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Mixing bodies and minds: race, classand ‘mixed schooling’ controversies inNew Orleans and Atlanta, 1874–87Joseph O. JewellPublished online: 05 Feb 2014.

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Mixing bodies and minds: race, class and‘mixed schooling’ controversies in NewOrleans and Atlanta, 1874–87

JOSEPH O. JEWELL

ABSTRACT Educational access was central in the racial inscription of class identitiesin the late nineteenth century. In Atlanta and New Orleans, white newspapers,politicians and ordinary citizens launched vigorous campaigns against integratedschools, which resulted in limited access to elite public schooling for upwardly mobileBlacks. Jewell’s study analyses these cases to explore social reproduction as a linkbetween race and class as social structures. Whites in both cities used the concept ofmiscegenation, or racial mixing, to define Blacks’ access to elite cultural knowledgeand social networks as a violation of the colour line. Jewell argues that analyses ofracial formation should give attention to discursive links between race and class instruggles over social reproduction because maintaining racial hierarchies in periods ofsocial change requires constructing new cultural narratives that reproduce economicdominance over racial minorities.

KEYWORDS African American history, Atlanta, class, education, intersectionality, middleclass, miscegenation, New Orleans, race, social mobility

In December 1874 riots erupted in New Orleans when black studentsattempted to enrol in two of the city’s elite high schools, the Upper Girls’

High School and the Central Boys’ High School, both of which served thechildren of mainly middle-class Whites. Although state law had mandatedracial integration in the city’s public schools, self-appointed bands of whitestudents roamed the city, physically expelling black students from the city’sintegrated schools. Their actions forced authorities to end the school term twoweeks early to restore order. Those voicing support for the white studentscalled attention to the threat to white children’s reputations if they wereforced to attend schools with Blacks. In September 1887 the Georgia statelegislature voted to withdraw state funding from Atlanta University, the onlyschool providing instruction for Blacks at the secondary school level, despitemore than a decade of positive reviews of its work. Lawmakers claimed thatby allowing their own children to attend classes, the school’s whitemissionary faculty had violated an 1870 state law mandating racially separateschools. Supporters of the legislature’s actions argued that, although no

Patterns of Prejudice, 2014Vol. 48, No. 1, 25–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2013.877700

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physical mixing had occurred, Blacks’ access to elite educational content andtheir contact with Whites posed a danger to white children at the school.White elites’ use of miscegenation rhetoric to justify segregating both the

content and context of elite public education in post-bellum cities, such asNew Orleans and Atlanta, illustrates how, during periods of social change,the maintenance of racialized class boundaries requires the development ofnew cultural narratives that racially reinscribe resources used in class repro-duction. In both cities, ‘mixed schooling’ controversies saw politicians,journalists and everyday citizens make the case for limiting Blacks’ accessto elite schooling by focusing on the danger posed to the ‘racial purity’ ofmiddle-class Whites’ cultural and social capital rather than their physicalbodies. Such efforts to defend the means of reproducing positions of privilegetend to articulate relationships between categories such as race, gender andclass.1 In their attempts to limit black educational access in the latenineteenth-century American South, Whites constructed narratives of racialmixing that drew on dominant ideas about race, class and symbolic capital tosustain durable links between race and middle-class identity and mobility.In this article, I show that Whites’ campaigns to limit urban Blacks’ edu-

cational access in the late nineteenth-century South were central in solidifyinglinks between race and class. These campaigns emerged during a time whenchanges to both the economic order and the racial order threatenedtraditional understandings of middle-class status. Urban Blacks’ attempts toclaim middle-class status and reproduce it intergenerationally, using thecultural and social capital embedded in education, challenged what were forWhites presumed structural links between whiteness and middle-class status.As a result, these campaigns made reference to the social, moral and culturalimplications of upwardly mobile Blacks’ access to elite forms of education formiddle-class Whites’ ability to reproduce their own social position.Because race and class are articulated where racial formations are actively

linked with the construction and maintenance of classes and class identities,2

sites devoted to social reproduction—the various forms of labour gearedtowards maintaining and reproducing existing social arrangements—repres-ent a crucial link between race and class. In periods of social change, strugglesover sites devoted to social reproduction generate new cultural narratives thatjustify or challenge economic dominance of racial minorities. Ideas about thedangers of Blacks’ access to elite forms of education linked whiteness withmiddle-class identity and mobility in the late nineteenth-century South. I will

1 Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in VictorianAmerica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997); Nicola Beisel and TamaraKay, ‘Abortion, race, and gender in nineteenth-century America’, American SociologicalReview, vol. 69, no. 4, 2004, 498–518; Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender,and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2006).

2 Stuart Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, in UNESCO(ed.), Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO Publishing 1980),305–45.

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show that Whites’ use of miscegenation rhetoric to justify restricting blackeducational opportunities was a racial project that contributed to thereinscription of whiteness on to middle-class identity in a period whensocial, economic and political changes problematized presumed linksbetween race and class.

Education, class and the racial order

Class mobility and race in the nineteenth century

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, racial categories were linkedwith labour and class identities. The skilled, free labour performed by themiddle class was generally defined as ‘white men’s work’, making unskilled,low-waged labour the province of unfree ‘coloured’ populations.3 However,by the 1870s and 1880s, industrialization and educational expansion hadbegun to change the contours of the middle class, gradually emphasizingnon-manual employment,4 and correspondingly higher levels of education.5

During this same period, mobility among European immigrants in the urbanNorth and newly enfranchised Blacks in the urban South complicatedtraditional links between race and class.

While the majority of Blacks in the post-slavery South remained in ruralareas as agricultural labourers, cities like Atlanta and New Orleans experi-enced dramatic growth from black urban migration. By 1870 Atlanta’s blackpopulation had increased by approximately five times its pre-war size, whileNew Orleans, which had a visible antebellum black presence, saw its blackpopulation more than double.6 In both cities, emerging patterns of socialmobility among Blacks challenged both traditional modes of social controland Whites’ exclusive claims to resources used in class mobility and

3 George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community(Westport, CT: Greenwood 1972); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race andthe Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso 1991);Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics and Mass Culturein Nineteenth-century America, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso 2003).

4 Melanie Archer and Judith R. Blau, ‘Class formation in nineteenth-century America:the case of the middle class’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 19, 1993, 17–41; Stuart M.Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1989); Stuart W. Bruchey,Small Business in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press 1980); OlivierZunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press 1990).

