African-American Education: The Antebellum Period

Matt Giacona
Prof. Blumberg
3/17/14

With education being critical to success in essentially every aspect of modern life, it interests me greatly it’s history and development, especially concerning the antebellum period. The problems with minority education we see today have roots in this era, and I believe that the schooling of African-americans pre-civil war is a topic that many modern researchers, historians, and policy-makers overlook increasingly as time goes by. African-american education was stifled for a long duration of antebellum America. North Carolina was the first colony to enact legislation attempting to prevent the education of slaves in 1740, imposing a 100 pound fine on anyone caught teaching one how to write. This type
It states that since African-american women found themselves in two categories of social subordination, higher education was generally not an option at all, and when it was, the available opportunities/benefits garnered from a degree were dismal if not non-existent largely until the first quarter of the 20th century. “Many black institutions of higher learning had white presidents, a high proportion of white male and female faculty, few black male teachers, and a very small number of black females” (EAAE 182), creating a situation in which the majority of black women did not have the opportunity of higher learning. This furthered not only the social divide between men and women, but also created a visible intraracial separation between African-american men and women. This struck me as odd being that this source also references the higher overall literacy rate in favor of African-american women, and led me to conclude that the differences in social status within the African-american race were more numerous and stark than I had previously thought (182). It seems to me that there were essentially four intraracial levels of social status; uneducated black women, uneducated black men, educated black women, and at the pinnacle, educated black men. From this I determine that the higher literacy rate among African-american
Conaway uses the story and thoughts of Shadd Cary, an African-american, female abolitionist writer, to amalgamate first hand deliberations of the then future of black education. She details various class distinctions between African-americans in regards to higher education, proffering that “middle- and upper-middle-class blacks already were poised to take advantage of an intellectual education comprising the humanities rather than vocational education” (Conaway 86). Conaway also analyzes arguments for higher education curriculum made by Frederick Douglass, and these two abolitionist make it clear that the various sects of African-americans and various levels of knowledge made it difficult to achieve excellent higher education due to the widespread unconformity of curriculums. This seems to have further divided blacks along lines of prior education, occupation, and work preference. Perhaps uniform educational goals and curriculums could have advanced the race as a whole instead of leaving many behind. This source corroborates Moss’ book in that it always displays the often perceived futility of higher education, noting that leaders like Frederick Douglass “strongly advocated racial integration in every aspect of American life, including education. Like other black leaders, he believed that education was the linchpin of racial uplift and equality.