Black Public History in Chicago

Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War

Ian Rocksborough-Smith

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083303
  9780252041662
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War.

Ian Rocksborough-Smith's meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago's black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.

CHAPTER ONE

Curriculum Reforms in World War II Chicago

It is not a huge revelation to point out that black American history was not always part of U.S. public school curricula. It is more provocative to say African American teachers once independently and at great personal and professional risk provided alternative curricula to their classrooms and communities. In oral histories, some local black schoolteachers and public historians, such as Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs and Timuel Black of Chicago, mention how their and other black classrooms in the city from the late 1940s through the 1950s were closely monitored by white colleagues. Sometimes, these colleagues expressed concern to administrators over how Burroughs and Black approached their lesson planning—especially if these colleagues suspected that students were being taught seditious forms of African American or U.S. history.1 Burroughs quite explicitly relates her experiences with such surveillance:

I, of course, was a strong advocate of black history, which was considered subversive in itself at that time. God forbid that you would teach Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth in class, and if you had anything to say about Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey, well, you had better just keep it to yourself. While my students were painting, I would be in the middle of a discussion about the Scottsboro boys, and I’d look over and see the white principal appear at the classroom door. Turning back to the class, I’d say, “And that’s how Betsy Ross came to sew the flag. Now, boys and girls, let’s talk about Patrick Henry. …” My students knew enough to hold in their chuckles until the principal had passed the door. As soon as he was gone, we’d go back to Clarence Darrow’s Scottsboro defense or Ida B. Wells’s upbringing or Mary McLeod Bethune’s activism.2

Timuel Black describes a similar experience from the early 1950s when he started teaching the sons and daughters of mostly white steelworkers in Gary, Indiana—just beyond the borders of Chicago’s South Side:

My challenge was to prove to them that they weren’t dumb. I won that. My attitude was there was a whole school there … almost all white. Their mission was to prove to this “dumb nigger,” that he shouldn’t be there. … My mission was to say it don’t make any difference. And I had an inner feeling in myself to say, to myself, “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.” White and black students were trying to get into my class. And the principal came and said white teachers [were complaining] about me. I have all this demand for my class … ’cause I give them good grades. And so the principal came and he sat in, and said, “What is that you’re teaching? …” I said, “American history.” But he said, “That’s not in the curriculum.” I said, “Corrected American history. Go check it out.” … I was just inserting it where it belongs.3

These recollections reveal the contested terrain of school curriculum and racial knowledge production that public educators (African Americans, in particular) encountered in the conservative climate of early Cold War America. Though far from being the only or worst period of duress in U.S. history for black Americans, many scholars have shown how any sort of advocacy for antidiscrimination became easily equated with Communist or, at least, unwanted dissident activity.4 The attempt to teach black history in classrooms, especially outside of mainstream civics curricula, was no exception. Looking back just a decade before the repressive climate of the 1950s had fully set in, however, shows that teachers like Burroughs and Black were not pioneers in their thinking about the need for curriculum reforms on matters of race in U.S. history. Burroughs’s and Black’s reflections show that such surreptitious pedagogy in the classroom was arguably emboldened by an earlier period of very public, contested, and significant black public-history activism on Chicago’s South Side. Much of it focused on getting African American history, in particular, into local school curricula and to the wider community. This chapter demonstrates how curriculum efforts originated in the early 1940s and extended through the mid-twentieth century.

Well before Burroughs and Black supplemented their individual classes, a February 7, 1942, article, “Development of Negro History in Chicago,” appeared in Chicago’s influential black newspaper the Chicago Defender, which was celebrating Negro History Week.5 This article also underscores the influence that Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) and Negro History Week, had on black-history observances for African American communities nationwide. According to the Defender article, Chicago teachers sought to emulate Woodson and the ASNLH’s efforts and so became the chief practitioners of black public-history activism in 1940s Chicago. South Side teachers spearheaded curriculum-reform efforts as well as extracurricular events and clubs they helped organize in schools and in the community to promote the teaching of black history. The author of the Defender article, Mavis Mixon, a teacher at Stephen A. Douglas Elementary on the South Side, was also a poet who sometimes worked alongside Margaret Burroughs and acclaimed writer Gwendolyn Brooks in writing groups that met at the South Side Community Arts Center—an important locale for Chicago’s black cultural renaissance from the late 1930s through the 1950s (not to be confused with the more famous Harlem Renaissance). Mixon was a lesser-known figure but, nonetheless, a part of the larger community of South Siders who comprised this mid-twentieth-century black Chicago literary and cultural renaissance.6

