Moral reform movements targeting racial minorities have long been central in negotiating the relationship between race and class in the United States, particularly in periods of large scale social change. Over a century ago, when the abolition of racial slavery, Southern Reconstruction, industrialization, and urban migration presented challenges to both race and class hierarchies in the South, postbellum missionary reform organizations like the American Missionary Association crusaded to establish schools, colleges, and churches for Blacks in Southern cities like Atlanta that would aggressively erode cultural differences among former slaves and assimilate them into a civic order defined by Anglo-Protestant culture. While the AMA's missionary institutions in Atlanta sought to shift racial dynamics between Blacks and Whites, they also fueled struggles over the social and cultural boundaries of middle class belonging in a region beset by social change. Drawing upon late nineteenth century accounts of AMA missionary activity in Atlanta, Black attempts to define and maintain a middle class identity, and Atlanta Whites' concerns about Black attempts at upward mobility, the author argue that the rhetoric about the implications of increased minority access to middle class resources like education and cultural knowledge speaks to links between anxieties about class position and racial status in societies stratified by both class and race.

Reparation and Reconciliation is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Formed in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists, the American Missionary Association united a network of colleges open to all, designed especially to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. The AMA and its affiliates envisioned integrated campuses as a training ground to produce a new leadership class for a racially integrated democracy. Case studies at three colleges--Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University--reveal the strategies administrators used and the challenges they faced as higher education quickly developed as a competitive social field. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations--including charities and foundations--and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.

"Soldiers of Light and Love" is an acclaimed study of the reform-minded northerners who taught freed slaves in the war-torn Reconstruction South. Jacqueline Jones's book, first published in 1980, focuses on the nearly three hundred women who served in Georgia in the chaotic decade following the Civil War. Commissioned by the American Missionary Association and other freedmen's aid societies, these middle-class New Englanders saw themselves as the postbellum, evangelical heirs of the abolitionist cause. Specific in compass, but wide-ranging in significance, "Soldiers of Light and Love" illuminates the complexity of class, race, and gender issues in early Victorian America.

This book explores the multiple dimensions of the antebellum Kansas tempest as a microcosm of the larger history of sectional conflict and reconciliation. It shows, through an examination of the antislavery ends and means of the American Missionary Association, the American Home Missionary Society, and the New England Emigrant Aid Company, that the northeastern free-state contingent in Kansas represented a wide spectrum of opinion on black bondage, ranging from racially egalitarian Christian abolitionist absolutism on the one hand to free labor pragmatism on the other. Nevertheless, Yankee confrontations with the allegedly parallel unprogressive forces of "slavery, rum, and Romanism" in the territory evoked compelling public images of civilization and savagery, freedom and dependence that broadened the appeal of antislavery politics in the free North on the eve of the Civil War. At the same time, For God and Mammon analyzes the ideology and dynamics of proslavery activism in Kansas, demonstrating how clashing conceptions of republicanism and capitalism helped frame the terms of debate over slavery. Finally, the book argues that the sharp polarities of slavery discourse in Kansas obscured a more ambiguous reality. Southerners resorted to fraudulent voting and appealed to anti-abolitionism, nativism, and racism not only to battle Northern elements but to score points over their proslavery whiggish rivals as well. Schisms within a competitive, business-minded pro-Southern elite contained the seeds of Mammon's triumph over political ideology in some proslavery circles and facilitated a sectional truce at the African American's expense even before the slavery question had faded from thepolitical horizon of the territory.