Abstract
AbstractThis article examines Black parents’ efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the Boston School Committee. Analyzing petitions, school records, and newspapers, this essay finds that the African School cultivated Black citizenship ideologies that prioritized political activism. This study invites new understandings of the political intersections of education and citizenship, and it illuminates the utility of Black nationalism in antebellum Boston.
Highlights
In 1787 and 1796, many Black residents petitioned Massachusetts’s leaders and the city of Boston for a separate school in their town
This article examines Black parents’ efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the Boston School Committee
School records, and newspapers, this essay finds that the African School cultivated Black citizenship ideologies that prioritized political activism
Summary
In 1787 and 1796, many Black residents petitioned Massachusetts’s leaders and the city of Boston for a separate school in their town. Historian Leslie Harris argues that the New York Manumission Society, in particular, created the African Free School to prepare free Black and enslaved people for citizenship because white members believed freedom did not warrant inclusion in the body politic.15 Black parents and students worked alongside New York Manumission Society and Philadelphia’s Quakers, and demanded redress when they encountered discrimination or subpar education.16 enlightened liberals’ segregation efforts varied by state, schoolhouses in Boston, Massachusetts, were one of the few integrated and locally supported institutions in the Northeast after Independence and northern emancipation.17 Black Bostonian activists argued that early Boston’s integrated schools were unproductive and discriminatory sites for their children.
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