Search Results

This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down state-mandated segregation in public education, and its implications for southern authoritarian enclaves. With the Brown shock, Mississippi's rulers faced their first major black insurgency in decades. A standoff between the state's governors and the White Citizens' Council (WCC) forces led to a stalemate over the development of an effective coercive apparatus, with negative consequences for managing the desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi. The chapter first considers the state of black education prior to Brown before discussing the crisis, triggered by the university's refusal to admit James Meredith—who was black— and Mississippi's resistance to the decision. It shows how a combination of intraelite dissensus and weak party–state capacities help explain the enclave's navigation of the desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi.

This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. On the eve of Brown, Georgia's ruling party remained controlled by the rural elites and white supremacist politicians composing the faction led by Governor Herman Talmadge. Through their massive resistance, enclave rulers successfully avoided the desegregation of state-supported schools for more than six years while also gaining headway in their repression of the statewide infrastructure of black protest. The chapter first reviews the state of black education in Georgia prior to Brown and the state's attempts to preempt the ruling before discussing how factional conflict affected rulers' development of new institutional defenses to ward off democratization pressures. It then considers the Talmadgeites' attacks on black protest throughout the 1950s and concludes by explaining how Georgia's rulers mishandled the UGA crisis.

This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of Clemson College in South Carolina. Prior to Brown, South Carolina's rulers sought to preempt the invalidation of state-mandated segregation by improving black education. After the ruling, they launched a strategy of massive resistance: decrying, deterring, and deferring threats to white supremacy in the public sphere. The chapter first reviews the state of black education before Brown and South Carolina's attempts to preempt the decision. It then considers the state's responses to Brown in the 1950s and early 1960s, showing that its leaders attacked both white civil society and black protest organizations. It also describes how the state bolstered its institutional resources to manage democratization pressures and concludes with an assessment of how politicians capitalized on ruling party cohesion and an improved coercive apparatus to navigate the Clemson crisis.

The Provident Hospital in Chicago was among the first black-controlled hospitals established. This chapter provides a novel approach to the study of the black hospital movement in Chicago. Specifically, it explores the partnership of a black hospital, Provident Hospital, with a white university, the University of Chicago. This affiliation aimed to promote Provident Hospital to become the foremost center of black medical education in the United States and set a new standard in black hospital care. However, despite financial and biracial support, the project showed signs of instability even from its inception. The analysis of this project in this chapter illuminates the often conflicting ideas that black physicians, white foundations, and the black public held with regard to the role of black hospitals. It also demonstrates once again that black hospitals could not be divorced from contemporary racial politics and realities.

This chapter focuses on the quest for education by black Atlantans. Like other African Americans who were awarded greater freedoms after the civil war, the black Atlantans recognized the significance of education. Recognizing the potent power of education, black leaders made education and learning the top priority of their racial agenda. However, despite these efforts, in the middle of the twentieth century, the black writings, essays, and studies revealed that black education was still separated and unequal. By 1950, the black leaders of Atlanta decided to sue for equality, but not for the elimination of the system of dual schooling. This action was amended in 1952, when African Americans argued that segregated schools were inherently unequal. They asked for a unitary school system but their case was later dismissed for lack of prosecution. After 1954, the Atlanta Board of Education passed a case for abolishing the dual school system but the case was treated by the board with laxity. On January 1958, a lawsuit known as Calhoun v. Latimer was filed, it was decided that the segregation schemes in schools were unlawful. The most significant result of the white reaction to desegregation was white flight. These reactions provided an unintended opportunity for African Americans to become the majority population in the city and for black elected officials to control the government of the city for generations to come.

This chapter details the histories of Gloria Richardson’s maternal and paternal families—the St. Clairs of Cambridge, Maryland, and the Hayeses of Mecklenburg County, Virginia—and reveals how they built financial wealth and used it to improve their lives and those of their fellow black people. These families stressed the importance of higher education and self-help organizations as means of improving their communities. The story of how Richardson’s parents met, and the black social network that made their connection possible, is a focus of this chapter. Richardson’s maternal grandfather, Herbert Maynadier St. Clair, receives special attention because of his important role in improving black people’s lives through his work as a Republican member of Cambridge’s City Council and his mentoring of Richardson.

