The race women of An Architecture of Education—the founders of two industrial and normal schools in particular—were working-class African Americans who developed strategic and pragmatic race-uplift programs in the service of their communities’ built environments. Elizabeth Evelyn Wright and Jennie Dean were both committed to building schools and campus sites that provided comprehensive normal and manual school training to young African American men and women for race betterment. By schooling an “intelligent citizenship” through an “academic education,” these educators commanded resources, political opportunities, and organizational strength.

During Reconstruction, the concept of race woman emerged from the abolitionist movement and developed in opposition to a growing white supremacist ideology. Race women drew their lessons from the antebellum self-help tradition as a way of combating white oppression and the stagnation of the Southern economy, which fueled further hostility. African American women helped form some of the earliest neighborhood schools, missions, and churches shortly after the war. In historian Jacqueline Jones's early work on Georgia Blacks during Reconstruction, Soldiers of Light and Love (1992), she reflects on how “demonstrating an ‘ethos of mutuality’ that had permeated Afro-American culture for some time, communities formed black churches; Republican party clubs and Union Leagues; fire companies; mutual aid, protective, and fraternal associations; and schools.” Jones points directly to the legacy of mutuality and self-help that persisted despite the perceived degraded condition of the Black race and its inability to build communities under enslavement. Although Jones acknowledges that education was an expensive proposition and luxury for people of all ages and sexes, it provided an impulse for applying all-Black strategies for social reform.

Historian and media studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper asks, “What does it mean to be a race woman?” In Beyond Respectability Cooper answers her own question thusly: “Race women were the first Black women intellectuals. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after Reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people.” The concept of “race woman” describes how Black women across the country formed a movement dedicated to combating racism and sexism, serving the needs of Black women, and uplifting the race through their efforts to transform the built environment.