Schools and Books: Public Education, Racial Uplift in the Woman’s Era, and Literary Studies

The decade of the 1890s—over a century ago—was a period characterized by various creative voices of the Woman's Era and a national "ferment" over the implementation and implications of public schools in a capitalist democracy. This chapter discusses education and literature as two complicit narratives of African-American subjectivity. It discusses that the act of going to school was an explicitly political act for freedmen; the schoolhouse, teachers, and students were targets for politically motivated violence. The chapter discusses emancipatory education as fundamentally limited by the conditions of capitalist democracy and the conditions of white male power. Education was a mode of improving not only one's self but the race, not only one's life but the future of an entire population. The schools permitted a discourse of uplift that promised, true to its Protestant missionary roots, progress on spiritual and social ladders.