“Advice from an Old Friend”: Representations of Race and Racism in Freedmen's Textbooks

Post-primary American History textbooks have long been recognised as perpetuators of racial stereotypes. Scholars including Jesús Garcia, David Tanner, J. E. Anderson and J. Banks have found that African Americans have been significantly underrepresented and misinterpreted in secondary-level curricular materials. More recently, in 2013 Anthony Pellegrino, Linda Mann and William B. Russell III concluded that an inadequate documentation of the segregated school experience for black Americans in selected historical textbooks constructed stereotypical images of a dependant black community. This, they concluded, ultimately contributed towards the ongoing racial tension that continues to plague contemporary U.S society.

However, these studies have not investigated the representation of race in the textbooks used in the South’s post-emancipation black schools. Although scholars of Reconstruction-era black education, such as Robert C. Morris and Ronald Butchart, have largely conceded that the curricular materials specifically designed for the freed people promoted white supremacist ideologies of black inferiority, the ways in which the entire range of textbooks, including those which were used by schools in the North, shaped the freed peoples’ socio-economic lives in post-Civil War society is yet to be examined.

Using North Carolina as a case study, this poster will analyse the range of textbooks used in the state’s freedmen’s schools during the Civil War and Reconstruction-era, 1861-1876. Specifically, I will investigate if the racial stereotypes perpetuated by the textbooks extended the patriarchal system of slavery and maintained the antebellum hierarchal southern social order. Although I do not argue that the curriculum used in North Carolina’s freedmen’s schools was representative of the other southern states, a thorough and in-depth case study will provide a better insight into and understanding of how the textbooks influenced the post-emancipation lives of southern blacks.

The textbooks examined will include those that were specifically designed for the former slave population, such as the Freedman’s Library, as well as those which were constructed by African Americans, such as the Freedman’s Torchlight, and those that were used in northern schools by white and black pupils. I will use the analytical framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the curricular materials’ text and content. Developed by Norman Fairclough, this approach to the study of language investigates the connections between discourse, ideology and power. Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, this poster will analyse the text, the processes of text production, distribution and consumption and the sociocultural context before, during and after the Civil War. Using the theoretical lens of critical race theory (CRT), which supports the notion that racism is ubiquitous in U.S society and maintained through white institutional structures, this poster will demonstrate that by portraying blacks in subservient rolls, the textbooks used in North Carolina’s schools for the freed people subjugated African American learners throughout the Reconstruction era.

Ultimately, an increased awareness of the ways in which the school curriculum can have far-reaching implications for minority ethnic, racial and gendered groups is vital for future curriculum planning and educational policy.