The Reconstruction students and alumni of USC

For the final project, I'm delighted to be working with Sam and Lelia on a project initiated by Dr. Tom Brown of the history department to understand the life trajectories of the USC students from 1873-1877,  the Reconstruction years during which African American students first attended the school.  Dr. Kennedy has been advising Dr. Brown on how spatial analysis could enhance this project, and undergraduates in Dr. Brown's undergraduate history course have been undertaking most of the data wrangling.  

Sources and datasets

The primary "dataset," which is itself a compilation of a variety of data from many sources, has been a blog created by an emeritus math professor who has been meticulously culling data on these students to publish short biographies of them on his blog, Blind Man with a Math Degree.

The blog has published some 80 biographies of undergraduates during these years (click on the tab RadicalStudent to see them), drawing upon multiple data sources like censuses, USC school records, newspapers, city directors, and secondary data like individuals' biographies to create short snapshots of each of these student's lives.  Taken together, these biographies cover--to my understanding--nearly half of the students who attended USC during this time period.  

In addition to these biographies on the blog, Dr. Brown has also compiled a list of 36 law students (some of whom were undergraduate students who continued their studies) from two additional sources: a series of profiles of the law students compiled by an emeritus professor of the law school, Lewis Burke, as well as Wikipedia.  To organize this data into something more manipulable, Dr. Wright created a set of Google Forms, organized on a basic website, through which the undergraduate students could share the work of data entry, turning the biographies into discrete life events with dates and locations insofar as possible.  All in all, this is an impressive, if niche, dataset that should shed light upon the life trajectories of USC students who attended the university during Reconstruction.

The dataset largely reflects the experiences of Black American in the latter half of the 19th century; only a handful of white students stayed enrolled at the university once the doors had been opened to African Americans in 1873.  From the biographies that I have reviewed myself, the students' post-USC experiences seem rather heterogeneous--ranging from those alumni who returned to their family farms or to teach at their own primary schools to those who went on to have illustrious careers in law, medicine, politics, and business.  In a few amazing examples, the first African American student to enroll, Henry Hayne, was actually serving as the SC secretary of state when he enrolled in 1873, while Francis Cardozo (Hayne's predecessor as secretary of state) enrolled in the law school in 1874 while also serving as the SC state treasurer!  Another alumnus went on to become a Supreme Court justice in the young country of Liberia in West Africa, which had been founded by American freedmen a few decades before.

Research questions and approaches

One of the upsides of the digitization of these data will be our ability to detect patterns, hopefully even in a relatively small dataset.  Dr. Brown is interested in exploring the possibility that the end of Reconstruction in 1877 pushed many alumni who could have contributed to the state's ongoing development into more welcoming places out-of-state; he is also keen to see the connection between USC's alumni from this period and the development of historically Black colleges and universities.  I too am curious to explore those questions and would add some more basic analyses as a starting point:

  • Were there spatial patterns in the geographic trajectories of these alumni after 1877?  If so, what cities or states appear frequently as places where they went to live and work?
  • How many stayed in South Carolina after 1877, and how many died in SC?
  • If there are geographic patterns that emerge in the data, what other factors in these life stories will overlap with them?  For example, will the lawyers have certain cities or states that they move to in a cluster?  Or the doctors?  Put another way, will the spatial analysis reveal any potential professional networks that were emerging?
  • What connection will the few white students who remained at the university have to the overwhelmingly African American student body at this time?  Will there be any evidence that the white and Black alumni remained professionally or socially connected to each other?

To see which of these questions we can answer using the spatial analysis, I am hoping to create a series of maps that could depict, for example:

  • Maps that help visualize where all the alumni with a known location were living in a series of timepoints after 1877--perhaps where they were in 1880, 1890, and 1900, or something along those lines.  Will we gradually see fewer and fewer of these alumni in South Carolina over time, as Dr. Brown suspects?  Cross-sectional maps will help us to get a general sense of that movement.
  • Maps that organize the alumni by profession to determine if there are patterns that emerge among the trajectories followed by lawyers, doctors, public servants, ministers, and the like; and
  • [to get at Dr. Brown's research question of note] Maps that tell us which alumni were connected at any point in time to various historically Black colleges and universities.

Expected results

In addition to the maps, I will learn how to use StoryMaps, an ArcGIS tool that helps to create attractive, scrolling visualizations, to pull these stories into a narrative.  Simultaneously, Lelia has indicated interest in following the trajectories of a select number of alumni over time, a process that should help bring individual stories to life and should illustrate some of the patterns that emerge through the mapping processes.  It really won't be until the maps help us to understand the patterns that various narrative stories can emerge, but I am excited to see what "stories" emerge for us to try and tell the world through this spatial analysis process.

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