Mixon’s assessment of black-history labors in Chicago focuses on the efforts of African American teachers and a few white allies in public schools who promoted alternative curricula and programs. Mixon explains that a number of South Side schools had many teachers and a few supportive principals who helped establish extracurricular Negro History Clubs during the 1930s and 1940s. As Black recalls, progressive white teachers were among the first to actually begin teaching supplemental African American history to their civics students.7 Ultimately led by black Americans, the local movement for curriculum reform certainly had interracial dimensions at its outset.

Public schoolteachers (black and white) on Chicago’s South Side regularly took part in public-history efforts geared toward reforming the city’s under-funded public schools through the 1940s. Among these influential teachers were Walter H. Dyett, music and drama; white English teacher Mary L. Herrick; Samuel Stratton, social studies at DuSable High School (formerly New Wendell Phillips); and Madeline Stratton Morris, Dunbar Public High Schools (figures 1 and 2).8

Stratton Morris, however, was the most pivotal for initiating curriculum reforms in Chicago during the early 1940s. Born Madeline Robinson in 1906 to John and Estella Robinson, she was the eldest of six children. She attended Chicago public schools, received training at the Chicago Teachers College to teach first through eighth grades, over the course of the 1930s and early 1940s received a bachelor of science in education and a master’s in education from Northwestern University, and pursued postgraduate work in various fields at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. After a successful career as a South Side civics teacher, she became an important mentor to Chicago teachers through the 1960s and 1970s. She was active in educational leadership, civil rights, and black-history movement activity throughout her career as president of the ASNLH from 1970 through 1977. She also served on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and service organizations like the National Council of Negro Women’s Chicago chapter as well as the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Figure 1. Madeline Stratton Morris, 1964. Madeline Stratton Morris Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Chicago Public Library.

Figure 2. William Stratton, ca. late 1960s. Madeline Stratton Morris Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Chicago Public Library.

Dyett, Herrick, and the Strattons were part of a significant cohort of South Side public schoolteachers who became instrumental in actively supporting local black public history.9 As Anne M. Knupfer writes, “[m]ost black teachers were keenly aware of the discrimination and other problems faced by black students.” Among the many solutions that these teachers sought, which included the initiation of private elementary schools and the development of “human relations curriculum” through the 1950s was one “to create meaningful curricula in black history, literature, and the arts.”10 These black-history units were never fully or permanently implemented during this period. Still, as Knupfer indicates, Chicago was the “only city to use such a citywide plan” for curriculum reforms for which the teachers received acclaim from around the country and the world.11

This chapter focuses especially on these African American–led curriculum-reform efforts and, in particular, the ones for which Stratton Morris was recognized. Her efforts were connected to ongoing public-history programs and initiatives in the community in the early 1940s and later impacted not only local but also national efforts to redress curriculum deficiencies for black American history. Curriculum-reform measures and related public-history activities were near the center of efforts to generate popular interest about black history in the country and were connected to struggles for civil rights. The high stakes of the efforts concerned with expressions of black history and public identity certainly produced concerns about who had the authority to communicate such knowledge to the community: school officials, teachers, representatives of the ASNLH who were disciples of Woodson, professional or community scholar activists of various political affiliations, or “race” experts (whether local club-women and African American civic elites or white academics and politicians). These contestations revolved for a time over proposed reforms to the civics curricula of Chicago’s public schools and revealed how these endeavors became significant repertoires for black public history in the city. Moreover, such reform measures were proposed well before the better-known civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s engaged most famously with issues of educational justice and racial reform, marked especially by the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which struck down de jure racial segregation.12

