Education for Freedom: Black-Organized Education in Reconstruction Era Franklinton, NC

In April of 1866, Walter A. Bookram, a civic leader in the Black community of the town of Franklinton, North Carolina, wrote to the editors of the A.M.E. Church’s newsletter, The Christian Recorder, to inform them that a school for the town’s free and newly-freed Black residents had been established.¹ The school in question was a night school housed in a local home and headed by Rev. J.H. Crawford, a Black Presbyterian minister and educator sponsored by the Presbyterian Committee of Missions for Freedmen.²

From the outset, the fact that the school was headed by a Black minister and managed and funded by the local Black community was a source of controversy. Shortly after the school’s opening, a group of thirty-nine white residents, along with Franklinton’s mayor, signed a petition to remove Rev. Crawford from his teaching position.³ Notably, the Assistant Superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Franklinton, Capt. Thomas H. Hay, was aligned with the petitioners in firm opposition to the school’s independence. Hay was particularly opposed to the support and oversight the school received from Franklinton’s leading Black citizens. In his letters to the Superintendent of North Carolina schools, Rev. F.A. Fiske, Hay enlarged on the alleged character defects of the town’s Black leaders, describing one of them, the aforementioned Walter A. Bookram, as an intimidating figure who helped to impose an “underhand levy of a tax” in support of the school, and who worked against the “freedmen’s best interests.”⁴ Hay asserted that, “The White People would be far more disposed to help the School along, if those two persons [Bookram and an unspecified Mr. Ransom] had nothing to do with the arrangement & if a White Teacher take the place of Mr. Crawford, such would be the result.”⁵

Hay later described the nighttime class meetings themselves as occasions which accomplished “very little,” and which provided, in place of an education, mere, “opportunities for licentious appointments,” after the conclusion of classes.⁶ Hay added a scurrilous rumor about Walter Bookram’s son to this charge, alleging that he had known of, “a girl of 18, who is in the employment of Mr P.C. Person, about a mile & a half from here, who attend these meetings, & who has more than once come home at day light though the meeting broke up about 10 P.M. and with her come young Bookram, who is, next to his father the most licentious reprobate in town & who has openly boasted that he intended to seduce the girl.”⁷

Most troubling in Hay’s eyes was the impact that the school’s activities was having on the Freedmen’s relationships with their former masters:

It is the universal complaint that the colored servants have not improved in manners, docility or disposition since these meetings commenced but on the contrary, are far more impudent, head strong and self willed than they were in the early spring. Something must be done to stop all this, and as a Lady Teacher would on every account be preferable, the change would work well also, by breaking up these meetings.⁸

This is the most telling complaint among Hay’s litany of charges against the school and its organizers. Even among the segments of the white population of North Carolina that were supportive of Black education, their aim was not to provide Black students with knowledge, but to use the educational system as an instrument to reinforce racial hierarchy. In 1866, the editors of the The Fayetteville News explained the matter plainly:

It has been objected by many that the requirement of the mere rudiments of knowledge – the ability to read and write – would cause the blacks to become dissatisfied, meddlesome in political affairs, and ambitious in civil and political rights and privileges. Their ambition and desire for elevation and equality is a natural consequence of their suddenly obtained liberty, but so far from its being increased…we believe that education would be a powerful agent for its control and regulation within proper bounds…The farther the negroes advanced in education, the more fully would they understand and appreciate the difference of caste and social position existing between themselves and the whites, and the more firmly would they become impressed with the necessity of labouring earnestly.⁹

Naturally, cultivating such an understanding and appreciation would preclude self-organized and self-directed Black education. This is precisely why the freedmen’s establishment of their own school on their own initiative provoked such strident opposition from the government officer appointed to oversee the Freedmen’s educational needs.

Of course, the Black community’s own reception of the school was quite positive. One observer sent a rapturous description of the school’s activities to The Christian Recorder:

I had the pleasure of witnessing one of the greatest scenes it has ever been my fortune to see. I saw about two thousand people on the march, the column being headed by Calvin Outlaw, on horseback. The strictest order was observed while marching along. Mr. W.A. Bookram was continually riding along the line, seeing that every thing was kept in a quiet and orderly manner. The scene was enlivened by about thirty-five children, who sang some beautiful and appropriate music while marching along the streets of Franklinton.

The day was very damp. On seeing the vast concourse in the line, and the large number of lookers-on, I really could not tell from whence they all came. After a long march, they all returned to the school-house,–their starting point.

. . . .This school (Freedmen’s School) is one of the best in the State. It is taught by J.H. Crawford, who is an excellent teacher, and who also knows well how to preach the gospel. He told me that he had sixty four scholars.

When this house was first talked of, the people of Franklinton did not want it. Some said: “Just to think of the idea of a negro school being here!” But now they have altered their minds. All who count themselves either ladies or gentlemen, say that it is the greatest thing that ever has been in this section of the country. May God bless all the people who are in favor of this school, and grant them happiness on earth, and when they die, that they may gain a crown of everlasting glory.¹⁰

The writer went on to describe several unpleasant encounters with white opponents of the school, and her gracious but firm repudiation of their attitudes. In her reported response to a question about whether women attended Rev. Crawford’s sermons, she states:

You would think they did if you were here. I saw about one hundred and fifty here last Sunday night (I mean white ladies.) I think you will have to judge for yourself, for I cannot tell who are ladies these times. We were in the habit of calling a person a lady who owned fifteen or twenty negroes. Now they have no negroes, what makes them ladies? The same that makes a colored lady makes a white lady. An industrious, kind, Christian-hearted woman, that wishes to do right and be kind to every body, and live in peace, and do all the good that she can while in this world, and help the poor to pay the preachers, and to make friends with all the colored people, and speak kind words to the erring. . .¹¹

