Education of the Negroes Since 1860

A historical document from the turn of the century, this book chronicles the extraordinary and fraught emergence of African American education in the South following emancipation. J. L. M. Curry, a former Confederate officer turned educational administrator, draws on his position with the John F. Slater Fund to survey the landscape of post-Civil War educational initiatives: the efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau, the activism of Black churches, the establishment of schools and colleges, and the struggle for literacy among newly freed people. Curry writes as a Southern moderate, one who acknowledges the necessity of education while remaining deeply embedded in the paternalistic assumptions of his era. The result is a document of considerable historical value that nonetheless filters the story of Black educational advancement through a lens of white supremacist logic, often minimizing Black agency and framing progress as benevolent white largesse. As a primary source, it illuminates both the genuine achievements of post-emancipation education and the ideological frameworks that would come to undermine them. For scholars of American history, Reconstruction, and the struggle for educational equity, this text offers an essential window into how the winners wrote the early chapters of a story still being fought over today.