History
The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
James D. Anderson
A study of who built, financed, and contested Black education across the post-emancipation South.
Reading list
Freedom and the right to read
For teachers and students studying emancipation, literacy, and education.
Read a passage from Frederick Douglass alongside a chapter of Self-Taught. Ask what kinds of evidence each uses. Bring in the Classrooms of Change exhibit to discuss how local stories complicate a national timeline.
Continue the story
Recommended reading
Essays
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois explores emancipation’s aftermath, segregated education, and the experience he calls double consciousness.
History
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams
The book follows Black people’s pursuit of reading and schooling before, during, and after the Civil War.
Essays
Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks
hooks brings classroom experience to questions about freedom, authority, and participation in education.
Memoir
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement, his pursuit of literacy, and his emergence as an abolitionist.
History
Schooling the Freed People
Ronald E. Butchart
A history of the teachers and institutions that helped build schools in the first decades after emancipation.