Article 3: Learning About Each Other: Two Teachers Negotiate Race, Class, and Gender in the Civil War South

The Civil War ended slavery but not the pernicious inequality of power and status that still characterizes relations between black and white America. It has been argued that the racist narrative that sustained political, economic, and social inequities in the South under slavery was reified in the postwar era, resulting in a more deeply entrenched cultural discrimination that kept blacks disenfranchised and disempowered and etched racism into the fabric of American life. The white planters, stripped of an economy and a way of life that ensured their power, neither forgave nor forgot the embarrassment of poverty and shame brought by defeat. As soon as they could, with the help of presidents bent on appeasement and the benign neglect of northerners who had fought the war to preserve the union but not necessarily to invite former slaves into their town meetings and parlors, the “secesh” regained control of their state houses and created policies that set boundaries around the social, political, and educational progress of blacks. As Frederick Douglass put it, “[T]he Negro after his emancipation was free from the individual master but the slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends” (Douglass 1882, 331).