The last two decades have seen a sustained interest among educational historians in examining the role of northern white missionary reformers in southern black communities—Edmund Drago's Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston's Avery Normal Institute (Athens: University of Georgia, 1990); Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr.'s Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education (Columbia: University of Missouri 1999); and Christopher M. Span's From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009). Historian Joe M. Richardson (Florida State University, Jacksonville) is best known for documenting the philanthropic efforts of the American Missionary Association (AMA), a nineteenth-century missionary society loosely associated with the Congregational Church chiefly known for its educational and religious efforts among African Americans in the post-slavery South. Richardson's earlier work Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1986) carefully documented the challenges faced by the AMA's majority white, northern-born, Anglo-Protestant, middle class missionary workers in their efforts to reform southern black communities through education and religion. In this latest examination of the AMA's efforts at social reform, co-authors Richardson and Maxine D. Jones attempt to move us a step further in our understanding of the postbellum missionary reform movement and its impact on black communities and American racial attitudes by focusing on the twentieth century.

The AMA's chief work of establishing common schools, normal schools, colleges, and Congregational missions in rural and urban southern black communities involved two interrelated goals—the abolition of race prejudice and expansion of economic and social opportunities for blacks; and assimilation of blacks into Anglo-Protestant culture. As Richardson and others have documented, the association's missionaries frequently found themselves at odds with both a resurgent white elite and with communities of blacks who demonstrated a strong tendency toward independence and self-determination. However, in this work Richardson and Jones tell a different part of this story, moving us beyond the postbellum period, and focusing on the scope and content of the AMA's work between 1890 and the onset of the modern civil rights movement.

The authors' central argument is that beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century both the AMA's mission and its relationship with black communities evolved in response to shifting racial dynamics. In order combat the deepening of institutional racism at the dawn of the twentieth century, the association folded its already successful educational missions into a new mission stressing “practical” education and the development of black community infrastructure. In making this argument, Richardson and Jones also consider the role of missionary institutions as sites where dynamics and meanings of race, gender, and class were often contested and rearticulated. While some of the subject matter treated here is not entirely new to students of southern history, religious history, educational history, or African American history, the authors break new ground in mapping the AMA's evolving educational project as it shifted from one of cultural transformation to formal political socialization and community development as paths to full and equal black citizenship.

The archival data pertaining to the schools, colleges, and various community institutions organized by the AMA between 1890 and 1950 are rich and detailed, lending strong support to the book's core thesis. The authors convincingly argue that the AMA's new guiding philosophy of “functional education,” chiefly articulated through the work of agents like Frederick L. Brownlee, founder of the Race Relations Department, sought to not so much transform as “further develop” missionary schools from outposts in “alien and hostile territories” into anchors for local cooperatives and community centers that facilitated black efforts to combat segregation. In making this point Richardson and Jones address one of the central critiques of postbellum abolitionist reform—that the effectiveness of agencies like the AMA was limited in large part by their paternalism toward black communities. The authors make it clear that a long tradition of white middle-class governance and leadership in the organization meant while black autonomy and self-determination were officially encouraged, they were in fact not always welcome. For many of the association's leaders, the success of their evolving mission demanded an examination of lingering racial prejudices among its missionary agents and workers. They contend that under this philosophy AMA mission schools encouraged greater black autonomy—providing opportunities for leadership through institutional governance; economic mobility through employment as teachers, contractors, and maintenance workers; and the exercise of citizenship rights through a community-based approach to decision-making.

An equally important contribution of the work is the authors' attention to the impact of evolving complexities of class, gender, and race among African Americans on the AMA's efforts at reform. Through examining debates surrounding the effects of the association's preference for black women as teachers, the impact of increased leadership opportunities for blacks in mission schools on the growth of the black middle class, the development of a twentieth-century racial consciousness among students and the social influence of these institutions on both black and white communities in the South, Richardson and Jones begin to offer deeper insight into some of internal dynamics that shaped black interactions with and understandings of the AMA.

This last point could have used more elaboration, particularly in light of the number of historical studies that explicitly look at class, gender, and racial attitudes within black communities. While the authors pull off the challenge of documenting the work of the AMA and its reform agenda in a shifting social and political context, one cannot help but be reminded that it is the interaction between external agencies like the AMA and the communities they sought to reform that makes the story of postbellum missionary reform so intriguing. Still, the work is strong, well researched, and provides a definitive statement about the importance of the AMA well into the civil rights era. Any questions left unanswered by Richardson and Jones about the AMA are best viewed as an agenda for further research by scholars of religious, educational, and African American community history.