Karen Christianity fueled a debate among American Baptists over the foundations of evangelicalism. Leaders such as Francis Wayland argued that evangelicalism grew from democratization and primitivism, a position that led him to argue for the Three-Self Theory and a deemphasis on education in evangelism. Meanwhile, leaders such as Barnas Sears argued that evangelicalism grew from the guidance of highly educated leaders. The resulting Baptist missionary ideal, embodied in the concept of the native ministry, drew from both theories. When the Civil War broke out, the native-ministry ideal led Baptists and similar evangelical denominations to missionary work among freed people in the American south. The native-ministry faith in the ability of nonwhite Christian leaders led northern Baptists to establish institutions of higher education for African Americans in the Reconstruction south.

Through a focus on Spelman Seminary of Atlanta, Georgia, between its founding in 1881 and the 1920s, this chapter analyzes the ideological assumptions behind, and the content of, education for black female respectability. An analysis of the content of the education offered at Spelman and the goals of administrators, board members, faculty, and supporters provides an understanding of how secondary schools for girls taught the attributes of respectability. To a surprising degree, industrial education was viewed as essential to the curriculum of a school for “striving” black young women. In contrast to traditional interpretations of black education that oppose industrial and academic education, Spelman faculty and associates viewed industrial and academic education as mutually reinforcing.

This chapter discusses the ideal of the “Black University,” a crucial theoretical framework for the politics of institution building in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Black University, a concept of adult education capable of serving the needs of “the total black community,” helped inspire several postsecondary Pan African nationalist establishments, including North Carolina’s Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU). The chapter describes the formation and evolution of MXLU under its director, Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller). It demonstrates how ideological evolution helped reshape MXLU while inspiring the creation of African Liberation Day, an annual series of demonstrations designed to raise awareness of and support for ongoing liberation movements on the African continent. Other Pan African nationalist formations, including Washington, DC’s Center for Black Education and East Palo Alto’s Nairobi College, are also discussed, as is the struggle to transform “Negro” colleges like Howard University into truly “black” institutions.

This chapter provides an overview of black Mississippians’ long quest for education. Beginning in the antebellum period, African Americans linked education to freedom. After the Civil War, freedpeople lobbied for the establishment of universal public schools and Mississippi created a state-wide system of public schools in 1870. Gross funding inequity existed between white and black education in Mississippi but the state’s disfranchisement of black voters prevented African Americans from unseating elected officials who denied their children quality education. Black parents double taxed themselves and made private contributions to finance public schools because of the funding shortfalls. Their commitment to quality education intensified after the United States Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. White supremacists, however, evaded the court order, so only a handful of black students had enrolled in previously all white schools by 1965. Black Mississippians thus turned to Head Start as an avenue for liberation.

This chapter surveys debates involving black education during the Reconstruction period and after, and analyzes fictional texts published in the late 1860s and the 1870s that capture both the hopes and anxieties of the early Reconstruction era. It explains why Booker T. Washington’s vision of education was a creation of the Reconstruction era, when federal and private philanthropical energies converged to create classroom disciplinary models for “uplift” via imitation and the acknowledgment of distinct limits for black progress. After briefly tracing the origins of this model in Reconstruction discourse, especially the work of Lydia Maria Child, the chapter demonstrates how the imitative model expressed hidden (or sometimes not so hidden) assumptions about black inferiority and the need to contain black aspirations within acceptable limits; and why this model, even though it was associated with Reconstruction, proved so attractive to some after the rise of white supremacist rule in the New South after 1877. Two stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson serve as test cases. These stories reached a national audience in 1878 and 1879 and signaled a distinct shift in the majority’s attitude toward black schools.

The Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and other strange political bedfellows champion the black-male led effort to open ABMS. This chapter uses these bedfellows to outline the simultaneously anti-feminist and anti-racist claim -- that black boys are oppressed by racist, white women teachers -- behind the push for ABMS. The rest of the chapter highlights feminists’ contention that these schools obscure black girls’ oppression. It also examines ABMS’ emergence against the backdrop of historically black colleges, industrial schools, and other single-gender schooling for black males. The chapter ends by contextualizing pro-ABMS discourse within feminist debates about the merits of making experience-based claims and by positing policy discourse analysis as the best means of understanding ABMS’ complex politics.

