Remembering Education, Remembering Freedom: African American Memoirs of Reconstruction, 1880–1920

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: New Questions: African American Education After the Civil War

Abstract

Antebellum slave narratives have received a great deal of scholarly attention in the past thirty years. Study of these narratives has transformed our understanding of slavery and freedom by drawing attention to the voices of the enslaved themselves. Scholars have paid much less attention to narratives written and published by formerly enslaved women and men after emancipation. My paper seeks to remedy this oversight by analyzing a subset of these postbellum texts. The authors of narratives written after Reconstruction described experiences of enslavement before the Civil War while also telling stories about the triumphs and difficulties encountered during and after Reconstruction. As a number of these published works were written by those who had been young people during the postwar years, education is often a central theme. Focusing on seventeen texts written by those who had been younger than eighteen when the war ended, I mine these publications for memories of education. Through this research, I contend that postbellum slave narratives serve a dual purpose in studying the history of education: the memoirs provide insight into educational practices during Reconstruction, and they also demonstrate how the authors mobilized memories of education to argue for a more fluid understanding of freedom than that held by many Americans in the later years of the nineteenth century.

The recollections of those who experienced emancipation as children demonstrate how African American memoirists, writing in the period often termed the “nadir” of African American history, used memories of education as a critique, whether explicit or implicit, of contemporary politics. Their memories also help us to better understand how classrooms during Reconstruction were sites in which young people learned ideas about freedom while also remaking these ideas to fit their everyday lives. The post-Civil War era saw significant growth in the number of students attending public schools, and time in classrooms allowed formerly enslaved children to expand the scope of freedom’s possibilities. Attention to education, both as an experience and a memory, therefore helps us to more carefully conceptualize the spectrum of freedom’s meanings during the post-Civil War era. Thinking about education in the context of memory in particular is also especially useful as we can consider how lessons learned in school fluctuate in importance over the course of individual lives.

Author

• Ben Davidson, New York University