Perspectives and Possibilities From a Black Veteran Educator: An Understanding of Agency

• In Event: Embracing Soul Work: Black Educators Teaching for Justice

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
This paper will examine the lives of two Black educators in Texas who worked during Reconstruction. The author explores the ways in which their pedagogies were shaped by the post-Civil War era in the South, a time period in which the reconstructed governments of the South faced an unfamiliar responsibility: providing educational opportunity for their new Black citizens. It was widely assumed that this should be done in racially segregated schools, but segregation fomented a severe teacher shortage. Centuries of slavery had created a profound education deficit in the Black community. There were too few able Black teachers and the well-intentioned white teachers that came South after the war were unwelcome. Nowhere was this problem more evident than in Texas, but white politicians were ill-equipped to address it. Into this leadership vacuum stepped two Black educators determined to wrest a share of the state's educational resources for their people. This paper analyzes the evolution of two Black educators working in this context.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework/ Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The paper employs historical and biographical research methods to describe the intertwined lives and work of these two Texas African-American educational leaders. Consulting association journals, state government documents, school records, biographies, school histories, and other archival sources, this paper enhances the body of work in this area of study and sheds new light on earlier research that portrayed these leaders as political innocents.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Using their own printed statements, accounts from the period, and secondary sources, this paper tells the story of how Laurine C. Anderson, a Republican, and Edward L. Blackshear, a Democrat, worked within a majority white, often hostile, political establishment to lay a solid foundation for the education of African-American Texans.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Black educational leaders of the last century are sometimes portrayed as wide-eyed innocents battling a reactionary political establishment to improve the lot of their people. This research into efforts to provide state-sponsored higher education for Texas’ African-American citizens in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dispels this assumption as inaccurate and patronizing. While champions of such education encountered great opposition from both the Black and white communities in Texas, they showed themselves to be adept operators in the politics of state government and the educational establishment, even in an increasingly hostile racial environment.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work\
This dual biography of Anderson and Blackshear, two little-studied leaders, shows how these very different men came together in their commitment to educational excellence for Texas’ African-American citizens. Instead, this paper provides a more nuanced view of how these men maneuvered effectively in the dominant political culture, often playing on the racial fears of white politicians to gain what the Black schools needed from state government.

Author

• Paige M. Bray, University of Hartford