Freedmen, Schools and "Middle-Class" Racism

Abstract

Ronald E. Butchart. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedom's Education, 1862-1875. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. 309 + xiv pp. Robert Francis Engs. Freedom's First Generation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 236 + xx pp. Jacqueline Jones. Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.273 + xiii pp. Northern abolitionists, particularly those missionaries and teachers who maintained their concern for the newly freed black throughout Reconstruction, became accustomed to bitter invectives from their white countrymen both North and South. They might have been angry or merely bemused had they been able to foresee arguments a century later that they were merely responding to a loss of social status. Recently a more damning accusation has been leveled at the teachers and missionaries involved in the black education movement, an accusation which would presumably bewilder and outrage them. Implicitly and explicitly, historians such as Robert Francis Engs, Jacqueline Jones and Ronald Butchart accuse the Northerners of being middle-class racists who wished to create a pliant, obedient black, molded according to Northern expectations. Their goals, at best, were to solve the "Negro problem" by transforming the rural Southern freedmen, chiefly through education, into people who were culturally no different from the majority of Americans. At worst, the Northerners deliberately selected education as the means of subverting black liberation. In reaching these general conclusions, these three historians have looked at very different aspects of the experiences forced upon Southern blacks during Reconstruction.