African American Education and Identity in Antebellum New York City

FAIN: FA-52915-07

Anna Mae Duane
University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)

I analyze the performances put on by students during the 1820's at the New York African Free School (hereafter NYAFS). My study of the NYAFS, established in 1787, when slavery was integral to New York's culture and economy, and absorbed into the public school system nearly a decade after New York's 1827 manumission law went into effect, seeks to understand how young African Americans imagined their own role as freedpeople and how those roles were mediated by the complex mix of benevolence and condescension that underwrote their education.

Media Coverage

PBS History Detectives (Media Coverage)
Publication: Season 7, Episode 9
Date: 1/13/2012
URL: http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigation/george-washington-miniature/

Associated Products

Epilogue (Book Section)
Title: Epilogue
Author: Anna Mae Duane
Abstract: My work on the New York Free School was featured in the epilogue of my book _Suffering Childhood in Early America_ (UGeorgia) 2010. The book has received positive reviews in two flaghsip journals, _American Literature_ and _The Journal of American History_.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/suffering_childhood/
Book Title: Suffering Childhood in Early America Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim
ISBN: 0820340588

“Like a Motherless Child”: Racial Education at the New York African Free School and in My Bondage and My Freedom (Article)
Title: “Like a Motherless Child”: Racial Education at the New York African Free School and in My Bondage and My Freedom
Author: Anna Mae Duane
Abstract: This article, along with the epilogue of my book, Suffering Childhood, was researched and written with the support of a 6-month NEH Faculty grant. Article abstract: In this essay, Duane argues that reading two disparate texts together—the largely unknown school records chronicling the work of antebellum black children and a text by the most prominent African American author in the canon—allows a powerful model to emerge for reading the mediated voices of children, slaves, and other marginalized people. Duane recovers and analyzes the records of the New York African Free School in the 1810s and 1820s, an archive that features the work of the first generation of black children to inherit freedom in New York City. She argues that the scripted performances of the NYAFS students offer insight into a set of overlapping cultural metaphors that structured black-white relations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The interaction between black students and white teachers anticipates the treatment that many early black abolitionists received from white abolitionists—of which the famous clash between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison is the most prominent example. By untangling the assumptions that underlie these performances, Duane suggests that we can better understand and analyze other interactions scripted by the overarching and intertwined beliefs that African Americans were children, and that children's subjectivities could be shaped according to the will of their educators.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/82/3/461.abstract
Primary URL Description: This is the link to the journal site. The article can be downloaded from here.

Speaker and Facilitator, Media Reception for Hope is the First Great Blessing: Leaves from the New York African Free School Presentation Book, New-York Historical Society, February, 2008 (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Speaker and Facilitator, Media Reception for Hope is the First Great Blessing: Leaves from the New York African Free School Presentation Book, New-York Historical Society, February, 2008
Abstract: This event invited New York high school students to spend the afternoon learning about the New York African Free School. I crafted a lesson plan for the material and engaged the students in lively discussion. The expertise I gained researching the school during my NEH faculty grant has led to this collaboration with the New-York Historical Society.
Author: Anna Mae Duane and Thomas Thurston
Date: 2/8/2008
Location: New-York Historical Society
Primary URL: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1436626441.html

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