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FALL 2006
A Powerful Legacy For Black Education
by Catherine Gianaro

A common perception among many African-American students is that doing well in school is “acting white.” But Ron Butchart, a historian in the University of Georgia’s College of Education, concludes from his research that the evidence indicates otherwise.“Doing well in school,” he said, “is acting black,” and in keeping with a tradition established more than a century and a half ago.

Butchart is researching the formal education of freed slaves in the American South from the earliest days of the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. His project, called “A Freed People’s Education: Learners, Classrooms and Teachers,” is a historical study of the teachers who worked among America’s former slaves, the schools the freed people and their teachers created, the pedagogies the teachers employed and the students they taught.

As is often the case with scholars, what started as a dissertation — in Butchart’s case, an inquiry into the ideologies of the northerners involved in freedmen’s education after the Civil War — broadened considerably and became a lifelong project. He and his team have probed everything from records of the Freedmen’s Bureau (created after the Civil War to deal with refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands) through the Southern Claims Commission (created for Southern loyalists whose property was damaged by Union forces) to Union and Confederate military and pension records. And they have dug through state archives, historical collections at city and state historical societies, city directories, and manuscript censuses returns at the National Archives. As a part of his project, Butchart has created a database of all the teachers he has found that now contains more than 11,000 teachers identified by gender, race, age when they started teaching, their prior occupation and 21 other variables.

“These data can be tapped in many ways, but what they have already revealed about the past and present of black people’s attitudes about education is overwhelming,” Butchart said. “When you go through the papers of the Freedman’s Bureau and just about any other source [on the Reconstruction Era], there’s a constant theme emerging from the freed people—a demand for access to literacy, for access to the codes of power that people acquire through literacy. Without literacy, they knew they were going to be re-enslaved in one form or another.”

Determined to be Literate

Many scholars, including W.E.B. Dubois, have described different groups emerging from slavery, bondage or peonage throughout human history. And throughout history there has never been a group emerging from slavery, bondage or peonage that responded to freedom the way African Americans did, Butchart said. “Many peoples came out of bondage believing that their folk knowledge was superior to the formal knowledge of the master class, while other groups came out believing they were unworthy of their former masters’ ways of knowing. When African Americans were freed from slavery, they took a different stance: They were determined to be literate, to know everything the white man knew.”

Blacks saw literacy as an essential element of freedom, he said. They understood that those who had power in the pre-war South — that is, rich whites — were literate, while poor whites were not.

“We have story after story from teachers, who would write, ‘I’m simply amazed at the speed with which these [black] children learn. They learn faster than white children and their hunger for education is greater than anything I’ve ever seen,’” Butchart said.

He admits that this finding challenges the argument that black education needs a culturally relevant curriculum — one that uses more examples from urban life or is more Afro-centric.

“In many ways I empathize with and understand that position, but the group of black children who came into the schools in the 1860s was more culturally isolated from mainstream white society than the black community has ever been since,” he said. “For some children coming out of slavery, the only white person they’d ever seen was the overseer or the master. They could not even observe the norms of white society from a distance.

“When they went into the schools, they were given a curriculum that was oppressively Victorian,” he added, “and yet those students mastered that curriculum at a prodigious rate.”

Some of Butchart’s colleagues still endorse the idea that today’s black students would be more successful if attention were paid to the cultural gap. “And although I believe that,” he said, “I can point to a time when the cultural gap was nearly unbridgeable, yet the black students bridged it.”

A Change in Perception

So what happened during the next century that so drastically changed the way some blacks perceive education?

A half century or more of sharecropping, during an era described by historian Rayford Logan in 1954 as the “nadir of black history,” produced the belief that to be successful on the white man’s terms, including succeeding in education, was to run the risk of maltreatment or a lynching.

“That alone may have contributed to countering the thinking that access to literacy meant access to power,” Butchart said. “If they showed their intelligence, black people were seen as uppity, and, as a result, could face violence or death.”

“We have story after story from teachers, who would write, ‘I’m simply amazed at the speed with which these [black] children learn. They learn faster than white children and their hunger for education is greater than anything I’ve ever seen,’” Butchart said.</p>

Further, and perhaps more importantly, according to Butchart, the promise that education would change one’s place in American society has rung hollow. For African Americans, gaining an education too often made no difference in terms of access to better occupations, better living conditions, or greater respect. As a single example, by the end of World War II, there were about 100 porters working at Chicago’s Union Station, he said, yet more than 90 of them had master’s degrees. They were still making minimal incomes, trying to live off tips they got carrying bags.

Such disparities, with African Americans achieving far more in school than their place in society reflected, continued until 20 or 30 years ago, Butchart said. “Today, many black kids will look you in the eye and say that education doesn’t pay. They may be better historians than their teachers — they know too many of their people who got a good education still ended up being unemployed or underemployed.

“We have to rethink how we package education and what we say education will do,” he added. “If the social system outside the school cannot or will not provide all of us with access to meaningful kinds of work, then those who are constantly penalized by that are eventually going to say, ‘Your system is a lie.’

“The tragedy is that African Americans fully embraced education at their emancipation, but they ended up in a peonage that was just as grinding as the form of slavery that preceded it,” Butchart said. “This is not ultimately a triumphant story. It’s a tragic story because the promise of education didn’t pay off in the ways that the freed people and their supporters hoped it would. Access to the codes of power did not give access to power.”

For more information, access Ronald Butchart’s Freedmen’s Teachers Project at http://www.coe.uga.edu/ftp.



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