"African American parental involvement in education is inextricably linked with improving the political and economic standing of their children. In The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, James Anderson (1988} chronicles the efforts of ex-slaves to "establish schools for their own children" (p. 15). According to Anderson {1988), the Negroes, labors were grounded in the "belief that education could help raise freed people to an appreciation of their historic responsibility to develop a better society and that any significant reorganization of the southern political economy was indissolubly linked to their education in the principles, duties, and obligations appropriate to a democratic social order,, (p. 28)..."