The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 [Book Review]

Abstract

Some previous histories of southern education, such as Charles W. Dabney's classic Universal Education in the South, slighted the role of American Americans in shaping their own education. James Anderson's new book, the best single volume on black education in the post-bellum south, commits the opposite error. Anderson exaggerates the power and autonomy of southern ex-slaves during Reconstruction and of southern blacks in general during the Jim Crow era, and correspondingly underemphasizes the significance for their education of the efforts of former free people of colour, northern blacks and whites and white southerners. While meriting praise for its uncovering of the role of ordinary people struggling to improve their educational lot, Anderson's revisionist book almost wholly excludes electoral, legislative and administrative politics. The exclusions and lopsided emphases make it nearly as one-sided and incomplete as the white-centred, bureaucrat-dominated history that it seeks to replace.

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