Educational Reconstruction

In Educational Reconstruction Hilary Green writes an original treatment of the origins and development of African American education by demanding that we pay much greater attention to how urban freedpeople built networks to create, develop, and sustain a system of public education from 1865 to 1890. Green proposes a new chronology and a different angle of vision for understanding the development of African American education in the Reconstruction era. Green's argument is that African Americans in Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama, built alliances that ensured the permanence of universal public education in the postemancipation South. The overwhelming majority of the public schools they built continued without much change despite the removal of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1870 and the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877. Moreover, she contends that such urban school movements spearheaded the enshrinement of public education as a right of citizenship in Virginia's and Alabama's Reconstruction constitutions. Consequently, Green argues for a new chronology that reframes the traditional Reconstruction era of 1865 to 1877 to one that extends from 1865 to 1890. Indeed, Green contends, "educational Reconstruction ended in 1890 when Congress failed to pass the Blair education bill" (p. 186). The Blair Education Bill proposed to allocate $77 million in federal funding to help create universal literacy. Given the high rates of illiteracy in southern states and within the African American population, Green estimates that passage of the bill might have aided African Americans in attaining the funding sorely needed to sustain educational reconstruction beyond 1890. African Americans and their allies proved unable to overcome its failure and thus faced the closure of their postemancipation movement and the transition to the next phase of African American education that we know as the thoroughly subordinate and unequal era of Jim Crow schooling

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