The Curriculum

Arguably, still no historical consensus exists on matters of educational-reform initiatives through mid-twentieth-century Chicago. Historian Michael W. Homel contends that the city’s African American community held concerns “relating to vocational training, Negro history and increased numbers of Negro teachers” during the 1920s through the early 1940s, but such issues “held relatively minor priority throughout these years.”13 An appraisal of teacher Stratton Morris’s proposed reforms, which consisted of supplementary social studies units geared toward elementary education from first through eighth grades, indicates that influential African American teachers definitely felt otherwise. Rather, for some, curriculum reform about black history was a priority. The impact of these endeavors is illustrated in how Stratton Morris’s curriculum reforms were part of a larger, often contested, field of black public-history activism. For a time, this field seemed to be nominally united around desires to express black identities as vital and virtuous forms of American identity from the World War II years through the 1950s.

Part of how Stratton Morris achieved civic authority to conduct the necessary research for her curriculum reforms was because the project involved extensive consultations with professional and/or scholarly experts of “race.” These consultations with educational elites suggest that Stratton Morris negotiated the development of her project within the parameters of racial liberalism that arose especially during World War II and the 1950s. She framed her project as decidedly American in orientation and scope; it became a universalizing curriculum designed to enhance student understandings of how black Americans were central to the “U.S. family.” She infused her units with insights from revisionist scholarship on the cutting edge of radical approaches to U.S. history from scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Woodson, Melville Herskovitz, Herbert Aptheker, and others. That these civics units were never permanently implemented in Chicago suggests that the efforts of curriculum reformers like Stratton Morris to redress omissions of black history in key areas of the public sphere had a long way to go. Still, the story of how they got off the ground at all remains highly significant.

Stratton Morris’s development of black-history units received approval of the school district and other civic and state-level public officials. In her own reflections, she comments that Chicago Public Schools superintendent William Johnson “readily accepted” the proposals for the black-history units that she and her school principal, Elinor McCollum, first brought to the district’s attention. Based on her successes as a South Side public schoolteacher, in 1940, Stratton Morris was released from her teaching duties to work for a year and a half with an assistant of her choosing to develop the units. Stratton Morris chose Bessie S. King, a Chicago elementary schoolteacher. An overseeing committee, chaired by McCollum, included one of the city’s few African American school principals, Ruth Jackson, of Colman Elementary.14 Stratton Morris and King were then assigned to the district’s Bureau of Curriculum and “given all of the freedom” they deemed necessary to complete their project.15

Much of the research for her units was carried out late into evenings and over weekends at the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library, a key cultural institution then of the black South Side. Stratton Morris’s research was also conducted in the stacks of the University of Chicago, the Field Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She submitted drafts of her units for review and approval to a distinguished and interracial list of academics and “race” experts whose interests extended to combating American racism and supported the black community in its efforts to combat racial discrimination. These scholars included Woodson, ASNLH head; Charles Wesley, then president of Wilberforce University and Woodson’s eventual successor as ASNLH leader; Herskovitz, founder of African studies at Northwestern University; Avery O. Craven, a professor of southern U.S. history at the University of Chicago, who wrote sympathetically during the 1940s of civil rights and worked to complicate mythologies about the “Solid South”; Fay Cooper Cole, an English professor at the University of Chicago, known for his role with Clarence Darrow’s defense team at the Scopes trial in Tennessee during the mid-1920s; Walter Johnson, an English professor from the University of Illinois; and numerous South Side public schoolteachers and administrators, including African American school principals Maudelle Bousfield and Ruth Jackson and three outstanding teachers of history, Ciara Anderson (DuSable High), Samuel Stratton (DuSable High), and Thelma Powell (Wendell Phillips High).16

The cumulative advice of these educators and “race” experts helped Stratton Morris produce curriculum units that reflected the global and transnational sensibilities of what was then cutting-edge revisionist history. Her third-grade unit on the West Af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Editorial Note
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Curriculum Reforms in World War II Chicago
• 2. Imagining a Black Museum in Cold War Chicago
• 3. Black-History Activism and the Afro-American Heritage Association
• 4. Cultural Fronts and Public-History Activism in the Black Power Era
• 5. The Washington Park Relocation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index