Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (review)

Abstract

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America. By Hilary J. Moss. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 296. Cloth, $37.50).Reviewed by Peter HinksHilary Moss has produced a compelling study of African American access education - both public and private - in antebellum America. She focuses on urban Northeast, although she also investigates these matters on middle ground of Baltimore. She intends to make sense of widespread, often violent, white opposition African American education that erupted in northern and southern communities in early 1 830s, a period that coincides with birth of public education ... in America (3). Moss examines three cities where pursuit of education by black parents and activists white and black elicited keen reactions from surrounding white communities - New Haven in late 1820s-30s, Baltimore in 1840s, and Boston in mid 1830s and late 1840s-50s. She concludes that emerging public school system of antebellum North worked hand-in-hand with an increasingly pervasive culture of white domination deny African Americans equal access schools and education - key vehicles for creating citizens - and thereby reinforced popular understanding that they were noncitizens.New Haven's Negro College crisis of September 1831 embodied one of first of many pitched white reactions against African American educational aspirations. Black and white proponents of college, including wealthy New York City merchant Arthur Tappan, determined that New Haven afforded it a particularly favorable site, in part because of city's interracial association, African Improvement Society. Yet a mass meeting of more than 700 local whites denounced it, and homes of blacks and Tappan were attacked. Moss pinpoints dormant white anxieties over black aspiration [colliding] with news of Nat Turner's rebellion (54) as reaction's furnace. The white working class focused its anxiety on the confluence of industrialization, immigration, and gradual emancipation [jeopardizing] their own financial independence and social status (56) and pushing them closer cheap and degraded black labor, while white elite feared that a Negro College derogated their own college education.Events in Baltimore differed but equally served marginalize African Americans. Baltimore interests Moss because whites there accepted city's relatively high incidence of free black literacy when efforts expand it in northern towns often sparked controversy. She finds that a parallel system of private schools for blacks - they were banned from public schools - existed because some Baltimore employers sought literate free blacks and their education neither threatened system of slavery nor challenged strict boundaries separating races. When black leaders petitioned City Council for relief from public school taxes or for financial support for expansion, they emphasized black orderliness and deference. Thus where black education complied with white domination, its existence was tolerated, maybe even encouraged.Boston's Horace Mann proclaimed that public schools would prepare children for rights and responsibilities of citizenship (157), yet, Moss argues, city consistently denied black children inclusion in this project. From inception of black schools in 1 790s through 1840s, Boston School Committee sustained them as separate and inferior institutions. By mid 1840s, however, black parents began petitioning integrate school system, convinced that it alone would alleviate their schools' deficiencies. Over ensuing decade, campaign embroiled blacks and whites in a complicated - sometimes violent - contest of alliances and divisions that occurred as much within as between each racial group. By 1855, black parents and their white allies celebrated integration of schools. …