5 Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (NewYork: Harper and Row 1988); William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1995).

6 Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York andOxford: Oxford University Press 1978); John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1973).

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reproduction. Urban settlement gave Blacks greater access to education fromboth public and private sources, and to the vote, which gave them a degree ofinfluence over urban politics.7 Scholars examining manuscript census data for1870 and 1880 indicate that between 10 and 25 per cent of the black workersin southern cities like New Orleans, Richmond, Charleston and Atlanta heldwhite-collar or skilled blue-collar jobs.8 Although relatively modest levels ofpersonal wealth made them only a fraction of the middle-class populations ofthese cities, urban Blacks’ economic and educational gains attracted theattention of national and local periodicals.9 Southern Whites argued thaturban Blacks’ pursuit of skilled trades, demands for fair wages, increasedaccess to education and use of the vote threatened the racial order. Popularaccounts told of urban Blacks who, removed from the ‘civilizing constraints’

7 Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile,1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1990); Leon F. Litwack,Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf 1979); Rabinowitz,Race Relations in the Urban South.

8 Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Bernard E. Powers, Black Charlestonians: A SocialHistory, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press 1994); Jerry JohnThornberry, ‘The Development of Black Atlanta, 1865–1885’, PhD dissertation,Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, 1977. Percentages arebased on data from the ninth (1870) and tenth (1880) manuscript census schedules forFulton County, Georgia, compiled by Thornberry in ‘The Development of BlackAtlanta’; for the Orleans Parish, Louisiana, compiled by Blassingame in Black NewOrleans; and for the city of Charleston, South Carolina, compiled by Powers in BlackCharlestonians. Occupational categories are based on classifications in StephanThernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis,1880–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1973). Thernstrom’s ‘highwhite-collar’ category includes professionals and managers or owners of largebusinesses. ‘Low white-collar’ includes salespersons, semi-professionals, small-busi-ness people and self-employed artisans. I expand the middle-class category to include‘skilled blue-collar’ workers (such as mechanics, carpenters, dressmakers etc.) becauseof their continued status in the post-bellum southern economy. See also James C. Cobb,‘Beyond planters and industrialists: a new perspective on the New South’, Journal ofSouthern History, vol. 54, no. 1, 1988, 45–68; and Archer and Blau, ‘Class formation innineteenth-century America’.

9 William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington:Indiana University Press 1990); Edward King, The Southern States of North America: ARecord of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi,Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia,West Virginia and Maryland (London: Blackie and Son 1875); Rabinowitz, Race Relationsin the Urban South. See also ‘Studies in the South: new dignities’, Atlantic Monthly,October 1882, 477; Edward Atkinson, ‘Significant aspects of the Atlanta cottonexposition’, The Century, February 1882; Walter B. Hill, ‘Uncle Tom without a cabin’,The Century, April 1884, 859–65; T. U. Dudley, ‘How shall we help the Negro?’, TheCentury, June 1885, 273–80; ‘Colored men of wealth’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans),6 October 1887; ‘Town topics’, Atlanta Constitution, 10 March 1877; ‘Through the city:news glimpses from our reporters’ note books’, Atlanta Constitution, 21 February 1878;‘Curbstone chat’, Atlanta Constitution, 24 August 1880; ‘Who loves the nigger? Plunkettdiscusses some phases of the situation’, Atlanta Constitution, 11 August 1889; and‘Negro morality at the South’, The Nation, 15 August 1872, 105.

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of slavery, avoided ‘honest’ labour and disregarded traditional rules of racialetiquette.10 These changes fuelled concerns about middle-income Whites’ability to maintain social dominance in the post-bellum era, emphasizing theneed for racial boundaries in middle-class public spaces, employment,housing and education.11

In the decades prior to the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessyv. Ferguson (1896), which sanctioned racial separation in schools, publicconveyances and other public spaces under the doctrine of ‘separate butequal’, laws and practices limiting black social mobility were alreadybecoming an integral part of Whites’ efforts to construct a post-bellum racialhierarchy in which Blacks remained economically subordinate and sociallyinferior.12 In this context, struggles among Blacks, their northern whitemissionary allies and southern white elites over schooling were crucial sites ofracial and class formation.

Race-class intersections and social reproduction

Scholars of class formation in the United States have established thesignificance of race in the making of class identities using structuralapproaches to race. Class-based perspectives, while paying attention to raceand racial formation, view race as a product of social structural change,functioning as a historically specific class discourse in which physical traitssuch as skin colour are highlighted to justify, transform or reproduce unequalpositions in the economic order.13 By contrast, race-based perspectivescontend that, as a central axis of social relations, race functions both as acategory of individual and group identity and as a hierarchical structure thatinteracts with class to shape the way resources are distributed.14 While bothof these theoretical strains provide insights into how racial differences emergewithin classes, we remain limited in our understanding of the various ways

10 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in theNew South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1993);Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books 1998).

11 Hale,Making Whiteness; Barbara Y. Welke, ‘When all the women were white, and all theBlacks were men: gender, class, race, and the road to Plessy, 1855–1914’, Law and HistoryReview, vol. 13, no. 2, 1995, 261–316; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow,3rd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1974).

12 Hale, Making Whiteness; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.13 Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London and New York: Verso 1994);

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London and New York: Routledge 1995);Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

14 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘Rethinking racism: toward a structural interpretation’, Amer-ican Sociological Review, vol. 62, no. 3, 1997, 465–80; Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: TheMaking of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press2006); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge 1994).

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that people navigate within these structures, or their motivations fordefending or transforming group boundaries.Intersectionality offers a useful framework for understanding interactions

between race and class. Intersectional approaches traditionally hold that race,class and gender are mutually constitutive, forming a ‘matrix’ that placessocial actors in positions of both privilege and oppression.15 Recent works inthis vein have pointed out that, while these approaches provide valuableinsight at the level of individual identity, how gender, race and class intersectas social structures remains under-theorized.16 Recent contributions to theoriesof structure offer a more nuanced way to conceptualize intersectional relation-ships. William Sewell argues that structures consist of sets of mutuallysustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action.17

Because social actors can and do combine them in new and different ways,structures intersect where they share resources and/or cultural schemas.18

Recent works examining the relationship between race and gender use thisinsight to develop more nuanced understandings of race-gender intersection-ality that address structure.19 This approach offers promising but as yetunderdeveloped lines of research regarding the intersection of race and class.Processes of social reproduction maintain both the racial order and the class

hierarchy. Uncertainties about the ability to maintain access to scarce butvaluable resources lead people to develop social practices, ideologies andrepertoires of action that ensure continued access and protect privilegedsocial position.20 Examinations of social reproduction informed by contem-porary Marxism have traditionally focused on the strategies of action andforms of labour performed in the paid sphere that perpetuate specific modes

15 Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology,2nd edn (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1995); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: HarperCollins 1990);Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feministcritique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, Univer-sity of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 40, 1989, 139–67.

