Southern Cities, Southern Schools Public Education in the Urban South

Subjects:

• Education » Comparative Education

Reviews:

• Plank and Ginsberg have edited this collection of 12 essays on public education in the urban South. The essays are organized into three parts; the origins of the public school systems, the causes and consequences of southern school reform, and the provision of 'separate but equal' educational facilities for blacks. An introduction sets the stage for the three parts and a bibliographic essay concludes the work. The case studies are limited geographically to the cities of the deep South--Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, Mobile, New Orleans, and Savannah--and temporally (with one exception) from the end of the Civil War to the late 1930s. Since there is little in the literature on this subject, the book fills a void in the study of the history of urban public education in the post-bellum, pre-Sun Belt South. This work can provide new insights into the history of public school systems. . . .
  —Choice

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Why Study the South?
• The Origins of Urban Public School Systems
• Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South
• Public Education in the New South: A School System for Atlanta, 1868-1879
• The Origins of Urban Schools in Comparative Perspective
• The Politics of Southern School Reforms
• The Politics of Memphis School Reform, 1883-1927
• Boss Behrman Reforms the Schools: The 1912 New Orleans School Reform
• Educational Reform and Organizational Change: Atlanta in the Progressive Era
• Progressive School Reform in Comparative Perspective
• Issues in Black School Politics
• Black School Politics in Atlanta, Georgia, 1869-1943
• The Politics of Black Education in Memphis, Tennessee, 1868-1881
• Two Worlds of Race? Urban Blacks and the Public Schools, North and South, 1865-1940
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index