Oral historians have declared the methodology a social justice project. This essay advances that discussion, positing that oral history methodology may represent a more specific "racial" justice project when coupled with critical race theory. An examination of the history of African American education scholarship, we argue, supports this…

Although common schooling began to take off in the northern United States around the 1830s, it did not gain great momentum in the South until the postbellum period. Spanning this lengthy Common School era, this article explores the role white supremacy played in both the development and the impediment of schooling for the masses in the southern…

This paper examines the impact of war on African-American education. This question is considered in three different periods: the eras of the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Second World War. Large-scale conflict, such as these instances of total war, can afford historical moments when oppressed groups are able take steps to improve…

When H. Councill Trenholm wrote that "we have a long way to go", he fully understood the barriers that African-Americans faced in securing educational equity in the twentieth century, particularly in the segregated South. He also was keenly aware of the importance of education to community development, human development, and…

Access to education formed a substantial boundary in the slave-holding South prior to the American Civil War (1861-1865). After emancipation, African-Americans demanded full access to formal schooling as one symbol of their freedom, seeking thereby to redraw the region's social map. Three groups of teachers in the freed people's schools…

Slavery in the United States denied education to the enslaved. Yet within fifteen years of the beginning of the American Civil War and the freeing of four million American slaves, the freed people and their supporters elaborated a full system of universal education in the South, including over 120 secondary and higher institutions. Historians have…