Integrations

The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education

Lawrence Blum, Zoë Burkholder

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226786032, 9780226785981
• eBook ISBN: 9780226786179
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country's long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States.
 
Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy.

CHAPTER 1

SEGREGATION

Established in the four decades preceding the Civil War, America’s first free, tax-supported “common schools” taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and a little bit of geography and history, as well as Protestant morality, a sturdy work ethic, mastery of the English language, and patriotism. The purpose of common schools was to prepare young people to be active and engaged democratic citizens. As reformer Horace Mann wrote in 1846, the United States must provide a free education to all, “sufficient to qualify each citizen for the civil and social duties he will be called to discharge.” Rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, boy and girl—the public schools promised to forge a nation of immigrants into a united citizenry.1

This expansive undertaking, however, contained a major loophole. If public schools were designed to prepare democratic citizens, how would they treat people who didn’t qualify for US citizenship? In the common school era, this included large numbers of African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans, as well as others understood to be nonwhite according to racial ideologies of the day. As historian James D. Anderson argues, Americans were “virtually obsessed with the ways in which race affected fundamental questions of citizenship, civil equality, and political power.” By the time the question of citizenship for people of African, indigenous, Latin American, and Asian descent was mostly settled, public schools discriminated on the basis of race.2

It is worth noting that racial ideologies of the common school era also labeled many white ethnics as racially distinct from the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. Although some European immigrant students faced educational discrimination, they never experienced the deliberate, state-sponsored racism suffered by African American, Asian American, Native American, or Latin American students. As one teacher put it, students who were not of European ancestry failed the “obvious test of color” and should be treated accordingly.3

A growing body of scholarship investigates the dynamic educational histories of African American, American Indian, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, Chinese American, Japanese American, and Mexican-origin communities. Thanks to this painstaking research we know more about both the tremendously varied and complex experiences of students of color in American public schools as well as the rich and nuanced forms of indigenous knowledge production and cultural transmission that took place outside of these institutions. We know less, however, about how racial ideologies functioned more broadly in educational history, how whites wielded state-sponsored racial discrimination as a form of power, and how people of color developed expansive, and at times contested, strategies to achieve counterhegemonic objectives that went well beyond securing equal educational opportunities.4

This chapter analyzes educational racism and struggles for racial equality in the histories of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese and Japanese Americans. It considers a small sample of the tremendously diverse experiences of students of color in the period leading up to Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed (but did not end) racial segregation in the public schools. All history is contextually specific, and these few examples are not meant to depict the full range of historical encounters with education racism in the United States. We have selected a few compelling examples to illustrate the evolution of American educational racism while also emphasizing people of color as active agents of resistance and change.5

We argue that Americans built and reinforced state-sponsored educational racism through a three-part process involving the exclusion, segregation, and differentiation of resources and curriculum. Segregation, or dividing students on the basis of their racial identity, was essential to creating and maintaining inequality in public education. In his famous study of American race relations in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed, “One deep idea behind segregation is that of quarantining what is evil, shameful, and feared in society.” In this sense, school segregation was a form of violence perpetrated by whites against students of color. Segregation is quite distinct from the project of separation, which was a voluntary strategy by people of color to establish and attend institutions dedicated to racial uplift and the affirmation of Black and indigenous identities. For instance, many African American and Native American educational activists have historically supported the option of separate, Black- and indigenous-led schools.6

All people of color committed to educational reform abhorred state-sponsored school segregation, however, debates over integration as a strategy for reform were persistent. The very meaning of school integration shifted depending on context—sometimes activists wanted to end the isolation of all students in a single classroom at a racially mixed school, while other times they were satisfied if a handful of Black children attended a white school.7 In the Jim Crow South, integration posed a direct threat to Black teachers, which gave activists pause, while in other examples the preservation of teaching jobs was not a major concern. Some activists, moreover, did not target school segregation as problematic but instead attempted to manipulate the system by classifying their children as white in order to access better-resourced schools.

In other words, the ways that people of color understood the relationship between educational inequality and school segregation varied significantly based on specific barriers to equality and how they envisioned public schools as sites of community empowerment, and so it should come as no surprise that school integration took myriad complex forms. What follows is not a single history of the struggle for school integration in the United States but instead the histories of the many school integrations designed to remedy educational injustice and remake public education to secure the democratic ideal.8

EDUCATION AS LIBERATION

Born into enslavement in 1818, Frederick Douglass used the power of oratory and the written word to persuade Americans of the evils of human bondage. Like many nineteenth-century Black leaders, Douglass believed that “the direct pathway from slavery to freedom” was education. He campaigned for “equal school rights” for Black students, which for Douglass meant attending the new common schools on a nonsegregated basis. According to Douglass, if Black students attended school alongside white peers, common schools would reduce prejudice, improve race relations, and symbolize equal citizenship for all. Douglass prioritized public education’s civic function in a democracy over more mundane concerns like preparing for a better-paying job. He believed public schooling had a singular power to help abolish enslavement and secure equal rights for African Americans during the era of slavery.9

Emancipation in 1863 brought about a fervent, almost missionary faith in education as a key to Black liberation. Numerous studies document the universal outcry for education among freedmen, women, and children of all ages in the South. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, there were very few free, tax-supported common schools anywhere in the region, and virtually none that were available to Black students. While sympathetic whites in the Union army, northern churches, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and northern philanthropies established private schools for Black southerners, archival data reveal that freedpeople seized control of education for themselves. Literate African Americans stepped forward as teachers, community leaders, and political activists during the era of Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877, setting up schools in the South based on the model of northern common schools’ academic curriculum.10 Black families expressed a preference for Black teachers, and as many as one-third of all teachers in the new schools for freedpeople between 1861 and 1876 were Black. African American school attendance in the South grew from less than 2 percent in 1860 to 10 percent a decade later, then tripled to nearly 30 percent of school-aged children by 1880.11

