A Class of Their Own

by Adam Fairclough

Overview

In this major undertaking, civil rights historian Adam Fairclough chronicles the odyssey of black teachers in the South from emancipation in 1865 to integration one hundred years later. A Class of Their Own is indispensable for understanding how blacks and whites interacted after the abolition of slavery, and how black communities coped with the challenges of freedom and oppression.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674036666
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	552
File size:	801 KB

About the Author

Adam Fairclough is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History and Culture at Leiden University.

Table of Contents

Contents Abbreviations Prologue: The Odyssey of Black Teachers Chapter One: Freedom’s First Generation Chapter Two: Black Teachers for Black Children Chapter Three: Missionaries to the Dark South Chapter Four: White Supremacy and Black Teachers Chapter Five: The Founders Chapter Six: The Faith of Women Chapter Seven: The City and the Country Chapter Eight: Teachers Organize Chapter Nine: Black Teachers and the Civil RightsMovement Chapter Ten: Integration: Loss and Profit Notes Acknowledgments Index

What People are Saying About This

Tony Badger

In this hugely impressive study, Adam Fairclough shows how black teachers coped with the basic conundrum facing them in the segregated South: how to advance within a system designed by white people to stop them from advancing. Fairclough's clear-eyed account chronicles heroic achievements and countless small victories in the face of overwhelming odds.
— Tony Badger, Cambridge University

William H. Chafe

Adam Fairclough has written a masterful book, full of insight, complexity and nuance. Always sensitive to the ambiguities black teachers faced, he nevertheless celebrates their strength and accomplishment in making possible the ongoing struggle of black Americans for racial and educational equality.
— William H. Chafe, author of Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America

Julian Bond

Adam Fairclough is in a class of his own when it comes to elucidating the history of the segregated South – this is a valuable addition to that historiography.
— Julian Bond, Chairman, NAACP Board of Directors

Editorial Reviews

[A] magisterial work of research.
— Dave Wood

River Falls Journal

Students and scholars who have an interest in southern history or African American history have much to learn from Fairclough’s study. Famous villains like James K. Vardaman and Ben Tillman appear on these pages along with the names of hardworking, dedicated teachers whose names are not well-known. Fairclough never sugarcoats black teachers. Some were snobs, and others spied on NAACP meetings for white superintendents in order to enhance their own salaries or to gain more secure positions. Fairclough also demonstrates the equality gap between black and white public schools and carefully explains the mean-spirited racial politics that characterized the South before the civil rights movement. This is one of the finest books this reviewer has read in many years.
— Theodore Carter DeLaney

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

A Class of Their Own is scholarly history at its very best: A richly textured and nuanced book, it tells an important American story that should not be forgotten.
— David J. Garrow

Wilson Quarterly

Although few histories devote much attention to black teachers in the South between 1865 and 1965, these men and women were in many ways the backbone of the black middle class. The educational infrastructure that they painstakingly erected did a great deal to discredit Jim Crow, and the accomplishments of these unheralded educators were just as dramatic and important as those of better known heroes of the civil rights movement. Adam Fairclough, a British historian who has written widely about that movement, tells this story very well. A Class of Their Own is a judicious exploration of a largely unstudied subject; it belongs on any well-stocked shelf of scholarly works on the Jim Crow South...Fairclough makes clear that the nostalgia of many African Americans since the 1960s for the Good Old Days of all-black schools is rose-colored. Only through desegregation could black children hope to attend decently funded public schools in the South. And yet A Class of Their Own demonstrates that the arduous struggles of black teachers 'made it difficult, nay impossible, for whites to turn racial segregation into a full-fledged caste system.'
— James T. Patterson

Washington Post Book World

Although standard accounts treat Brown as an unambiguous triumph for African American, many Southern blacks did not see it that way. "We felt betrayed," said the principal of a black high school in South Carolina. W. E. B. Du Bois, the major black figure among the founders of the NAACP, and the novelist Zora Neale Hurston denounced the decision. Hurston regarded the ruling as "insulting rather than honoring" her race, because it assumed that black children could not learn without the uplifting presence of white classmates...Adam Fairclough's book is a salutary reminder of what de jure segregation was really like, and a clear demonstration that the educational opportunities open to African American children have expanded dramatically since Brown.
— Stephan Thernstrom

Times Literary Supplement

In A Class of Their Own, Adam Fairclough--a professor at the University of Leiden and one of the most diligent and careful historians of civil rights--explores the often overlooked complexities of black Southerners, emphasizing teachers and education leaders.
— David L. Chappell

The Nation

You know those stories some of our folks like to tell about the days they had to walk for miles to school on dirt roads in scorching heat and biblical rain? They're true. Read A Class of Their Own, an inspiring account of Black teachers' relentless struggle to provide a quality education for our people. Civil rights historian Adam Fairclough charts the impressive strides teachers made in the segregated South during a 100-year period, beginning just after the end of the Civil War in 1865. In one-room schoolhouses, without running water or plumbing, and at red-brick all-Black land grant universities and other halls of higher learning, gifted Black teachers encouraged students to become achievers. Although these devoted educators seemed unflappable to their students, Fairclough reveals the enormous challenges they faced from White school boards, whose members often discouraged their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
— Patrick Henry Bass

Essence