James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 explores the antecedents and unfolding of Black education in the South. He asserts that the conflict of free labor versus slave labor alongside the socioeconomic political environment of the post-Civil War South shaped decades of Black education and its curriculum debates. This work provides an in-depth examination of the origins of the curriculum in segregated schools.

Preceding legal freedom, Anderson notes that Blacks were drawn to education and founded underground schools for themselves. As the slave-ocracy crumbled, efforts to educate Blacks gained support from abolitionists, missionary societies, and benevolent Whites.

By the mid-1860s, the newly established Freedmen's Bureau found 500 Black schools already existing as the formative period for exslaves' education was underway. The curriculum quickly ...