The Racialized Origins of Violence in the Foundations of Mass Public Education in the US, 1830-1880

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical historical inquiry into the role of racialized slavery and violence in the foundations of mass public education during the common school eras of the North and the South, from 1830-1880. The foundations of mass public education in the US are often positioned as a Northern, white-led endeavor, obscuring the roles African Americans played in its development. Employing a critical violence framework informed by Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Peace and Conflict Studies shifts the lens of analysis to illuminate what has been shadowed in historical narratives of how public education came to be. Further, a broader conception of education, one that examines literacy and learning both inside and outside the schoolhouse, as well as a broader conception of violence that includes direct, structural, and cultural violence, spotlights the dynamic relations of power and the role of violence and racism.

Through critical historical inquiry and a violence framework, I challenge narratives of Southern exceptionalism that positioned Northern states as separate from the institution of slavery and white opposition to and hostility toward Black education as a Southern phenomenon. Rather, I show how education in the North during the common school era (1830-1860) was entrenched within the system of slavery and the ideology of white supremacy stemming from racialized slavery.

By asking how education became so laden with violence, how violence was justified and legitimated, and why whites perceived Black education as potential violence, I examine the relations and dynamics of African American endeavors to achieve liberation and racial uplift through education, among white efforts to block, deny, manage, and shape them. Drawing on historical artifacts and accounts documenting African American experiences, I chart how violence traversed African American education during the antebellum North and South and the postbellum Reconstruction era. Whites deployed violence and exclusion in the antebellum North and South in many ways, including excluding free people of color from common schools, burning down Black schools and harassing Black teachers and students, and punishing enslaved Blacks who tried to gain literacy. After the Civil War, whites enacted direct violence such as threats, beatings, arson, and murder, specifically targeting Black educational institutions, teachers, and students. I demonstrate how structural and cultural violence against Black education was legitimated through laws and customs, and justified through racialized ideology and white supremacy.

Despite multidimensional violence, Blacks persisted in establishing schools in the North and South, and cultivating knowledge networks that would serve as sites of learning and resistance. The story of African American strivings for education enhance historical consciousness and American historical memory by countering erasure of the stories of people of color whose experiences often remain at the margins of historical scholarship. Further, by centering racialized slavery in the history of education and explicitly attending to violence, it is clear that both were critical to shaping the foundations of public education. Also clear are the educational triumphs of many African Americans amidst white violence and how remembering can be a powerful means of resistance.