16 Beisel and Kay, ‘Abortion, race, and gender in nineteenth-century America’; PatriciaHill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press 1998); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Raceand Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress 2002).

17 William H. Sewell, Jr, ‘A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation’,American Journal of Sociology, vol. 98, no. 1, 1992, 1–29.

18 Ibid., 18–19.19 Beisel and Kay, ‘Abortion, race, and gender in nineteenth-century America’; Glenn,

Unequal Freedom.20 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. from the

French by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1984); MichèleLamont, Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1992); Michèle Lamont(ed.), The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (Chicago: University ofChicago Press 1999).

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of production.21 However, feminist examinations of social reproduction callattention to the mental, manual and emotional labour that maintains existingsocial arrangements, how it is organized and the various public and privatesites where it is performed.22 The construction and maintenance of both theracial order and the class hierarchy depends on the cultural inscription ofthese resources and the various forms of labour associated with their use. Ahistorical analysis of where and how groups construct new discursive linksbetween categories such as class and race contributes to our understanding ofhow hierarchical forms are defended and maintained during periods of socialchange. In this article, I use this approach to explore the construction andmaintenance of durable links between race and class in struggles overeducational resources in the post-slavery South.

Education and racialized class boundaries

Education has been a central resource in the construction and maintenance ofgroup boundaries, particularly during periods of social change. Writings onschooling under industrial capitalism suggest that it contributes to socialreproduction through two main processes. First, children arrive at schoolshaving been socialized into cultures reflecting their parents’ social position.23

Interactions with school personnel reinforce this socialization, resulting in theacquisition of formal academic credentials that legitimate social inequality.24

Second, schools provide the setting for interactions among peers from similarbackgrounds that foster the formation of social networks, through whichvalued resources are exchanged and consolidated, ensuring continued

21 Bourdieu, Distinction; Paul DiMaggio and John Mohr, ‘Cultural capital, educationalattainment, and marital selection’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 90, no. 6, 1985,1231–61; Michèle Lamont and Annette Lareau, ‘Cultural capital: allusions, gaps andglissandos in recent theoretical developments’, Sociological Theory, vol. 6, no. 2, 1988,153–68.

22 Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Shifting the center: race, class, and feminist theorizing aboutmotherhood’, in Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (eds),Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (London and New York: Routledge 1994),45–66; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘From servitude to service work: historical continuities inthe racial division of paid reproductive labor’, Signs, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, 1–43; BarbaraLaslett and Johanna Brenner, ‘Gender and social reproduction: historical perspectives’,Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 15, 1989, 381–404.

23 Bourdieu, Distinction.24 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passerson, Reproduction in Education, Society and

Culture, trans. from the French by Richard Nice (London and Beverly Hills, CA: SagePublishers 1977), 204–5; Annette Lareau, Home Advantage: Social Class and ParentalIntervention in Elementary Education, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little-field 2000).

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access.25 Ideologies supporting racial and class separation in schools havetraditionally been based on the belief that sustained, unsupervised contactwith social inferiors jeopardizes the ability of higher-status children toreproduce social position, thereby enforcing the need for socially homogen-eous environments and networks.26 These same ideologies have also shapedideas about the schooling that different groups should receive, resulting indifferential access to academic credentials that facilitate class mobility andreproduce class position.27 Studies of race and educational access shouldconsider how struggles over education as a form of social reproduction havehistorically articulated racial identities with class identities.Although the assimilation of racial and ethnic outsiders was one of the

goals of late nineteenth-century educational expansion, public schoolingtended to reinforce the homogeneous patterns of settlement and associationfound in cities.28 One strain of school reform advocated limiting black andimmigrant children’s access to certain types of schooling, citing variations inmental capacity and doubts about the feasibility of assimilation.29 Reformersalso expressed concerns about contact between middle- and upper-classnative-born Anglo-Protestant youth and the children of ‘inferior racial stocks’who populated the working classes of the nation’s cities.30 In the last decadesof the nineteenth century, public and private high schools represented an

25 Bourdieu, Distinction; Paul DiMaggio, ‘On Pierre Bourdieu’, American Journal ofSociology, vol. 84, no. 6, 1979, 1460–74; Paul DiMaggio, ‘Cultural capital and schoolsuccess: the impact of status culture participation on the grades of U.S. high schoolstudents’, American Sociological Review, vol. 47, no. 2, 1982, 189–201; Lamont andLareau, ‘Cultural capital’.

26 Jennifer Jellison Holme, ‘Buying homes, buying schools: school choice and theconstruction of school quality’, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 72, no. 2, 2002, 177–206; Steven B. Levine, ‘The rise of American boarding schools and the development of anational upper class’, Social Problems, vol. 28, no. 1, 1980, 63–94; Amanda E. Lewis, Racein the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2003); David B. Tyack, ‘Constructingdifference: historical reflections on schooling and social diversity’, Teachers CollegeRecord, vol. 95, no. 1, 1993, 8–34; Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna, ‘The politics ofculture: understanding local political resistance to detracking in racially mixedschools’, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 66, no. 1, 1996, 93–118.

27 Bourdieu and Passerson, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture; Annette Lareau,Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press2003); Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press 1985); Joel Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: ABrief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States, 6th edn (NewYork: McGraw-Hill Higher Education 2009).

28 Archer and Blau, ‘Class formation in nineteenth-century America’; Cremin, AmericanEducation.

29 Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Oxfordand New York: Oxford University Press 1989); John H. Ralph and Richard Rubinson,‘Immigration and the expansion of schooling in the United States, 1890–1970’, AmericanSociological Review, vol. 45, no. 6, 1980, 943–54; Tyack, ‘Constructing difference’.

