Education for citizenship has pervaded American philosophies of schooling since the proposals of Thomas Jefferson and the antebellum movement for common schools. After the Civil War, Hilary Green argues in Educational Reconstruction, African Americans seized on the conviction that “[e]ducation and literacy symbolized full citizenship in a literate society” (6). Between 1865 and 1890, blacks in Richmond, VA and Mobile, AL worked with white allies to create enduring school systems and to train leaders of the struggle for racial justice.

Historians often divide the history of southern blacks’ education at the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1870. This periodization, Green observes, induces us to view the years thereafter as the start of the Jim Crow era. She instead looks at the quarter-century after the war as a period when black urban activists worked profitably first with the bureau and northern missionaries and then with government officials. Drawing on newspapers and periodicals, manuscript collections, and government and missionary society records, she argues cogently that they turned the Freedmen's Schools into resilient public schools.

Green begins with freedpeople's collaboration with the Freedmen's Bureau and missionaries between 1865 and 1870. In Richmond they opened twenty-six schools in 1865–66. Someone wrote to a Mobile newspaper in 1866 that blacks would fight “a war of races” (43) before they would give up their schools. Both cities became educational models for their states. Though conflicts arose among the partners, including missionaries’ resistance to the employment of black teachers, local white opposition to blacks’ education strengthened the alliance.

By the time the bureau left, new constitutions had obligated states to educate children of all races. Finding some allies in local and state governments, blacks worked diligently in the 1870s to create quality public schools. Efforts to win seats on school boards and teaching positions for African Americans mostly failed, but educational access did grow. Funding, though insufficient in all schools and more diluted in those for blacks because of their higher attendance rates, was not intentionally distributed in racially discriminatory ways. Surprisingly, the return of Virginia's government to ex-Confederate Democrats – the state's “Redemption” – saw “the expansion rather than the demise of the African American schoolhouse” (108). During the 1880s, reformers’ success in Richmond varied according to partisan politics, as the Redeemers and the more sympathetic Readjusters traded control of the state. In Mobile, blacks continued to win some improvements for schools but mainly struggled to preserve what they had.

Although few African Americans taught in urban public schools, activists established normal schools in both cities: Richmond Colored Normal in 1867 and Mobile's Emerson Normal in 1873. These created a corps of black teachers – hired chiefly in rural districts until the 1880s – and “the necessary leadership to carry African Americans out of the darkness” (89). As participants in local literary societies and as role models for black youths, they promoted racial campaigns ranging from expanded professional opportunities to lynching opposition.

The true era of Jim Crow, Green explains in an epilogue, began in 1890 with the ascendancy of Booker T. Washington and Congress's rejection of the Blair education bill for federal school funding. Fear of Green's “more militant” (180) activists prompted southern whites to support Washington's more conservative educational plan. Yet urban blacks had established tax-supported schools that would survive, though separate and unequal, until the civil rights movement. That success, essential to understanding nineteenth- and twentieth-century educational history, is the key lesson of this book.

Green might have given more attention to gender, particularly regarding the normal schools. Did anyone object to their – typical but not necessarily uncontroversial – coeducational classes? She also might have reflected more on how much Richmond's and Mobile's stories tell us about the urban South broadly. But these are minor shortcomings. This well-researched and clearly narrated account of two major cities adds an important dimension to rural-focussed works on education and citizenship by James D. Anderson, Christopher M. Span, and others.

Educational Reconstruction sheds welcome light on several other key issues in American education. The chapters on black normal schools build on Christine A. Ogren's research on teacher training while chipping away at the frustrating dearth of research on early African American higher education. Green provides insight into the development of blacks’ political strategies and of a southern black middle class. In addressing the Blair bill at the local and national levels, she bridges the historiography of black schools with the high political histories of education by Charles W. Calhoun and Williamjames Hull Hoffer. Finally, Green's discussion of Congress's failure to create a “uniform, national, public school system” (187) expands the book's relevance by helping to explain why, even today, the United States maintains highly decentralized systems of education.