Creating Citizen—Subjects: Reconstruction and the Political Invention of Black Sovereignty

This paper reframes the establishment of public education in the South by Black politicians after the Civil War as a successful attempt to create new citizen-subjects in the United States. Black politicians established the right to education for Black citizens and the mechanism for its institutional and fiscal sustainability. This created a new class of citizens who were explicitly rights bearers and also had claims on resources from the state in a way that defied antebellum American norms of racialized citizenship. Moreover, once established, this right was not abolished. The expansion of the citizen-subject was further institutionalized and the twentieth century expansion of civil rights was predicted on Reconstruction’s expansion of the citizen-subject.