30 Beisel, Imperiled Innocents.

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important site of middle-class formation. Families who could afford to keepchildren out of the workforce for higher grades of schooling prepared themfor white-collar employment and, in the case of girls, for marriages thatmaintained or improved class position.31 However, as Blacks, immigrants andother racial outsiders demonstrated both the capacity and desire for highergrades of education that offered equal citizenship and social mobility,reformers debated the implications of educating these populations beyondrudimentary levels or vocational tracks.32

Mobility, miscegenation and cultural pollution

Racial ideologies invoking the threat of cultural or moral pollution emergedpartly in response to the social mobility of racial outsiders. These ideologiesheld that the lifestyles, tastes and culture of the middle and upper classeswere the result of inborn racial capacities rather than wealth accumulation,making Blacks and immigrants culturally and morally unfit for middle-classmobility or, at best, in need of careful assimilation.33 Racially marking elitecultural knowledge helped to maintain the homogeneous social networks thatensured both racial and class endogamy. Conversely, sustained, unregulatedcontact with morally suspect racial outsiders increased the likelihood of lossof social position.34

‘Miscegenation’, a term coined by pro-southern and anti-black Democratsduring the presidential election of 1864, initially referred to the physical‘union of the white and black races’.35 The term regained popularity in thepost-bellum era with the abolition of racial slavery and Whites’ social and

31 Reese, The Origins of the American High School; David B. Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot,Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press 1990).

32 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press 1988); Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People:Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press 2010); Fass, Outside In; Tyack, ‘Constructing difference’;Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and in Freedom(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2009).

33 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in theUnited States, 1880–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1995), 29–31; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and theAlchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 1998);Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples atHome and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang 2000).

34 Beisel, Imperiled Innocents; Donovan, White Slave Crusades.35 David G. Croly, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the

American White Man and the Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & Company 1864);Sidney Kaplan, ‘The miscegenation issue in the election of 1864’, Journal of NegroHistory, vol. 34, no. 3, 1949, 274–343; Elise V. Lemire, ‘Miscegenation’: Making Race inAmerica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002).

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political anxieties about preserving racial hierarchy.36 The dangers of physicalmiscegenation figured largely in late nineteenth-century racial discourse,linked to stereotypes of black sexuality and underscored by Blacks’ spatialand physical mobility. However, the visibility of upwardly mobile Blacks insouthern cities prompted Whites to develop new narratives recounting thedangers of new forms of miscegenation, namely cultural and intellectual, as theoutcome of black educational and social mobility.In the post-bellum South, white elites sought to maintain social dominance

in part by limiting Blacks’ access to education.37 However, in Atlanta andNew Orleans, where the availability of elite forms of public schooling forBlacks compounded extant fears about black social mobility, white politicians,journalists and ordinary citizens campaigned to restrict Blacks’ access to eliteeducation on the grounds that it violated legal prohibitions against racialmixing. These campaigns resulted in the gradual resegregation of publicschools in New Orleans and the withdrawal of state funding for Georgia’sonly public secondary school for Blacks. The Upper Girls’ High Schoolcontroversy in New Orleans and the Atlanta University controversycontributed to the defence of the colour line by generating new culturalnarratives that reinscribed resources used in middle-class reproduction. Thedevelopment and use of these new discursive links between race and middle-class position also provide insight into how middle-class Whites responded toAfrican Americans’ efforts at class mobility.

The Upper Girls’ High School controversy

In 1868 Louisiana’s Reconstruction lawmakers ratified Article 135 of the newstate constitution, establishing a policy of racial integration in public schoolsand universities. The article stated: ‘There shall be no separate schools orinstitutions of learning established exclusively for any race by the State ofLouisiana.’38 However, as early as 1870, the Orleans Parish Board of SchoolDirectors engaged in practices that were described as ‘circumventing the law’in an attempt to maintain formal racial separation in New Orleans.39 In

36 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-AmericanCharacter and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1987);Jaqueline Dowd Hall, ‘“The mind that burns in each body”: women, rape, and racialviolence’, Southern Exposure, vol. 12, no. 6, 1984, 61–71; Martha Hodes, White Women,Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-century South (New Haven, CT and London: YaleUniversity Press 1997).

37 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Pamela Barnhouse Walters, David R.James and Holly J. McCammon, ‘Citizenship and public schools: accounting for racialinequality in education in the pre- and post-disfranchisement South’, AmericanSociological Review, vol. 62, no. 1, 1997, 34–52.

38 Constitution Adopted by the State Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana, March7, 1868 (New Orleans: Republican Office 1868), 17.

39 ‘Mixed schools’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 10 August 1870, 2.

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response to this opposition, State Superintendent of Education Thomas W.Conway ordered all parish school boards to issue certificates assigningchildren to public schools based on proximity. Orleans Parish Board PresidentWarner Van Norden was almost immediately charged with using the newpolicy to ensure that ‘no negroes were admitted into white schools’.40 TheBoard’s continued resistance led Conway to establish ward-based schoolboards comprised of ‘loyal’ black and white Republican voters who wouldcomply with state policies.41 The Daily Picayune, echoing the anger of thecity’s Whites, charged that the continued operation of the public schoolsystem was ‘seriously threatened’ by what it called the ‘outrageous work’ ofintegration.42 Varying historical accounts suggest that, by 1871, anywherefrom one- to two-thirds of the city’s public schools were racially mixed.43 Twoexceptions to this number were the Upper Girls’ High School and the CentralBoys’ High School, both of which were considered elite public schools.44

The ward boards’ success encouraged Blacks’ ongoing efforts to integratethe city’s schools. On 14 December 1874, three black female students from theColiseum School accompanied by their teacher, Julia Wood, arrived at theUpper Girls’ High School to take entrance examinations. The school’sprincipal, M. E. McDonald, refused to accept the girls as applicants andasked the party to leave the school’s premises immediately.45 Members of theschool’s graduating class, who witnessed the exchange between the principaland the party from Coliseum School, composed a formal letter to the CityBoard of School Directors protesting the admission of Blacks.

We, the seniors of the Upper Girls’ High School, having passed creditableexaminations in order to graduate, do hereby most emphatically decline toreceive our diplomas unless the question brought up this day … in regard to

40 Roger A. Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862–77 (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press 1974), 110–11; ‘Mixed schools’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 12 January1871, 1.

41 Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana.42 ‘Mixed schools’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 12 January 1871, 1.43 Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana; Louis R.

Harlan, ‘Desegregation in New Orleans public schools during Reconstruction’,American Historical Review, vol. 67, no. 3, 1962, 663–75.

