John Alvord: White Influence In Higher Education

John Alvord, who despite being avid anti-slavery, proclaimed that whilst he valued the education of the freed people, he believed black people were naturally inferior to whites regarding intellectual and reasoning skills. Doubts over the natural ability of black people’s brains to process information continued even when young people proved they were able to cope with lessons on the same level as their white peers. August Stickier noted that whilst black children could retain basics such as the alphabet he unfairly questioned whether black children would progress parallel to whites within higher education. These powerful, white men from the North were extremely influential in precluding black access to higher education and maintaining the

Brosnan agrees with Butchart and Anderson that racism existed within the texts but argues the impact was widely felt as although not every Southern school used freedmen’s textbooks, these were read by hundreds of thousands of black learners of all ages between 1865 and 1866, with 648,000 copies of “The Freedman” being distributed by the ATS.

Also, only one educational tool - ‘The Freedmen’s Torchlight’ - was written for and by black people, this emphasises the domineering position of white influence.

Thus, we cannot underestimate the negative impact of the content of the discussed texts, Brosnan feels these were inherently racist and did not allow for upward mobility but moulded a ‘diligent, disciplined and subservient workforce that respected the antebellum status quo.’ Blatant racism was common place, with often no attempt to make its existence subtle: examination of the 1860 edition of ‘A system of Modern Geography’ which would have been used for several years portrays such visions, dividing mankind into five racial categories with ‘European or Caucasian’ being outlined as the most noble