Quantifying the Destruction of African American Schools During Reconstruction

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

Abstract

This paper surveys African-American schoolhouses damaged or destroyed in former slaveholding states between 1865 and 1872, mapped by county and state, based on evidence from the Freedmen’s Bureau Records (available at the National Archives) and the U.S. Congress Select Committee on Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (formed to investigate the Ku Klux Klan). The result is a map with hundreds of data points, each an incident of property violence.

The destruction of schoolhouses has become an iconic image of the Reconstruction era, yet we still rely on anecdotal data rather than a systematic account of the damage. The paper addresses that gap and offers three points of analysis:

1) Although this survey presents all the examples reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau and to Congress—comprising a voluminous set of records—even a cursory newspaper search suggests that it is far from comprehensive. Hundreds of incidents of property violence went unreported to federal officials, making it difficult to quantify differences accurately between states and counties. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to collect uniform field reports, for instance, agents differed in their commitment and in the types of information they sought out. Often, they were reliant on hearsay and inconclusive reports, surrounded by hostile populations in occupied territory. As the agent in Greenville, Alabama, admitted, “Under the present state of affairs, I do not consider it safe to visit the remote localities in this country, where outrages have been committed.” Likewise, schools continued to suffer abuse in the decades after the Freedmen’s Bureau closed, and intermittently until the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. While the survey represents a first step toward quantification, then, it also offers an opportunity to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of federal data collection.

2) With that caveat, the available information suggests significant variation in the number of schools damaged during the period of the study. Analysis by county highlights pockets of systematic destruction, swaths of more sporadic incidents, and many counties reporting no disturbances at all. Likewise, one finds significant division among Southern whites about the desirability of African-American education and the justification for criminal acts. These findings support current scholarship, which has emphasized both the coordinated nature of vigilante attacks and the role of local conditions in racial violence. Results are also mapped over maps of racial composition by county, and partisan affiliation (in 1860) by county.

3) Finally, as part of a broader study of property destruction in American schools, the paper seeks to put these incidents in the nineteenth-century context of public rioting, white supremacy, and local discord. While the degree of repression during Reconstruction was unique, its form was not. One can find hundreds of African-American schools destroyed, in all areas of the country and for all sorts of reasons, often racial animus but also disputes within the African-American community, bored students, and simple accidents. In many cases, this history provided enough ambiguity to prevent full investigation or denunciation of intentional acts of vandalism or arson.

Author

• Campbell Scribner, University of Maryland - College Park