44 Central Boys’ was the city’s oldest public high school and was favoured by studentsfrom private academies, while Upper Girls’, located in a ‘fashionable’ neighbourhoodabove Canal Street, was known for educating ‘young ladies of prestigious socialconnections’. See Donald E. DeVore and John Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: PublicEducation in New Orleans, 1841–1991 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies,University of Southwestern Louisiana 1991), 76; Fischer, The Segregation Struggle inLouisiana, 123–4; Harlan, ‘Desegregation in New Orleans public schools duringReconstruction’, 666.

45 Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Education, William G. Brown: To theGeneral Assembly of Louisiana, for the Year 1874: Session of 1875 (New Orleans: RepublicanOffice 1875), 53–4; ‘School imbroglio’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 15 December1874, 1.

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our school being mixed, is decided before the appointed time for ourgraduation, December 23 1874 … . The junior and first year classes refuse toattend this school until this decision is made.46

The following day, a group of black male students arrived at the CentralBoys’ High School to take entrance exams, but were forcibly barred fromentering by a group of students. Following the example of the Upper Girls’students, a smaller contingent of students from Central Boys’ also composed aletter to the City Board of School Directors.

Gentlemen, as students of the Central [Boys’] High School of New Orleans, weare presenting to you the following protestation which we believe is based onsacred principles and rights … Examinations are taking place right now intown for the privilege of admission to the Central High School of NewOrleans. Thirteen negroes [presented themselves for] these examinations. Assons of Whites and faithful to the principles of the white race, without havingany hostility against negroes, we are asking you to decide if a negro must beadmitted at the Central High School. If you decide affirmatively, then we willall leave school, which will not be able to be a school for Whites anymore.47

In making the case against integrated schooling, the students at bothschools, mainly from middle-class backgrounds (see Table 1), made connec-tions between race and the value of education. Neither of the lettersquestioned the ability of Blacks to pass high school examinations. However,their refusal to accept diplomas and their threats to leave the schoolsaltogether, unless the examination processes and student bodies remainedracially exclusive, clearly connected the value of an academic credential to theracial context in which it was earned. These understandings contributed tonew understandings of the dangers of racial mixing.In the following days, editorials in local newspapers expressed support for

the students, arguing that admitting Blacks into schools reserved for middle-class Whites undermined their usefulness in class reproduction by exposingmiddle-class white youth to contact with their perceived social inferiors ofboth races. As early as 1870, the Daily Picayune had identified the Whites whoattended the city’s integrated schools as ‘a small number of degraded andworthless whites’ who, together with ‘the hybrid class of mulattoes andquadroons’, lowered the ‘standard of white superiority’ by supporting mixedschools.48 Hence, within this new narrative about the dangers of racial

46 ‘School imbroglio’.47 ‘La revolution dans les ecoles’, New Orleans Bee, 17 December 1874, 1 (the author is

grateful to Marie Des Nieges Leonard who translated the original French).48 ‘The negro in the public schools’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 13 February 1870, 1.

The Republican, the moderate organ of the Republican Party in New Orleans,equivocated on the issue, claiming that ‘the demand for the indiscriminate associationof races’ came from Blacks of ‘mixed blood’ and that ‘the great mass of the negroes’were ‘at least indifferent to the privilege’ (The Republican, 16 December 1874).

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mixing, resisting integrated schools became a matter of defending claims tomiddle-class respectability. One parent, signing his letter as ‘A Mechanic’,wrote to the New Orleans Times expressing his concern that, if black studentswere admitted to the school his daughters attended, they would be ‘exposedto the contaminating influence of girls and women of that race, who arenotorious as being in great part destitute of chastity’. He continued, ‘I do mostearnestly protest against placing my sons and my girls … in daily contactwith such associates’, further adding that it was ‘notorious’ that there was ‘nopublic sentiment among negroes attaching disgrace and obloquy to theft orimmorality’.49 Clearly, even though no explicit concerns were expressed aboutinterracial sexual contact between children, integrated education had direconsequences for the young, who were vulnerable to ‘morally polluting’influences.

The use of education as part of a class reproduction strategy was alsolinked with race by invoking the perceived economic burden that blackeducation placed on the city’s white taxpayers. Opponents of black educationhad long argued that the small amount of wealth generated by Blacks meantthat public schooling was a resource primarily paid for by Whites, who werealso being asked to subsidize the growing numbers of black schoolchildren.50

At the outset of the Upper Girls’ controversy, the Daily Picayune mobilizedthis same rhetoric when it defined for its readers a ‘mixed school’ as ‘simply aschool paid for by the money of white people, but into which colored pupils

Table 1 Occupations of household heads of Upper Girls’ High School and Central Boys’High School student protesters, 1874 (%)

Occupation Upper Girls’ High School(n=46)

Central Boys’ High School(n=23)

Middle classHigh white-collar 6.5 30.4Low white-collar 32.6 30.4Skilled blue-collar 19.6 13.0

Total middle class 58.7 73.8

Other classesSemi-skilled blue-collar orservice

6.5 —

Unskilled blue-collar 8.7 4.4Keeps house 17.4 21.7

Total other classes 32.6 26.1

Note: Data from articles in the Daily Picayune (‘School imbroglio’) and the New Orleans Bee(‘La revolution dans les ecoles’) listing names of those who signed the petitions against blackenrolment at each school. Names were checked against the United States Federal Censuses for 1870and 1880. Occupational categories are based on Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians, 290 2.

49 ‘The public schools’, New Orleans Times, 21 September 1875, 6.50 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Fischer,

The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana.

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are forced against the will and in defiance of the protests of those whosupport it’.51 Even as it conceded the need for black schools, the DailyPicayune asserted that, because racial integration lowered the value of a publicschool education for Whites, ‘the introduction of the colored pupils wasequivalent to the exclusion of whites’, and that white parents would ‘cease tofurnish the means which support them’, being under no obligation to support‘what they believe to be the pollution of “mixed schools”’.52

Integrated schools also problematized claims to pure racial identities, arequirement for middle-class respectability. The immediate danger of physicalmiscegenation was that the young might be tempted or coerced intentionallyinto intimate contact that crossed racial boundaries. However, given thecomplex racial history of New Orleans, physical appearance was anunreliable marker of racial identity, and underscored the importance ofracially homogeneous social networks.53 In the days following the attempts tointegrate the two schools, editorials in the New Orleans Times, the DailyPicayune and the New Orleans Bee encouraged students to protect the city’sremaining white schools from black ‘infiltration’ and repair what theyperceived as an affront to the honour of the students at Upper Girls’ byboycotting mixed schools or forcibly ejecting Blacks from classrooms.54 TheDaily Picayune reported that a group of students from Central Boys’ hadorganized a ‘vigilance committee’ expressly for this purpose:

