"Our Future is in Our Own Hands:" Black Educational Activism in Tennessee, 1865-1890
Abstract
In the wake of Emancipation, freedpeople across the South declared certain imperatives
that they believed would legitimize their separation from slavery and prepare them
for their imminent status as citizens of the United States of America. One of those
imperatives was access to an equal and adequate education, and black folks came out
of slavery ready to fight and advocate for that access. Gaining this educational access
would not be inevitable in former Confederate states, as highly partisan political
environments and physical violence inflicted by white Southerners not yet ready to
let go of the pre-War status quo made black progress difficult. With these conditions
as a backdrop, this thesis examines black educational activism in from 1865 to 1890,
using the state of Tennessee as a case study. Specifically, it stresses the importance
of black educational activism in the evolution of black politicking after slavery.
Moreover, this thesis describes black educational activism as freedpeople’s method
of both understanding the meaning of citizenship and acting that citizenship out.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
HistorySubject
EducationBlack politicking
Black activism
Citizenship
Nineteenth-century Tennessee
Colored Conventions
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16668Citation
Steele, Brennan (2018). "Our Future is in Our Own Hands:" Black Educational Activism in Tennessee, 1865-1890.
Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16668.Collections
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