This chapter describes the philosophical transition from desegregation to “community control” as the driving force behind African-American urban struggles for educational opportunity and dignity in the late 1960s. Focusing on New York City, it outlines grassroots educational battles against substandard, segregated schools in Harlem and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn. It argues that political adaptation, as well as the shortcomings of the crusade for “quality integrated education,” reinvigorated black nationalist elements of African-American educational philosophy. It demonstrates how parents and activists mobilized theories of “black education” as part of their efforts to resist inferior public education and to imagine redemptive social alternatives.

The introduction provides an overview of the research and places James Edward Shepard in historical context by analyzing the discourse of race relations in North Carolina. I examine the dialogue of black Durham’s participation in the “race issue” of the early twentieth century and evaluate black higher education throughout the United States during this time period. I discuss the famous Washington versus Du Bois debate. This chapter also presents the main argument of the manuscript--that black college presidents of the early twentieth century were more than academic leaders. They were race leaders, as can be seen in the case of Dr. James Edward Shepard. For these presidents the real debate was not the struggle between liberal arts and vocational education but “what was the most practical way to uplift the Negro Race.”

This chapter recounts the story of Byas's abrupt departure from the world of the professor and synthesizes the meaning of his loss in the context of black schooling. Indeed, Byas's departure provides an apt metaphor for the extensive work of black professors who operated black schools with little salary incentive but who (in the end) were removed from their jobs. Their dismissal was personally costly but professionally devastating, as it unhooked the structures that best explain the similar activities in black segregated schools. With the professor went the forms of professional development, leading to the dismantling of a system of black education.

This chapter covers Peter Clark’s life from birth through the end of his first stage of political consciousness and activism. Set against the backdrop of the uniquely oppressive racial and social conditions in Cincinnati, this chapter sets the stage for Clark’s eventual rise to local and state prominence. While this book is a political and intellectual biography, personal relationships forged in his youth played a crucial role in raising his consciousness and molding him into the leader he would become.

This chapter analyzes the works of pro-Reconstruction novelist Albion Tourgée: A Fool’s Errand, The Invisible Empire, and Bricks without Straw (1879–1880). Tourgée had a significant impact on the postwar United States but found loyal readers only after the battle for strong black schools available to all in the South had largely been lost. The chapter examines the meaning behind the change in how Tourgée signified black freedom, which has largely been ignored by literary historians.

This chapter explores the warring—and yet mutually constitutive—discourses of education and colonization through a particular focus on the New York African Free School (1787-1834), an institution designed by the New York Manumission Society to prepare black children for freedom. The school produced a remarkable roster of alumni, including Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, Ira Aldridge, Patrick Reason and others. The development and curriculum of this school, when placed in context with early republican conversations about education, race and citizenship, provides a means of understanding how in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Enlightenment notions of a child’s malleability had become a means of determining whether non-white occupants of United States soil could be educated into citizenship, or whether they would have to be excised from the nation’s borders. Ultimately, this chapter attends to the conversations about black education that unfolded in the interplay between parents and administrators, and between students and the schoolwork those students were assigned, to better understand how and why colonization would emerge as the reigning antislavery philosophy during these years, and how African Americans engaged and eventually dismantled the racial logic underlying the American Colonization Society.

From Oakland to Long Beach, from South Central Los Angeles to South San Francisco, historically African American neighborhoods and schools are shifting to predominantly Latino/a populations with large numbers of Pacific Islanders and other communities of color. These changing urban populations have brought Black and Brown students together in classrooms and communities in new and complex ways. How has the linguistic landscape of urban schools and communities been altered by these changes? Most important, how can schools respond to the linguistic realities of young people as they grow up in such changing multilingual and multiethnic contexts? In this chapter I draw on the African American Language use of African American, Latino/a, and Pacific Islander youth in a changing California city and offer culturally sustaining pedagogy as a way to position the linguistic socialization of young people in such culturally rich spaces as an asset in schooling and beyond.