Freed Black southerners organized their own schooling rather than defer to White missionaries

Evidence

Antiracist southern Blacks were not waiting on northern assimilationists. “Throughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves,” reported the Freedmen’s Bureau’s superintendent of schools, John W. Alvord, in early 1866, after touring the South. These emancipated people were neither looking at the White missionaries as superior nor considering them their saviors. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 634

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: self-education as a form of Black antiracist agency — dismantles the savior narrative while also flipping the common ‘they needed northern help’ story on its head.
• XREF: connects to: Black educated leaders used print literacy to undercut illiterate preachers’ authority — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 230; Black and white missionaries jointly imposed Victorian domesticity as core black education. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 458; White missionary schools accommodated southern segregation to court white support — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 254 (+1 more)