The boys of the [Central Boys’] High School, who are determined not to standthe mixture of the schools, repaired yesterday morning to the [Lower] Girls’High School, and after deliberation resolved to expel the negroes … withoutthe intervention of the teachers. A committee of five … was appointed toinform the negroes of their decision. The committee waited on the girls in theschool room, and notified the negroes of the fact that they must leave, whichthey immediately did, to the great satisfaction of all the pupils, and left theboys to enjoy, according to their expression, a jolly time.55

A lengthy editorial in The Louisianian, the city’s only black newspaper,decried this activity and questioned Whites’ ability to claim pure racial spacesand identities in what had long been recognized as a racially mixed context.Describing the students’ efforts from Central Boys’ as the ‘quixotic task ofeliminating color in a peculiarly “mixed” community’, the editorial went sofar as to cast doubts on the racial identities of those involved in the protests.

51 ‘The public schools’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 16 December 1874, 1.52 Ibid., 2.53 F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania

State University Press 1991); Virginia R. Domínguez, White by Definition: SocialClassification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1986).

54 Thomas H. Harris, The Story of Public Education in Louisiana (New Orleans: DelgadoTrades School Print Shop 1924).

55 ‘The school war’, Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 18 December 1874, 2.

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[The students] were beaten back solely because of their complexion, and in, asthe Republican has it ‘the peculiar difficulties of Louisiana’ their parents andfriends maintain that other pupils light colored and favored … aided in theirassault and expulsion. In other words, ‘the peculiar difficulties of Louisiana’have always made the drawing of lines between the races dubious, exceptwhere so dark and with such race characteristics as could not be gainsaid.56

National coverage of the incident underscored this point. While purging blackstudents from the schools, Harper’s Weekly reported, the boys mistakenlyidentified a number of white students as black, including the daughter of analleged prominent White Leaguer. This error led Harper’s to conclude that,even for the ‘young regulators’ who seemed ‘baffled at every step’, the‘question of color was one that not even the sharpest inquiry could decide’.57

The opinions expressed in local newspapers in the Upper Girls’ controversysupport the view of class and race being linked through strategies of socialreproduction. By suggesting that integrating the schools would jeopardize thevalue of the academic credentials they were set to receive, students and theirsupporters effectively linked the racial composition of schools with theirsocial value and contributed to new narratives of racial mixing. Newspapersand local pundits used these narratives to play on the fears of the whitepopulation at large, but specifically those of middle-class families who lookedto higher grades of public education as a means of reproducing class positionin a shifting social environment. The doubts cast on the racial identities ofthose Whites attending mixed schools undermined claims to respectabilityand only emphasized these concerns.58 In Atlanta, Blacks’ access to sucheducation generated a similar controversy over race and class reproduction.

Atlanta University and the Glenn Bill controversy

In contrast to Louisiana’s early efforts at integration, Georgia’s statelegislature established racial separation in its schools. In 1870 it passed alaw requiring public schools to be racially segregated but funded equally,‘both as regards school houses and fixtures, and the attainments and abilitiesof teachers, length of term-time, etc.’.59 However, the Atlanta City Council’sfailure to provide school buildings in accordance with the law on the groundsof economy meant that northern abolitionist missionary agencies like theAmerican Missionary Association (AMA) had the opportunity to receive at

56 ‘The Republican’, Louisianian, 19 December 1874, 1.57 ‘Color in the New Orleans schools’, Harper’s Weekly, 13 February 1875, 147–8.58 By 1877 the Orleans parish school board had already begun adhering to a policy of

racial segregation in school assignments. Two years later, an all-white legislatureadopted a new state constitution without Article 135. See DeVore and Logsdon,Crescent City Schools, 84–9.

59 Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Atlanta: printed by thepublic printer 1870), 57.

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least nominal state support for their educational work among Blacks. By 1875the AMA had established three grammar schools and a normal school,Atlanta University, which offered high school instruction to ex-slaves andtheir children.60 In order to avoid the cost of building a separate public highschool for Blacks, the state legislature awarded Atlanta University’s trustees$8,000 to be used towards operations. This arrangement made the schoolsubject to annual review by a legislature-appointed Board of Visitors. Despiteits members’ expressed opposition to black education beyond the primarygrades on the grounds of Blacks’ intellectual inferiority, the Board’s first visitto the campus in 1871 during the university’s end of term examinationsproduced a positive report:

At every step of the examination we were impressed with the fallacy of thepopular idea, which is common with thousands of others a majority of theundersigned have heretofore entertained, that the members of the African raceare not capable of a high grade of intellectual culture. The rigid tests to whichthe classes … were subjected, unequivocally demonstrated that underjudicious training, and with persevering study there are many members ofthe African race who can attain a high grade of intellectual culture.61

The Atlanta Constitution concurred: ‘to see colored boys and girls… in Greek andLatin and demonstrating correctly problems inAlgebra andGeometry… appearsalmost wonderful.’62 Positive assessments of the university’s work over the nextthree years resulted in an 1874 vote tomake the award an annual appropriation.63

While the Board of Visitors continued favourable evaluations of the school,some journalists and politicians began voicing concerns in the wake of theappropriation vote. Unable to draw on claims of Blacks’ intellectualinferiority, lawmakers—including those who had previously commendedthe school’s high grade of academic work—now questioned the wisdom ofBlacks receiving higher grades of instruction.64 They also called attention towhat the Atlanta Constitution described as the ‘sickening social equality’ on thecampus being subsidized by white taxpayers.65 The 1886 election of John

60 See Joseph O. Jewell, Race, Social Reform and the Making of a Middle Class: The AmericanMissionary Association and Black Atlanta, 1870–1900 (Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield 2007).

61 Report of the Board of Visitors, 28 June 1871, 2: Robert W. Woodruff Library, AtlantaUniversity Center, Special Collections, Edmund Asa Ware Papers.

62 ‘Atlanta (Colored) University’, Atlanta Constitution, 29 June 1871, 1.63 ‘Atlanta University’, American Missionary, March 1875 51–2; ‘The General Assembly’,

Atlanta Constitution, 15 January 1875, 1.64 In 1873 Atlanta School Board President Joseph E. Brown, who had chaired the 1871

Board of Visitors and authored that year’s favourable report, now argued againsthaving white missionaries teaching Blacks, stating that the city’s schools shouldemploy only those teachers who would teach Blacks ‘the proper relations that exists[sic] between them and the white race’ (quoted in ‘The public schools’, AtlantaConstitution, 31 August 1873, 1).

