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Although Brown is rightly celebrated as an epic civil rights milestone, its lasting influence on educational equality is less clear. This chapter explores African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American struggles for more equitable and integrated schools after 1954. It also considers how and why people of color sometimes pursued alternatives to integration, such as community control, in hopes of attaining both educational equality as well as other goals like self-determination and community empowerment. We emphasize the tremendous educational victories in the post-Brown era while acknowledging that school desegregation did not achieve the intent of equalizing educational opportunities for all students of color. Chapter 2 emphasizes three key findings: first, that white citizens, often unapologetically, opposed school integration and equalization measures from 1954 to the present; second, that improvements in public education were a direct result of sustained educational activism by communities of color; and third, that over time educational activists developed multiple nuanced conceptions of school integration as one possible tactic, among many, to equalize public education. This long history of educational activism and the multiple visions of school integration that came out of it, provides crucial lessons for how to revive public education today.

Chapter 1, “Segregation,” investigates the histories of African American, Native American, Mexican American, Chinese American, and Japanese American students from the earliest public schools through the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. It demonstrates that white officials intentionally discriminated against students of color first by excluding them from early public schools, then by segregating them as access to public education expanded, and finally by attempting to limit the curriculum for students of color to “manual training” and industrial work. It also highlights how minority educational activists fought back through both direct legal and political attacks on segregated schools as well as more subtle forms of accommodation and resistance. A key finding is that while it was clear to all that segregated facilities engendered unequal opportunities, many activists nevertheless questioned integration as a solution, and some saw enormous value in schools led by Black, Mexican American, or indigenous educators. World War II and the rising postwar civil rights movements centered new attention on segregated schools as a tool of white supremacy that must be abolished.

In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal famously identified the “American Dilemma,” an inherent tension between widespread faith in equal opportunity on one hand and discrimination against African Americans on the other. This book traces a similar phenomenon in northern public schools, which promised an equal education for all and then consigned Black children to second-class facilities. This paradox generated the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools in a legally desegregated system would more effectively advance the Black freedom struggle. This book offers a social history of northern Black debates over school integration in the North. It chronicles an extraordinary range of Black educational activism in the North stretching from the common school era to the present, and analyzes how this work—much of it carried out by women and youth—inspired the larger civil rights movement and created substantially more equal public schools.

Chapter 1 examines the earliest debates over school integration in Boston, Rochester, Cincinnati, Jamaica (New York), and a number of smaller towns. It argues that Black northerners viewed integrated public schools as essential to abolishing slavery, establishing Black citizenship, and eliminating racial prejudice. For abolitionists and Black leaders, the symbolic ideal of school integration took precedence over concerns about the quality of education available to Black youth. In contrast, Black families and teachers prioritized access to high-quality education and believed separate schools could better meet this goal. The ensuing debates between Black integrationists and separatists were intimately tied to the abolitionist movement, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. By the turn of the twentieth century, Black northerners had won the right to attend public school on an equal and integrated basis, yet they struggled against a rising tide of bigotry and residential segregation.