Landscapes of Freedom: Black Educational Architects and the Historical Geographies of African American School Grounds

Abstract

My study recovers the little-known history of African American school builders through the Jim Crow era, a group of professional architects and school administrators who modeled distinct placemaking practices that challenged antiblack social arrangements during slavery and its afterlives. Building on and complicating histories of racial capitalism and black resistance, I argue that black architects and builders helped reimagine African Americans’ relationship to the landscape and education by constructing schools and promoting industrial education in service of the unfinished work of Emancipation. In my study, I employ the language of “architect” to signal the professional architect and builder who learned industrial trades and oversaw the design and construction of schools; and I also use the term to refer to black school administrators who leveraged industrial education to physically build schools and increase property ownership in African American communities. Drawing upon autobiographical sources, the records of black associations, magazines and newspapers, amongst other archival records, Landscapes of Freedom reveals a tradition of resistance to antiblack-racism that was rooted in the built environment of schooling and was fundamentally connected to teaching and learning. Encompassing a range of actors, including career architects, building contractors, artisans, principals, teachers, students, and their families, I document the ideas these figures brought to the physical and ideological construction of black schools across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In doing so, I account for how a people, once considered property themselves, refashioned their relationship to land and property ownership through their investments in the physical construction of their schools as a collective endeavor.