Bernice Robinson, a forty-one year old Charleston beautician, was surprised when she was asked to become the first teacher for the Highlander Folk School’s Citizen Education program in the South Carolina Sea Islands, for she had neither experience as a teacher nor a college education. This did not present a problem for Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander School.
Black Loyalists and “The Book of Negroes”
The Book of Negroes is an extraordinary historical resource, a meticulous list drawn up by the British authorities between May and November 1783, in which they recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated from New York.
Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction by Michele Mitchell (2004)
Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation is a fascinating study of the tactics African Americans used to bolster racial uplift after Reconstruction. Mitchell presents the book as a social history, revealing moments when African Americans shared ideas on ways to advance the race during the Progressive Era at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.