40 Acres & a School: Legacies of Freedmen’s Education on Black Civic Engagement

• In Event: Social Movements and Race in the US

Abstract

Political and social marginalization are enduring features of the African American experience from Reconstruction to the present. The rise of right-wing populist movements today makes questions about minority representation and socioeconomic inequality even more pressing. We use new microdata on Freedmen’s Bureau educational initiatives in the Reconstruction South to study the legacies of schooling on Black socioeconomic achievements and political engagement. Disaggregated by gender, these data critically shed light on the achievements of African American women and girls during Reconstruction.

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. Specifically, we leverage original fine-grained microdata, disaggregated by gender and school subject 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 Jim Crow Era and to the present. Freedmen’s Bureau schools have especially important effects on the engagement of African American women.

Authors

• Breanna C. Gray, University of Pennsylvania

• Christopher William Blair, University of Pennsylvania