http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1097969866

From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875

In the years immediately following the Civil War, debates over the general purpose of schools for African Americans (mostly freedpeople) centered on whether the schools should seek to develop blacks as citizens, train them to be free but subordinate laborers, or produce some other outcome. This book is the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi's politics and policies of postwar racial education. Span finds that newly freed slaves made heroic efforts to participate in their own education, but too often the schooling was used to control and redirect the aspirations of the newly freed.

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