Read on Twitter
1/ Excited to have an article on freedmen’s schools and white terrorism in the latest issue of @JCWE1. A few takeaways and acknowledgements:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774313
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774313
2/ The basic finding of the study is that white Southerners burned and ransacked a lot of schools. I could verify 631, but the number could have been twice as high.
3/ It is notable that these attacks were never limited to rural areas, as historians usually assume, but occurred in Southern cities as well (an overlooked area of ed reform that @HilaryGreen77 documents in “Educational Reconstruction.”) https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823270125/educational-reconstruction/
4/ One reason we don’t know more about school destruction was the gov't did not systematically track it. As @mjsteudeman argues, federal agencies were adopting statistical approaches to ed governance, but were already constrained by political pressure. https://bit.ly/37m15Lg
5/ That pressure was clearest in Congress. As Elaine Parsons demonstrates, Southern partisans distorted or dismissed evidence of racist attacks even before they could be counted, creating a polarized, post-truth, "fake news" environment much like our own… https://uncpress.org/book/9781469652139/ku-klux/
6/ An archival find that did not make it into the article but w/ relatable frustration and dark humor: Exasperated at filling out the same form about “public sentiment toward Colored Schools” and seeing nothing done about it, R.M. Manly (VA), offered new answers every month:
7/ "Generally unfriendly"
"Not as favorable as before the recent northern elections"
"Virginians do not regard them as an ornament to the Old Dominion"
"To the whites a medicine, to the blacks a cordial"
"Rueful acquiescence"
"Quiet but not encouraging"
"As usual"...
"Not as favorable as before the recent northern elections"
"Virginians do not regard them as an ornament to the Old Dominion"
"To the whites a medicine, to the blacks a cordial"
"Rueful acquiescence"
"Quiet but not encouraging"
"As usual"...
8/ "What can't be cured must be endured"
"Waiting for something to turn up"
"As the whites view it : ( As the colored view it. : )"
"A bitter pill"
"Waiting for something to turn up"
"As the whites view it : ( As the colored view it. : )"
"A bitter pill"