These adroit responses from Franklinton’s Black residents to white protests against the school notwithstanding, the charges levied by the school’s opponents that Rev. Crawford was conducting noisy religious meetings that were, “demoralizing in their effects upon the Freedmen,” led to an investigation from the Superintendent of Education.¹² Although Fiske found that the charges were meritless, he nevertheless cautioned the school’s organizers to, “refrain from extravagance and boisterousness in the evening meetings, and for the present at least to hold those meetings less frequently.”¹³

The model of self-organized education created by the freedmen, and the intensity of white opposition to it, is instructive. Firstly, the initiative taken to independently found and fund the Franklinton freedmen’s school is a striking illustration of the fact that, far from being rendered broken and dependent by the experience of bondage, the freedmen were fully and dynamically engaged in taking charge of their own affairs and tending to the needs of their own community. Indeed, taking steps to acquire the education that would serve as the foundation for further advancement was characteristically the first action that Black communities and individuals took on their own behalf in the wake of emancipation. This was done no matter the obstacles, and no matter the setting, whether under a tree after a day in the fields, or in the home in the midst of household chores.¹⁴ Moreover, participation was broad and intergenerational. Teachers educated children. Children educated parents. And peers educated one another.

Secondly, it was glaringly evident that unless the freedmen took control of their own schools, they would not be provided with an education that would endow them with the self-knowledge, self-respect, and self-determination that they would need to build their own free and flourishing communities. They would instead receive paternalistic training that would fit them to be a useful means to the ruling caste’s ends.

In many ways, with respect to education, Black Americans are confronted with the same challenges that confronted the first generation of freedmen, in new forms. At present, much of the effort to improve educational outcomes for Black children is framed in terms of changing the paternalistic and instrumentalist attitudes that have doggedly persisted in the American educational system since the days of reconstruction. However, much of that effort is directed at validation and affirmation of the moral self-image of the wider society, at the expense of attention to indigenous capacity-building. In my view, this is a mistake. Without self-organized and self-directed institutional structures, our commitments to freedom and prosperity for Black Americans will always remain aspirational rather than operational.

Rather than simply attaching ourselves as adjuncts to externally directed educational equity movements and perpetually clamoring for greater responsiveness to Black children’s needs, it seems to me that it is instead our task to ensure that our children never come to believe in any way that the source and justification for insidious anti-Black attitudes and practices originate within themselves. As I see it, the best way to do this is to redirect the time, spirit, and resources that we are currently wasting on token efforts to remold the anti-Black attitudes that prevail in the wider society toward taking charge of the direction of our own education, just as our ancestors did. Then our children will learn, through the evidence of their own daily experience within their schools, families, gatherings, and neighborhoods, that they have within themselves all that is needed to successfully respond to the daunting array of challenges that confront them, and be empowered to add their part to the long and distinctive tradition of, “courage, fortitude, and creativity,”¹⁵ that they are heir to.

Addendum, 2-19-23

I recently learned from a new and excellent publication, Emma’s Postcard Album, by Faith Mitchell, that in addition to his activities as an educator, Rev. J.H. Crawford was active in defense of the freedmen’s civil rights. In 1866 he addressed the following letter to the Christian Recorder:

Mr. Editor:

. . . I will close this letter with a few remarks concerning the treatment of our people by the civil law.

Whipping-Posts in Raleigh

With much pain I inform you that several colored persons, for the crime of larceny, have been punished with whipping, in Raleigh and one in in this place.

Now, if this is the law of the State, what is the use of our toiling as we are now, and as we have been doing for the last four years. We left our homes to save our country, but we learned that the chains of slavery had to be cut before our country could be saved. As we entered each town, we cut down the whipping-posts immediately. Through chilling storms we marched to destroy those posts; but of what use, we ask, was our toil, if negroes are still to be whipped? Is it religiously or morally right for us, as men who have suffered so much for their country, to allow such brutal conduct to escape our notice? Yours forever, with great respect,

J.H. Crawford

The Christian Recorder, North Carolina Correspondence, Franklinton, NC, April 7, 1866.

Nearly 160 years later, through “chilling storms,” we still march on.

Notes

1. “Editorial Items.” The Christian Recorder, April 21, 1866.
2. Capt. Thomas H. Hay. “North Carolina Field Offices, Subordinate Field Offices: Franklinton, Letters Sent, Vol. 95, July 1866–June 1867.” Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (NCBRFAL), 1865–1872, October 6, 1866. NMAAHC.FB.M1909, Item 4.11.1.1. Freedmen’s Bureau Digital Collection, 1865–1872.
3. AnneMarie Brosnan. “Contested Goals and Competing Interests: Freedpeople’s Education in North Carolina during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1861-1875,” (2020), 125. Accessed December 11, 2022. https://dspace.mic.ul.ie/handle/10395/2930.
4. Hay, NCBRFAL, September 18, 1866.
5. Ibid.
6. Hay, NCBRFAL, October 6, 1866.
7. Ibid.
8. Hay, NCBRFAL, October 6, 1866.
9. The Fayetteville News, September 11, 1866.
10. “Letter from Franklinton, N.C.” The Christian Recorder, May 5, 1866.
11. Ibid.
12. F. A. Fiske to Jacob F. Chur, 22 October 1866, Records of the Superintendent of Education, M844:1.
13. Ibid.
14. Roberta Sue Alexander. “Hostility and Hope: Black Education in North Carolina during Presidential Reconstruction, 1865-1867.” The North Carolina Historical Review 53, no. 2 (1976): 113. Accessed August 13, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23529614.
15. The Universal House of Justice. Letter to an individual believer, 3 Jun 2007.