65 ‘The Atlanta University’, Atlanta Constitution, 27 June 1874, 3.

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B. Gordon, a popular Confederate general and advocate of post-bellum blacksubordination,66 furthered public sentiments against the school. Theseculminated in the Board of Visitors’ 1887 report, which was quotedextensively in the Atlanta Constitution under the headline ‘WHITES AND BLACKS

BEING EDUCATED TOGETHER AT ATLANTA UNIVERSITY … The Board of VisitorsStumble on a Sensation’.

There are in attendance white students of various ages and both sexes, most ofthem having more or less connection with the members of the faculty andother officers, and one at least, entirely unconnected with the officials. We haveascertained by conference with the members of the faculty … that it is theavowed intention to receive all white children who apply for admission intothe school, and we interpret this … as a desire to break down the existingbarriers against the coeducation of the races. We desire to say that we regardthis practice not only intrinsically wrong, but as bearing, in this case, animproper use of the money appropriated by the state to this institution.67

When questioned by reporters, Atlanta University President HoraceBumstead and faculty member Thomas N. Chase both confirmed the presenceof ‘seven white pupils’ who had ‘been in attendance for some years’,identifying them as the children of missionary teachers. Bumstead notedthat, since their arrival in Atlanta, missionaries’ children, upon reachingschool age, had ‘received the benefit of the instruction’ at the school because itallowed their parents to ensure the quality of their children’s education.68

Despite both Bumstead’s and Chase’s claims that the state legislature wasaware of this arrangement, the ‘discovery’ of racial mixing now provided fuelfor a campaign against black higher education on the grounds that the schooland its officials had deliberately violated the 1870 law against racially mixedschools. However, the concept of racial mixing, as journalists, lawmakers andthe public employed it, contributed to narratives about the dangers to classcultures and social networks rather than to physical bodies or blood lines.

In response to the Board of Visitors’ findings, state representative W. C.Glenn introduced a bill into the lower house of the Georgia legislature thatintended to ‘regulate the manner of conducting educational institutions’ inthe state and ‘to protect the rights of colored and white people and to providepenalties for the violation of the provision of this act’. The so-called Glenn Billproposed to withdraw the annual appropriation and make teaching in orrunning an integrated school a misdemeanour, carrying with it a fine of$1,000, six months’ imprisonment or one year on a chain gang.69 Glenn told

66 Ralph Lowell Eckert, John Brown Gordon: Soldier, Southerner, American (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press 1989).

67 Report of the Board of Visitors, 7 July 1887, quoted in the ‘The message: Governor Gordonpays his respects to the legislature’, Atlanta Constitution, 8 July 1887, 1.

68 ‘No mixing of races’, Atlanta Constitution, 12 July 1887, 4.69 Ibid.

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the Atlanta Constitution that his intention was to uphold the ‘spirit of the lawagainst mixed education’ by protecting ‘the negro in the negro schools againstirruption of whites’, and ‘whites in white schools against the irruption ofnegroes’.70 He further elaborated on the effects of such education:

I need not dwell on the social chaos that would come from commingling theraces in schools. The fancy shudders at contemplation of the product of thetwo races thus thrown together at young and impressible ages in unrestrictedintercourse, each imbibing the worst ideas of the other. The miscegenation ofideas may be as fatal as physical miscegenation, and the intellectual hybridresulting from the co-education of the races as much a monstrosity as thephysical hybrid could be.71

Glenn’s statement identified the threat posed by mixed schools as one of thedevaluation of education as a resource. The successful reproduction ofracialized class identities depended on white children having exclusive accessto elite knowledge and maintaining racially homogeneous associations. Inmixed environments, he reasoned, black and white children failed to maintainracially pure cultural identities, diminishing their chances for reproducingsocial position. The bill passed the house on 2 August 1889, with only tworepresentatives opposing.Although the bill’s language and Glenn’s explanation of it described

integrated education as a detriment to both Blacks and Whites, it was thethreat to white children that was the source of concern. Atlanta Constitutioncolumnist Bill Arp echoed the concern for middle-class white children’s abilityto reproduce social position in mixed schools. Describing black children asbeing prone to ‘laziness’ and ‘theft’, he stated his opposition to mixed schoolsas a matter of protecting the white children’s character:

The dirty trampmay come tomyhouse and beg his breakfast and set on the backsteps and eat it, but I will not have him for a companion just because he is ahuman being. I will choosemy company and not intrudewhere I am notwantedmore than they. I will choose my children’s company as far as I can. Theircharacters are formed in early youth—in their school days and their schoolmateshave a great deal to dowith it. They shall not go to school with negro children.72

Here, Blacks’ presumed moral inferiority devalued the social networksembedded in schools, harming white children’s chances for reproducingclass position. Another supporter insisted that ‘none with practical experi-ences on the subject can defend mixed schools, excepting upon the broadground that all distinctions should be obliterated and whites degraded thatblacks may be elevated’.73

70 ‘Glenn’s bill’, Atlanta Constitution, 19 July 1887, 5.71 Ibid.72 ‘Arp’s philosophy’, Atlanta Constitution, 7 August 1887, 4.73 ‘The color line in education’, Atlanta Constitution, 11 August 1887, 4.

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The bill’s supporters paid little attention to the threat posed to racialidentities by physical miscegenation. Only one letter described the issue asone of white racial survival, stating that ‘to encourage social equality andmiscegenation’ as practised at Atlanta University would be to ensure ‘in twogenerations a race of mulattoes’.74 In defence of the bill in the Senate, a singlesupporter raised the issue, arguing that ‘race co-education’was ‘synonymous’with miscegenation: ‘The public sentiment which permits white girls to betaught with negro boys is not far removed from the sentiment which allowswhite girls to marry negro boys.’75

For lawmakers, the consequence of racially mixed student bodies in eliteeducational environments for class reproduction was a more pressing issue.When the bill reached the Senate for discussion, it was proposed that the thirdsection be replaced with a provision that ‘no person’ receiving an educationfrom an integrated school would be considered ‘competent to teach in anyschool, college, or educational institutions of the state’ that was supported bypublic funds.76 On 22 September, the bill with the substituted section passed.Calling it a victory for the ‘settled policy of the state’ governing racial mixing,lawmakers allayed the fears of middle-class Whites in urban areas whereother missionary-run black schools existed by criminalizing any form ofintegrated education and rendering any educational credentials awarded bysuch institutions to white students null and void in the eyes of the state.

