Black Education in New York State

In the first comprehensive history of black education in New York State, Carleton Mabee contributes toward a fuller understanding of the role African Americans have played in American education. As he says in the final chapter, "This agonizing narrative, stretching over more than three centuries, reveals not only the severe limits as to what education by itself can achieve, but also significant improvement in the education of blacks-halting and limited improvement, to be sure, but nevertheless improvement, and thus can give us hope."
Mabee discusses colonial church-sponsored efforts to educate slaves, the work of nineteenth-century white abolitionists in promoting black education, and the role of both blacks and whites in developing public schools and other kinds of schools for blacks.
Extensive research into primary sources provides new insights into the major nineteenth-century school issues as they related to African Americans in New York State. Mabee also examines the impact of the "Great Migration" of African Americans into the state in the early twentieth century and the revival of segregated schools that follows.
52 illustrations-many of them rare-and 17 tables are included.
Winner of the 1979 John Ben Snow Prize
"A first-rate piece of work....Raises questions and defines issues on Afro-American education for years to come. I believe that this work will become a standard." -Monroe Fordham, Editor, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History