Hilary Green's book, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 offers a powerful testimony of the courage, will, agency, and wherewithal of African Americans emerging from slavery in the decades following the Civil War demanding that justice and equality be afforded to them and their children. As Green accounts, African Americans after emancipation rightfully set their sights and energies on education, viewing its development and considerations as the ultimate equalizer in society, and the most appropriate vehicle for propelling them toward citizenship and for distancing themselves from their slave past. For her part, Green concentrates on the educational reconstruction efforts in two urban cities in the South—Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama—and asks how African Americans and their supporters in these two urban centers “create, develop, and sustain a system of education during the transition from slavery to freedom?” (p. 2).

Green's inquiry and discoveries add depth and complexity to the historiography of African American education in the American South during the Reconstruction era. Her findings are inspirational and further our understanding of the remarkable character, determination, and strength of freed people and their progeny to build and attend schools for their own liberation. In many ways, Green's study complements the historiography of the African American educational experience during this era, but it deviates in important ways. Unlike previous published histories, Green doesn't illustrate examples from the antebellum era of heroic or clandestine efforts of enslaved African Americans becoming literate. She spends very little time concentrating on the grassroots educational opportunities and developments of freed people during the war years, as we have seen with other noted scholars of this region and era—James D. Anderson, Ronald E. Butchart, Heather Andrea Williams, and myself, to name a few. She pays minimal attention to the role of the Freedmen's Bureau, the various missionary societies, or the northern teachers who traversed the South and establish extensive networks of schools for freed blacks and impoverished whites. Nor does Green detail in any meaningful way the psychology or consciousness that motivated freed people to insist their children be schooled and educated for citizenship and equality, and not some new form of servitude.

Instead, Green concentrates her energies on the aftermath of these important concerns, and details the rise and evolution of state-sponsored public education for African Americans in Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama. In eight chapters and an epilogue, she illustrates the never-ending and intense struggle African Americans in these two cities had in laying the foundation for public schooling and obtaining their education rights. Green further details the establishment of normal schools or teacher-training schools for black Richmonders and black Mobilians, and the push by these African Americans to ensure public schools provided a quality education to their youth. She also covers the white backlash to all these efforts and the ultimate upending of these educational reconstruction campaigns after Congress failed to pass the Blair Education Bill in 1890. This left the future of public education, and the fate of black lives, in the hands of southern whites and ex-Confederates who loathed emancipation, state-sponsored schooling in general, and African Americans becoming educated for anything other than subordination and a life of servitude.

Green does an excellent job chronicling how this history unfolded in the two and a half decades following emancipation. She superbly describes the agency on the part of black Richmonders and black Mobilians to utilize schools, allies, and their legislatures to advance their overall needs and to transition from slaves into free men and women deserving of opportunities, equal status, and justice. Few historians have mined the archives to substantiate this interpretation better than Green. Her diligent pursuit of the archival sources and records needed to corroborate the accuracy of events in her narrative, the acute read of the collected works of the primary characters in her study, the appreciation for the complexity of claims of truth, and her exceptional ability to ground her historical knowledge with pragmatic ways of seeing the world through the eyes of the everyday people she researches, renders Educational Reconstruction a hallmark achievement.

The epilogue is arguably the book's most important contribution. Green illustrates both the permanency and fragility of twenty-five years of effort on the part of African Americans to build and fashion a system of schools that reflected their norms, values, and beliefs and prepared them for full-fledged citizenship. By extending the Reconstruction era past the standard artificial endpoint of the Compromise of 1877, Green reminds her readers how engrained the educational developments that arose and spread throughout the South because of the efforts and enthusiasms of former slaves had become. Schools that included African Americans were forever a permanent reality. In no significant way did this exist prior to the Civil War. Not so evident, however, was who would control these schools, how they would be funded, and what they would teach—hence, the fragility.

One remedy to this concern was an education bill proposed and championed by Senator Henry William Blair from New Hampshire. The Blair Bill “called for the creation of a permanent, uniformed, national public school system in America supported with federal funds” (p. 187). It not only would have shifted the responsibilities of public education from the states to the federal level, it would have, as Green points out, fulfilled “the promises made to educate blacks during Reconstruction” (p. 187).

The Blair Bill was one of a few attempts in this era on the part of Congress to institute a national system of education. The first, proposed by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner during the initial years of the first phase of educational reconstruction in the South, demanded a national system of education be included in the 14th Amendment to ensure emancipation led to equality. When that proposition failed to gain congressional support, Massachusetts Representative George Frisbie Hoar, in 1870, introduced a bill entitled, “To Establish a National System of Education.” It also went nowhere. Twenty years later, Blair submitted a modified version; it too failed, and this failure, Green surmises, ushered in the next phase of African American education. A phase that sponsored Booker T. Washington and his philosophy of industrial education; a phase that educated blacks for menial work and subordination rather than citizenship and equality; a phase that used schools to make African Americans a permanent underclass without rights or protections; a phase that advanced the education of whites at the expense of the education of blacks; a phase that lasted until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As Green correctly illustrates, the failed passage of the Blair Bill was the death knell to the educational reconstruction efforts of freed people and their allies who sought to use schools to transform enslaved men and women into free and educated citizens.

Green's revised chronology of Reconstruction and meticulously researched book increases our understanding of the postwar efforts made to advance African American education. It motivates readers to want to learn more on the subject and should be required reading of anyone interested in our American past, African American education, and how ordinary people can do extraordinary things even when given only the slimmest of chances.