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Using the Educational Histories of Individuals to Complicate Standard Historical Narratives about Expanding Citizenship Rights and Opportunity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Valinda W. Littlefield*
Affiliation:
Department of History and director of African American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina
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My History of Southern African American Education, 1865–Present class, a mid-level survey course, examines the history of education for African Americans in the South from Reconstruction to the twenty-first century. It draws a variety of undergraduate students, as it is cross-listed with the College of Education, Department of History, African American Studies Program, and the Institute of Southern Studies. We examine issues of power and privilege, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status interact with educational opportunities and achievement. A major objective is to help students understand the ways in which public education in the United States was shaped by competing economic, political, and ideological interests; this focus includes learning the ways in which schools reinforced and reshaped the larger society. Another objective is to use local, state, and regional educational issues to provide a background for understanding the history of education as well as patterns, trends, and changes in the larger historical narrative.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

1 Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).Google Scholar

2 Several teachers drove approximately 80 miles round trip each school day. Yet they attended events in the community and often took students home with them on the weekends.Google Scholar

3 Anderson, , The Education of Blacks in the South; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 9, 21; Gilbert, J., Sharp, G., and Felin, S., “The Loss and Persistence of Black-Owned Farms and Farmland: A review of the Research Literature and Its Implications,” Southern Rural Sociology 18, no. 2 (December 2002): 1–30; and Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, “Somewhere in the Nadir of African American History, 1890–1920,” in Freedom's Story, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865–1917/essays/nadir.htm.Google Scholar

4 Logan, Rayford W., The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).Google Scholar

5 Forten, Charlotte, “Life on the Sea Islands,” Atlantic Monthly 13 (May 1864): 587–96, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6517/; see also Billington, Ray Allen, ed., A Free Negro in the Slave Era: The Journal of Charlotte Forten (New York: Collier, 1953), 158–85.Google Scholar

6 Delany, Sarah L., Delany, A. Elizabeth, and Hearth, Amy Hill, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (New York: Delta Books, 2007); and Murray, Pauli, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).Google Scholar

7 Litwack, Leon F., Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999); and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997).Google Scholar

8 Litwack, , Trouble in Mind, 7.Google Scholar

9 Anderson, , “The Hampton Model of Normal School Industrial Education 1868–1915” and “Education and the Race Problem in the New South,” in The Education of Blacks in the South, 33–109; and the 1919 “South Carolina Petition,” National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text1/petition1919.pdf.Google Scholar