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern whites reasserted their dominance by requiring literacy tests, poll taxes, and other measures to deny African Americans’ enfranchisement. Stripped of their civil rights, southern Blacks were consigned to second-class citizenship on the basis of race. Many of the schools established for freedpeople were closed, as southern whites adamantly opposed education for Black youth. Southern states established a system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow, enforced through law, the police and courts, the press, social custom, and the relentless threat of vigilante violence.12

By the time the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that it did not violate the equal protection clause to require “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans in 1896, very few Black southerners had access to public education. A fledgling system of public schools for whites had only just been created, and the southern aristocracy and the white working class agreed it was best to deny universal education to Black youth. Neither wanted Black children to have access to schools that could lead to economic competition with whites or, worse, Black enfranchisement and political equality. Under these conditions, Black southerners had to fight for the right to pay for and build their own public schools.13

FIGURE 1. African American schoolchildren pose with their teacher outside a school, possibly in South Carolina, c. 1900–1910. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-13304.

As James D. Anderson argues, common schools for Blacks in the South expanded between 1900 and 1935 thanks to the tireless advocacy and financial contributions of African American students, parents, and community members. Some white philanthropists, like Julius Rosenwald, supported Black common schools, but only if Black families agreed to accept a special “manual training and industrial” curriculum, a deal that many resisted. These schools were to be light on academics and focus instead on teaching manual labor skills deemed “appropriate” for Black youth, typically agricultural and manual labor for boys and domestic work for girls.14

Booker T. Washington and other Black leaders declared that schools should teach Black children the “dignity of labor” instead of elitist and impractical academic subjects like French, chemistry, geology, mechanics, mathematics, and literature. This was a strategy to cultivate white support for Black common schools, and although it was controversial, it helped assuage white fears of an educated Black citizenry. White southerners grudgingly supplied small measures of public funding to the schools that southern Black communities had built for themselves. States agreed to provide a tiny measure of financial support if segregated schools promised to offer a manual training and industrial curriculum that greatly differed from white schools’ courses.15

Civil rights leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois vigorously protested a manual training and industrial program for Black students. “Do Negroes oppose this because they are ashamed of having their children trained to work?” Du Bois asked. “Certainly not. But they know that if their children are compelled to cook and sew when they ought to be learning to read, write and cipher, they will not be able to enter the high school or go to college as the white children are doing.” He concluded, “It is a deliberate attempt to throttle the Negro child before he knows enough to protest.”16

Inequalities between white and so-called colored schools in the Jim Crow South were staggering by every measure through the first four decades of the twentieth century. White southern politicians openly campaigned to limit public education for Black students. “I am firmly convinced, after most careful thought and study,” the South Carolina governor-elect pronounced in 1911, “that the Almighty created the Negro to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. I also believe that the greatest mistake the white race has ever made was in attempting to educate the free Negro.”17

Not surprisingly, “colored” schools in the Jim Crow South had far less funding than white schools, operated in dilapidated structures with few supplies, and were open only a few months a year. Elementary schools were usually one- or two-room structures, and many lacked electricity and plumbing. Denied access to academic high schools, secondary schools for Black students were called “county training schools” and did not prepare students for the academic rigors of higher education. Schools restricted to “colored” students in the South rarely had gymnasiums, cafeterias, libraries, or science laboratories, which were increasingly common in white schools. The highest-paid Black teachers made less than the lowest-paid white teachers, and “colored” schools were few and far between in rural areas. There were exceptions, such as high-quality all-Black schools in cities like Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, but for the most part separate schools for Black children were terribly unequal.18

Black teachers established professional associations to advocate for improved school funding, facilities, and teacher salaries in order to fortify southern Black communities. As the Arkansas State Teachers Association put it, “Real teachers seek rather to be of the greatest good and usefulness to those taught; seek to elevate the nature and capabilities of the human soul and tremble under the responsibility of attempting to be its educator. The real teacher strives to bring out the gem from its earthen casket, polish and make it fit to be placed in humanity’s diadem.” Despite vast inequalities, “colored” schools grew to become valued institutions and, in some cases, cherished sources of community pride. Over the course of the twentieth century, dedicated Black educators continued to improve the quality and curriculum of segregated schools, thereby enriching the socioeconomic prospects of their students and the quality of life for Black families and communities.19

The South’s apartheid schools institutionalized both white privilege and discrimination against African Americans. State legislators required school administrators to assign white children to one school and African American children to another, making it a crime to permit any degree of racial mixing. These laws codified racism and signified whites’ refusal to interact with Blacks on an equal basis. They implied that Black people were inferior and that even casual interaction between children of different races was inherently dangerous, effectively using the power of the state to transform the social preferences of an elite group of whites into unyielding law. Black southerners through the first half of the twentieth century fought to access public education and then struggled to equalize opportunities in a system that used race as the single most important fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1   Segregation
• CHAPTER 2   Desegregation
• CHAPTER 3   Equality
• CHAPTER 4   Integrations: The Capital Argument
• CHAPTER 5   Integrations: The Civic Argument
• Conclusion: Egalitarian Civic Integrationist Pluralism
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index