Emphatically Our Battle: A Content Analysis of the African Free School of New York City Curriculum, 1787-1840

The African Free School of New York City, established in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society, aimed at providing an education of the children of freedmen and former enslaved people. Scholarship on the role of slavery, emancipation, and racial discrimination in the post-Revolutionary and antebellum periods in the North has grown over the years. However, few studies exist that specifically examine the curriculum of the African Free School, and how the Black community's involvement in the schools impacted the curriculum taught to the students. We conducted a content analysis of the curricular documents of the African Free School in order to ascertain whether these materials from over two centuries ago shows evidence of emancipatory curriculum that was, and can still be used, as pedagogical tools to challenge racial discrimination, and decolonize the curriculum today. Keywords: Emancipatory Curriculum, Content Analysis, African American History, Curriculum Studies, African Free School, Antebellum Studies
Introduction The battle against caste and Slavery is emphatically our Battle; no one else can fight it for us, and with God's help we must fight it ourselves. --James McCune [...]