Fallen Prince is a powerfully written and exceedingly significant examination of a little-known chapter in the education of African Americans in the rural South. Stone's biography of his maternal grandfather; William James Edwards, tells of Edwards' heroic rise from abject poverty to establish Snow Hill Institute in 1893 for former bondspeople and their progeny in the midst of ignorance, superstition, and a pervasive system of the cruelest form of racial oppression in the very heart of Alabama's Black Belt.
W.J. Edwards, a Booker T. Washington disciple, was a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute class of 1893. Snow Hill Institute, a private school for grades kindergarten through 12, was an academically and culturally enhanced version of the essentially industrially-based Tuskegee model. During the "golden years" of Edwards; principal-ship, it became a school of uncommon excellence. The founding of such a school against such tremendous odds as existed at that time and place is, in itself, a feat worthy of note.
But this book is much more than an account of one man's accomplishments as a pioneer in African American education. Through his meticulous research, Stone has uncovered highly credible evidence of a conspiracy by Northern industrial philanthropists, the Ku Klux Klan, and shortsighted as well as unscrupulous Blacks to place severe limits on the education of the peasantry of the South. This is a far-reaching and classic account of a head-on collision between those with two fundamentally different goals regarding the education and future of African Americans.
On the one hand, there was the fearlessly outspoken Edwards and his brilliantly concieved comprehensive program to educate Blacks to compete on every level of society. His total plan included programs designed to gain economic independence and political power for the 95% of African Americans who then formed a peasant class in the Black Belt. The opposition was led by Northern industrialists deeply involved in the financial support of acidemically weak manual training schools that would prepare the politically impotent Blacks to form a perpetual pool of non-competitive cheap manual labor for the use of landowners of the South as well as the industries of the North. Stone has sensitively and analytically described the dramatic struggle and the eventual outcome which has shaped conditions as they exist in the Black Belt today.