The two major purposes of this study are to describe how a unique mixture of politics and racial attitudes coalesced to involve education and to identify and analyze the major forces associated with and propelling the public school movement between 1902 and 1913 in the South.

In the century between the "Emancipation Proclamation" of Abraham Lincoln and the "I Have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther King Jr., America sought both to rebuff and to redeem the promise of "liberty and justice for all." The story of slavery and the bloody civil war that abolished it has been told, but the story of the struggle for liberty and justice by and for African Americans in the half-century following the end of Reconstruction has been largely overlooked. In this highly readable narrative, distinguished historian Ronald C. White Jr. portrays the people, their ideas, and their ongoing struggle for racial reform in the United States from 1877-1925--a vital prelude to the modern civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Best remembered as the founder of Hampton Institute and mentor of Booker T. Washington, Samuel Chapman Armstrong played a crucial role in white philanthropy and educational strategies toward nonwhite people in late-nineteenth-century America. Until now, however, there has been no scholarly biography of Armstrong--his story has usually been subsumed within that of his famous protégé. In Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited, Robert Francis Engs illuminates both Armstrong's life and an important chapter in the history of American race relations. Armstrong was the son of missionaries to Hawaii, and as Engs makes clear, his early experiences in a multiracial, predominantly non-European society did much to determine his life's work--the uplift of "backward peoples." After attending Williams College, Armstrong commanded black troops in the Civil War and served as a Freedmen's Bureau agent before founding Hampton in 1869. At the institute, he implemented a unique combination of manual labor education and teacher training, creating an educational system that he believed would enable African Americans and other disfranchised peoples to rise gradually toward the level of white civilization. Recent studies have often blamed Armstrong for "miseducating" an entire generation of African Americans and for Washington's failings as a "race leader." Indeed, as Engs notes, Armstrong's educational designs were paternalistic in the extreme, and in addressing certain audiences, he could sometimes sound like a consummate racist. On the other hand, he frequently expressed a deep devotion to the ultimate equality of African Africans and incorporated the best of his black graduates into the Hampton staff. Sorting through the complexities and contradictions of Armstrong's character and vision, Engs's masterful biography provides new insights into the failures of emancipation and into the sometimes flawed responses of one heir to antebellum abolition and egalitarian Christianity. The Author: Robert Francis Engs is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890.