Reconstruction Era Resources at Wilson Special Collections Library: African Americans

The Penn School on Saint Helena Island, S.C., was founded during the Civil War by northern philanthropists and missionaries for former plantation slaves in an area occupied by the United States Army. Over the years, with continuing philanthropic support, it served as school, health agency, and cooperative society for rural African Americans of the Sea Islands. The first principals were Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, followed around 1908 by Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House, and in 1944 by Howard Kester and Alice Kester. The school became Penn Community Services in 1950, with Courtney Siceloff as the first director, and the Penn Center, Inc. in the 1980s.

The original deposits are papers, mostly 1900-1970, mainly from the Penn School, and primarily correspondence of the directors and of the trustees, treasurers, and publicity workers located elsewhere. Topics include African American education, Reconstruction, political and social change in South Carolina, agricultural extension work, public health issues, damage from hurricanes, World War I, the boll weevil and the cotton industry, the effects of the Great Depression on the school and the local population, changes in the school leading to a greater emphasis on social action in the outer world, and the end of the school and the turn to community service. Volumes include diaries, extracts from letters, recollections, minutes of the board of trustees, ledgers, cashbooks, inventories, financial records, registers of students and teachers, and minutes of various clubs and societies. Printed materials consists of newspapers clippings, pamphlets, promotional literature, school materials, administrative circulars, and annual reports. There are also about 3,000 photographs in the collection, dating from the 1860s to 1962 (bulk 1905-1944), documenting school activities, Island scenes and Islanders, classes and teachers, baptisms, agricultural activities, parades, fairs, and special events at the Penn School. The Addition of November 2012 includes papers, volumes, printed materials, photographs, audio recordings, and film that are similar in scope and content to the original deposit.

A leading proponent of racial equality in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, Albion W. Tourgée (1838--1905) served as the most articulate spokesman of the radical wing of the Republican party, and he continued to advocate for its egalitarian ideals long after Reconstruction ended. Undaunted Radical presents Tourgée's most significant letters, speeches, and essays from the commencement of Radical Reconstruction through the bleak days of the era of Jim Crow. An Ohioan by birth, Tourgée served in the Union army and afterwards moved to North Carolina, where he helped draft the 1868 state constitution. Within that and other documents he proposed free public education, the abolition of whipping posts, the end of property qualifications for jury duty and office holding, and the initiation of judicial reform and uniform taxation. Tourgée also served as a Republican-installed superior court judge, a position that brought him into increasing conflict with the Ku Klux Klan. In 1879, he published A Fool's Errand, a bestselling novel based on his Reconstruction experiences. Although now often overlooked, Tourgée in his lifetime offered a prominent voice of reason amid the segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, racial propaganda, and mythologies about African Americans that haunted Reconstruction-era society and Gilded Age politics. These thirty-four documents elaborate the reformer's opinions on the Reconstruction Amendments, his generation's racial and economic theories, the cultural politics of North-South reconciliation, the ethics of corporate capitalism, the Social Gospel movement, and the philosophical underpinnings of American democratic citizenship. Mark Elliott and John David Smith, among the foremost authorities on Tourgée, have brought these writings, including the previously unpublished oral arguments Tourgée delivered before the U.S. Supreme Court as Homer Plessy's lead attorney in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), together in one volume. The book also includes an introductory overview of Tourgée's life and an exhaustive bibliography of Tourgée's writings and related works, providing an essential collection for anyone studying Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement.

Letter to Governor Henry Simpson of South Carolina from Trescot, also of South Carolina, concerning his pardon, amendments to the Constitution, and suffrage for blacks.