Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association and African Americans, 1890 to the Civil Rights Movement

Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association and African Americans, 1890 to the Civil Rights Movement. By Joe M. Richardson and Maxine D. Jones. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. xxii, 287 pp. $49.50, isbn 978-0-8173-1657-0.)

Both ]oe M. Richardson and Maxine D. Jones have contributed substantially to the literature on African American education, with a study of the American Missionary Association (ama) in the Civil War era and an analysis of the development of black colleges. In Education for Liberation, they examine the amas work from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the modern civil rights era.

Organized in 1846 as an abolition society, the ama was officially nonsectarian but was closely linked to the Congregational Church. During Reconstruction it sent hundreds of missionaries and teachers southward to aid freedpeople. ama members saw education as...