African American racial uplift—that is, a gendered racial mutual history of self-help—has existed as a tradition since the early part of the nineteenth century. Yet African American educational history and readings of the built environment have too often heralded the achievements of Black men such as Booker T. Washington or John Hope Franklin at the expense of Black women's involvement in racial uplift and, more specifically, in the creation of industrial and normal schools throughout the South in the nadir of Jim Crow. Incorporating research into African American community and culture, An Architecture of Education: Black Women Design the New South essays the critical influence African American women of the late nineteenth century had on the built environment in the South (figure 1), and who, as such, inscribed a social and political ideology of race uplift onto the very bricks of the industrial and normal schools they worked to found in “the Age of Washington and Du Bois” some thirty years after the Civil War. Two notable women, Elizabeth Evelyn Wright (figure 2) and Jennie Dean (figure 3) founded, respectively, Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina, established in 1897 (figure 4), and the Manassas Industrial School, Manassas, Virginia, established in 1893 (figure 5). Wright (born in 1872 and died in 1906) and Dean (born a slave in 1848 and died in 1913), whose biographies and actions illuminate and are central to An Architecture of Education, both regarded education not only as a remedy for the trauma of years of chattel slavery but also as a means to enlarge the limited role of women in the often male-dominated process of Black community building.

Race Uplift and the Built Environment

An Architecture of Education expands our understanding of this period in African American women's history by arguing that the intellectual project of race uplift as a social movement included the built environment as a primary vehicle for race-based advancement. As historians of the South—from post-Reconstruction through the beginning of the Progressive era—have yet to study the work of African American women and the built environment in an extended monograph, this book begins to fill this critical gap.