Education In The South Summary

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In the book, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, James Anderson was published in 1988. It address the historical narrative of the education of African Americans in the Southern states of America. It paints the portrait of the persistent oral culture of African Americans. As a historian, he creatively paints the picture of the culture of African American during the Civil War until the Great Depression. After the Civil War, and the emancipation of slaves, the newly freed men and women had a growing desire for education in order to self-sustain and challenge white supremacy. They held values of self-help and self-determination, and the fight to obtain education was the route to liberation and freedom beyond the physical setting and into the mind. The system created by whites to education African American ignited the downward structure that continued the oppression and miseducation of Blacks. This led to a badge of inferiority that Anderson covers in seven detailed chapters with empirical data and visual references. …show more content…
The journey is a dynamic one, due to the lack of political and economic means, white elites controlled the structure of most of the twentieth century. He notes that politics and racial conflict outweighed the dynamics of education in the South, analyzing the motives of various organizations such as the Freemen’s Bureau, northern missionaries, and liberals. More significantly he outlines the long-term results of African Americans having to abide in an underfunded segregated system. Having minimal knowledge on the progressive era of African American history, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 sheds light on the educational movement. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, with an outline of the fight during Reconstruction to afford an education, to the Hampton Model, to the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, to black intellects, to the migration affects in the 1920s and 1930s. This long standing of class issue trace back to the denial of proper education. Connecting this the theme and theoretical perspective of Carter Godwin Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro, the mis-education leads to mental captivity that is driven by the “so-called modern education” does more harm than good to the Negro. James Anderson does an extraordinary job at

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