Uplift in Schools and the Church: Abolitionist Approaches to Free Black Education in Early National Philadelphia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution provides a case study of how Richard Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church strove to become an autonomous provider of education to the free black community in the late 1790s and early 1800s as a way to avoid the direct influence of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and provide an education tailored to the needs of Philadelphia’s black population. By taking education into their own hands, free blacks sought to fight inequalities by dissociating themselves from the system of inequalities represented and supported by the PAS. Though members of the PAS and leaders of the free black community shared the goal of raising the socioeconomic status of blacks and reducing poverty through education, the education provided by the AME Church aimed to provide a practical, moral education tailored to the needs of a black community struggling to obtain work in competition with recent immigrant groups, and not one – such as offered by the PAS – which provided arbitrary measures of success in a white community which disregarded black educational achievements. This case study can be placed into the broader context of blacks’ ambitions of social equality with whites despite the structures of inequality – specifically regarding the lack of access to affordable, practical education – in the early republic in Philadelphia designed to keep them in a subjugated social position.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".