Acknowledging Blacks’ educational progress at Atlanta University meantthat campaigns to limit black educational access could not rely solely on oldernotions of black intellectual inferiority. Journalists and politicians insteadstressed the notion of intellectual or cultural pollution in accounts of racialmixing, playing on the fears of those who relied on public schooling toreproduce middle-class position. While the threat of physical miscegenationwas routinely used to justify the exclusion of Blacks from the public spaces inwhich middle-class identities were constructed, intellectual or culturalmiscegenation meant that integrated schools, whether public or private,devalued middle-class culture and jeopardized the ability of white middle-class children to reproduce their privileged positions in a racialized classhierarchy.

74 H. O. Washington, ‘In favor of the Glenn Bill’, Atlanta Constitution, 13 August 1887, 4.75 ‘Against co-education’, Atlanta Constitution, 23 September 1887, 7.76 ‘Simmons’s successor’, Atlanta Constitution, 10 September 1887, 2; ‘The state’s property’,

Atlanta Constitution, 14 September 1887, 2. Supporters of the substitution argued thatcriminal penalties were unnecessary since withdrawing the appropriation made theschool a private institution and no longer subject to state supervision. Supporters of thebill’s original form claimed that the substitution punished children rather than theadults who were aware of prohibitions against racial mixing (‘Against co-education’).

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Race, class and the new miscegenation

Understandings of race and class as mutually supporting systems are not anew feature of racial discourse. Although claims about Blacks’ intellectualand moral inferiority remained an essential feature of late nineteenth-centuryracial ideology and justification for Blacks’ social, political and economicsubordination, the visibility of upwardly mobile Blacks in southern citieschallenged understandings of racial whiteness as a necessary condition formiddle-class identity and mobility.77 Blacks’ newfound access to eliteeducation as a resource in class mobility compromised its use by Whites ina strategy of middle-class reproduction that supported white racial domin-ance. The potential for cultural mixing in integrated classrooms compromisedboth the cultural knowledge and social networks that encouraged racializedclass endogamy by calling the purity of racial identities into question. In NewOrleans and Atlanta, Whites used miscegenation to discuss and explainBlacks’ use of secondary education as a resource in social mobility. These newracial narratives clarified the dangers posed by upwardly mobile racialoutsiders. By racially marking elite education and its use in class reproduc-tion, Whites reasserted links between racial identity and class identity in aperiod in which both the racial order and the economic order experiencedprofound social change. In subsequent years, middle-income and elite Whitesin other southern cities used the concept of miscegenation to make claimsabout the links between race, class and social reproduction in defence ofWhites’ exclusive use of elite educational resources. In 1874 Tennesseelawmakers argued that mandating mixed schools in Nashville or Memphis,as stipulated in the education provision of the proposed Congressional CivilRights Bill, would undermine the utility of their school systems because iteffectively excluded Whites from public schools in those cities.78 In 1883opponents of the appointment of two black trustees to Richmond, Virginia’sschool board argued that Blacks’ moral inferiority jeopardized the socialposition of any white schoolchildren ‘receiving instruction or advice’ fromthem,79 and that the ‘intermingling of the two races on school boards’ shouldbe forbidden ‘under the same course of reasoning forbidding the intermar-riage of whites and blacks’.80 In 1895, at the urging of State Superintendent ofEducation William N. Sheats, Florida lawmakers passed legislation similar toGeorgia’s Glenn Bill targeting the AMA’s Orange Park Academy, a normalschool near Jacksonville with high academic standards and a racially mixedstudent body. Sheats argued that the school’s colour-blind enrolment was aform of miscegenation that gave any white children (especially girls)

77 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Hale, Making Whiteness.78 ‘A mixed public school in Tennessee’, Nashville Republican Banner, 30 September 1874, 1.79 A. Fulkerson, ‘An open letter’, Richmond Daily Dispatch, 15 July 1883, 2; ‘Mixed schools’,

Richmond Daily Dispatch, 25 March 1882, 2.80 ‘A false issue’, Richmond Daily Dispatch, 30 June 1883, 1.

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attending the school ‘a social taint’ that rendered them ‘in the estimation ofdecent people … something akin to illegitimate’.81

Struggles over black access to elite education, skilled jobs and qualityhousing in the urban South foreshadowed the formation of a system of de juresegregation that rendered spaces where middle-class identities were con-structed essentially ‘white’ racial spaces.82 As populations of racial outsidersin urban centres increased nationally, justifications for constructing bound-aries in middle-class spaces utilized similar arguments about the specificthreats that the upwardly mobile members of these groups posed to theability of white, native-born children and youth to reproduce socialposition.83

I have argued that in struggles over black educational access in the post-bellum southern United States, Whites expanded the concept of miscegena-tion as a means of cementing links between whiteness and middle-classidentity. In the late nineteenth-century United States, the visibility ofupwardly mobile African Americans and other racial outsiders challengedlong-held understandings of the relationship between class and race.Maintaining the racial order required developing new cultural narrativesthat would ensure continued economic dominance over those minorities whomanaged to achieve even a modicum of social mobility. Narratives that justifyand reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities intergenerationallyare a foundational aspect of racial hierarchy. As such, scholarship examiningstruggles over schools and other sites devoted to social reproduction shouldgive attention to the emergence of discursive links between social categoriessuch as class and race because they offer important insights into howpoliticians, pundits and everyday social actors define and defend socialpositions in multiple and overlapping hierarchies.

Joseph O. Jewell is the author of Race, Social Reform and the Making of a MiddleClass: The American Missionary Association and Black Atlanta, 1870–1900(Rowman and Littlefield 2007). He currently serves as a board member forHumanities Texas. Email: jjewell@tamu.edu

81 William Sheats, ‘Drawing the color line’, Bradford County Telegraph, 13 September 1895,3; ‘Orange Park and the National Council’, American Missionary, November 1895, 346–7;Joe M. Richardson, ‘“The nest of vile fanatics”: William N. Sheats and the Orange ParkSchool’, Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 4, 1986, 393–406.

82 Hale, Making Whiteness; Welke, ‘When all the women were white, and all the Blackswere men’; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

83 Beisel, Imperiled Innocents; Donovan, White Slave Crusades.

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