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The Schools They Built
Paperback
Black American HistoryGeneral Education
Publisher Price: $57.99
ISBN13: 9789720834980
Publisher: Cornelia Whitfield-Boyce
Published: Oct 2 2026
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
They were forbidden to read. Within a generation they had built thousands of schools, dozens of colleges, and a teaching profession of their own.
THE SCHOOLS THEY BUILT is a clear, documented history of how Black Americans created their own education between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century - and a correction to the version most of us were taught.
The familiar story credits Northern missionaries and the Freedmen's Bureau. The records tell a different one. Schools were already running in contraband camps and country churches before any society arrived. A large share of the teachers were Black. The single largest source of money was the freedpeople themselves, paying tuition and buying land out of almost nothing, while also paying taxes into school funds that shortchanged them. This book puts that evidence at the center, without minimizing what outside help supplied or the violence that met the schools at every turn.
Written in plain, careful prose for general readers, with contested figures flagged as contested and no invented scenes or dialogue.
What's inside:
- Literacy under slavery: the anti-literacy statutes, and how people learned anyway
- The wartime schools at Fortress Monroe, the Sea Islands, New Orleans and the Mississippi valley
- The Freedmen's Bureau - what it actually did, and what it never could
- The Northern societies, and the Black teachers their own records under-counted
- Who paid: church collections, subscription lists, and land bought by communities with nothing
- What was taught, and why the curriculum argument mattered
- The founding of the Black colleges and normal schools, from Fisk to Tuskegee
- Teacher training as the multiplier that made everything else possible
- Schools burned, teachers driven out, and how communities rebuilt
- The retreat of Reconstruction, disfranchisement, and the engineering of unequal schools
- Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, presented as a real disagreement rather than a morality play
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