Legacies of American Slavery

An anti-literacy statute enacted in South Carolina in 1740, prohibiting education for enslaved Africans, is evidence that racial discrimination in American education is older than the nation itself. White slaveholders passed the law to quell fears that acquiring literacy would arm African captives with information that could be used to mount rebellions and gain freedom. For the next two centuries, restricting access to education remained a tool to extend the power and control of white enslavers (and their descendants) over Black people. Even today, unequal access to education has the effect of limiting many African Americans’ employment options, wealth, social prestige, and access to other opportunities. Despite these strong currents of active resistance and harmful neglect, however, the creative determination of African Americans to educate themselves and their communities is a vital legacy of American slavery.

The recommendations on this reading list come from historian Lisa Monroe, who helps manage the Legacies initiative on behalf of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. The five books examine segregation, social biases, and heroic approaches to pedagogy from the Civil War to the present. Together, they show how Black people (and occasionally their white allies) have confronted, subverted, and sometimes succumbed to impediments in the quest to secure equal education and opportunity in America. This is not a comprehensive bibliography, of course, but an excellent starting point for those who want to learn more about the topic.

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Lawrence Blum and Zoe Burkholder, Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

From the publisher: “Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy.”

Camika Royal, Not Paved for Us: Black Educators and Public School Reform in Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022)

From the publisher: “Not Paved for Us chronicles a fifty-year period in Philadelphia education, and offers a critical look at how school reform efforts do and do not transform outcomes for Black students and educators. This illuminating book offers an extensive, expert analysis of a school system that bears the legacy, hallmarks, and consequences that lie at the intersection of race and education. In a bracing critique, Royal bears witness to the ways in which positive public school reform has been obstructed: through racism and racial capitalism, but also via liberal ideals, neoliberal practices, and austerity tactics. Royal shows how, despite the well-intended actions of larger entities, the weight of school reform, here as in other large urban districts, has been borne by educators striving to meet the extensive needs of their students, families, and communities with only the slightest material, financial, and human resources. She draws on the experiences of Black educators and community members and documents their contributions. Not Paved for Us highlights the experiences of Black educators as they navigate the racial and cultural politics of urban school reform. Ultimately, Royal names, dissects, and challenges the presence of racism in school reform policies and practices while calling for an antiracist future.”

Jarvis Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021)

From the publisher: “Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of ‘fugitive pedagogy’—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage…. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the ‘mis-education of the Negro’ by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today.”

Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)

From the publisher: “Tracing the first two decades of state-funded African American schools, Educational Reconstruction addresses the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians, and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. Hilary Green proposes a new chronology in understanding postwar African American education, examining how urban African Americans demanded quality public schools from their new city and state partners. Revealing the significant gains made after the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, this study reevaluates African American higher education in terms of developing a cadre of public school educator-activists and highlights the centrality of urban African American protest in shaping educational decisions and policies in their respective cities and states.”

Derrick E. White, Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

From the publisher: “Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors—not to mention many other professions—and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White’s sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.”