Historians of education have long been interested in determining who attended school in the nineteenth-century United States. In a period of rapidly increasing expenditures on education, not all residents shared equally in the benefits. Knowing who attended school is a crucial first step toward an assessment of the opportunities education afforded to nineteenth-century Americans, as well as measurement of the returns the new investment produced for the American economy as a whole.

In an earlier study, an examination of the educational content of the African American monthly press between 1900 and 1930, I was surprised to find meager commentary on issues related to black teachers or on the conditions and practice of teaching in African American schools. For example, the periodicals contained only two full-length articles, both published before 1908, on the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), the most prestigious African American educational organization of the period and aspirant to the title of black NEA. Likewise, the journals virtually ignored the social roles of teachers, rarely highlighting them as role models or lauding their community contributions. Why these omissions occurred is a matter of conjecture, though I speculated in the earlier work that the reasons were associated with the journals' middle-class orientation, which celebrated higher educational achievements by the race more than dwelling upon the deplorable conditions enveloping black common schooling during this troubled time. Given this framework, issues concerning African American teachers were neglected to the extent that a variety of concerns involving black common schooling were glossed over as well.