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.