At the close of the Civil War, the United States of America faced a juncture centered on the idea of fully including freedmen into American society. Newly elected government officials initially undertook this task during post-Civil War Reconstruction by passing legislation that temporarily enforced social equality in areas of the nation that were previously closed to a large segment of its citizenry. Along with the passage of this local legislation, this group created three new constitutional amendments to ensure that the newly freed population would benefit from all of the rights and privileges that this document guaranteed its citizens. Nonetheless, government officials understood that the assignment of creating a more equal society should not be left in the hands of politicians alone. Inasmuch, mutual aid organizations answered the call to help eliminate the caste system in the United States.

Christi M. Smith's Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education, offers an insightful analysis of the role that the American Missionary Association played in creating a more just, equal society via offering integrated higher educational opportunities for groups of people who previously did not have access. Moreover, Smith offers an intriguing argument, in which she explains that in the midst of rising competition in higher education during the early twentieth century, gains made toward dismantling the racial and social caste system in the United States were thwarted due to the lack of a united message from universities throughout the nation.

Smith's seven chapters work systematically to reveal the evolution of the rise and fall of integrated higher education in the United States. From “A Racial Reckoning on Campus,” to “The ‘Perils’ of Gender Coeducation,” the author supports her argument that as early as 1867, coupled with the support of Radical Republicans, benevolent societies such as the American Missionary Association created integrated institutions of higher education in the South as a larger part of the nation's anti-caste movement. Moreover, the author claims that these colleges were created with the intent of developing a new class of leaders, teachers, and ministers who would go among the people to spread new ideas of an anti-caste society.

Consequentially, the author argues that as the nation emerged from post-Civil War Reconstruction, the federal government focus shifted from the south to a westward expansion. Notwithstanding this westward shift, there was a new emphasis on creating elite high educational institutions in the nation that placed many private colleges in peril as they began to have to compete against the not-so-hidden agenda of segregation by funding agencies that supported research in higher education. Inasmuch, with this loss of federal support and a new emphasis being placed on statues and competition, the issue of appropriate financing these institutions faced became a key factor in their shift from the anti-caste movement to achieving national and international notability.

Well-researched and written, Smith supports her argument with an exhaustive and extensive use of both primary and secondary sources. The author made use of documents from the American Missionary Association (AMA) to the personal correspondence of presidents of Berea College to glean an insight into the true purpose of their institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although many of the sources that the author used are readily available and have been previously utilized by a number of historians/scholars who focus on black higher education in the past, Smith delves deeper into these collections to strengthen her argument that the early aim of the AMA was not only to offer education to the freedmen, but to alleviate the caste system in America.

Although some of the claims that the Smith makes in relation to future predictions are somewhat problematic, the overall structure, research, and argument of this manuscript are solid. For scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this work should become a part of your personal library, as this author has offered a fresh new interpretation of the role that colleges and universities played in the anti-caste movement at the dawn of the Jim Crow era.