On the Threshold of Education: Race and Antebellum Schooling in the Text and Context of the Colored American

Abstract

I examine African American educational writing in the Colored American newspaper against the backdrop of white notions about common schooling. Along the way, I explore how the fusion of racial and educational discourses combine with social factors to influence competing conceptions of the common schoolhouse in the antebellum North. White reformers, despite employing the democratic language of universal education, imagined the schoolhouse as a site where whites could be cultivated as national citizens and nonwhites, specifically African Americans, rendered noncitizens. They created a fantasy of the schoolhouse as a site that paradoxically produced national unity and perpetuated social fracturing through racial division.