40 Acres and a School: Legacies of Freedmen’s Education during Reconstruction

• In Event: Educational Legacies and Racial Dynamics

Abstract

Political and social marginalization are enduring features of the African American experience from Reconstruction to the present. Existing literature has shown that education is closely related to socioeconomic and civic outcomes. In particular, education facilitates social mobility, economic opportunity, and political engagement. For marginalized communities, education can thus serve as a critical equalizer, enabling disenfranchised individuals to harness new-found resources in pursuit of more equal shares of political and socioeconomic power. To this end, education is a core means of both building human capital and locking in social gains. We explore the links between education, conflict, and minority empowerment in a unique setting---the postbellum American South. We begin with a case study of Texas, leveraging original, fine-grained microdata on the educational attainment of emancipated slaves between 1865 and 1870. Using teachers' reports from the Freedmen's Bureau archives, we construct a county-month level dataset of Freedmen's Bureau schools and freedpeople's educational achievements. Our dataset brings new, high-resolution data to important empirical questions, allowing us to chart the progress of efforts to educate African Americans in the American South during Reconstruction, backlash against those efforts, and the legacies of postbellum education and violence. In contrast to assertions that Jim Crow-era backlash negated the effects of Reconstruction, results suggest that educational initiatives during Reconstruction are associated with increased Black political engagement, economic mobility, and minority penetration of institutional barriers throughout the early post-Civil War period. Freedmen’s Bureau schools have especially important effects on the engagement of African American women in Texas.

Authors

• Breanna Crystene Gray, University of Maryland, College Park

• Christopher William Blair, Princeton University