Continued: Brief Overview of Racism and the History of Public Education

A quick look at the late 19th and early 20th century

by Jim Wood

Presented at the Race and Education Action & Change Work Group Meeting

July 23, 2014

Foundational Belief: United States public education is, historically, racist in nature and that racism (individual and institutional) has always had a profound effect on our ability to deliver equitable and quality education in the United States of America.

Historical Context: In the summary that follows, I have chosen to concentrate my analysis of racism and the history of public education during the late 19th and early 20th century on social, political and educational conditions in the South rather than the North. I've done so,because during that time (from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s up to 1920s)approximately 90% of the 8.8 million African-Americans in the United States lived in the South. The impact of educational policy and the implementation of instructionin the seventeen formerly slave states was keenly felt by virtually all African-America children.

Reign of Terror Intensifies: After the Reconstruction era was abruptly ended by federal policies and actions in the late 1870s, the White supremacist order in the states of the former Confederacy was reestablished. Children being born and reaching maturity post-emancipation endured a reign of terror reinforced by a criminal justice and economic system that transformed most facets of Black family life from slavery to de facto enslavement in ways that made equitable schooling for students of color nearly impossible. The physical, emotional and social violence directed at Black families was designed to bury all hope of harvesting the fruits of freedom. The graph below provides a stark example of one such form of violence, the lynching, which perpetrated to strike terror into the psyche of Black residents throughout the South.


Lynchings and racially motivated murders in each decade from 1865 to 1965.

Note that the lynchings were dramatically decreased during the period when federal troops occupied the South and asserted order during the reconstruction period. During the decade of the 1880s, lychings and racially motivated murders reached a low point for the period, but that decade also saw the formal and informal establishment of Jim Crow law and the resulting social stratifications such laws and customs built. By the 1890s, a system of enforcement of those laws was firmly in place and the primary arm of terror, lynching, was reestablished. The terror was aided and abetted by a criminalstructure that includeda system ofpeonage whereby local magistrates (from actual circuit judges to local justices of the peace) could contract with farmers to house ("incarcerate") people of color and hold them to do forced labor. These prisoner/workers were primarily 12 to 30 years old who had been arrested for minor (or non-existent) offenses ranging from vagrancy to loitering and fined at a rate they could not pay. When they were unable to pay, their unpaid and forced labor was the exchange to pay off the fines for their offences (see Slavery by another name by Douglas A. Blackmon).

People of color accused of more serious offenses were imprisoned in conventional jails or juvenile facilities where they too were made to work off their sentences in the now infamous "chain gangs". Add to these aspects of peonage the more widespread injustice of sharecropping and you have the context for schooling for over 90% of the African-American population in the United States from the 1880s well into the 1920s and for the majority on into the 1960s.

Schooling for students of color (including children of Spanish descent) emerges: In 1896, in the casePlessey vs. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court determined that separate but equal would be the law of the land. This decision guaranteed that schooling for children of color (remember, at the time, 90% of African-Americans resided in the South) would be separate and the culture of terror, unequal economic opportunity and criminal justice would reinforce that schools would be unequal despite what the Supreme Court ruling avowed.

Schools that were not segregated by race adopted another form of racial separation that took place inside integrated schools. This separation was justified by using the "science" of IQ test results as therationalefor separating students into distinctly different learning tracts. Originally intended as a diagnostic tool to identify children for extra attention by developer Alfred Binet, the IQ test was distorted by Lewis Terman and others to create a hierarchy of intelligence. The tests' language and culturally biases resulted in people of color and recent immigrants scoring the lowest on the test. Subsequently the IQ and other tests were used to determine which students would receive rigorous course work and which would be steered toward less rigorous curricula that resulted in lower career expectations for them.

At the same time as this movement to racialize intelligence was a taking place, a national debate was raging about the kind of education children of color should receive. Booker T. Washington, a former slave, took the position that the oppressive conditions of post-emancipation were too dangerous to advocate for an approach to education that disrupted the status quo (remember, the "separate but equal" doctrine). After his well known 1895 speech, the Atlanta Compromise, Washingtondedicated the last 20 years of his very prominent lifeto publicly avoiding confrontation over segregation in all its forms. He advanced his agenda by pushingfor a long-term educational approach that he felt would lead to the economic advancement of Black Americans. In that approach, schools for students of color were tobe used to develop manual skills and self-help entrepreneurialism. Washington was able to build a successful base at the historically Black institution of higher learning, Tuskegee Institute,where his public stance for appeasement garnered considerable White philanthropic support.

The preeminent thinker who emerged in the African-American community to counter Booker T. Washington's educational principles was W.E.B. DuBois who became the spokesperson for a more immediately emancipatory approach to the education of Black Americans. As you might expect, White support and money did not flow to DuBois, a graduate of FiskUniversity who was the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. As a result, he recognized that collective action was the only likely way to move the education of the masses of students of color toward equity. He joined with others to form the Niagara Movement advance collective action in advocacy for civil rights action.

Resistance to second-class citizenship: By 1909, DuBois had co-founded the NAACP. The early 20th century found DuBois joined by a substantial explosion of political, economic, social, education and artistic flowering in the African-American community. Marcus Garvey advocated for a free African state, writers and thinkers James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen and others forged a lens on the complexity of Black culture and further constructed an infrastructure to counter the debasement of Black life that had been established for centuries by Euro-centric hegemony.

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