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The Inheritances of a New Elite Private School

Michelle A. Purdy

in Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools

This chapter chronicles how early decisions by Dr. William Pressly, founding president of Westminster, and other private school leaders began to blur the boundaries between public and private. ... More

This chapter chronicles how early decisions by Dr. William Pressly, founding president of Westminster, and other private school leaders began to blur the boundaries between public and private. Westminster, established in 1951, became a popular private school among white middle- and upper-class Atlantans. As Pressly became a leader of the National Council of Independent Schools, he began to negotiate multiple contexts, including that of the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia, and independent schools nationally. Westminster’s early school culture reflected “Old South” sentiments and racist traditions, while at the same time the first black students to desegregate the school were being born. They would be raised in the segregated black communities and schools developed because of and in spite of Jim Crow. What they gained as young boys and girls would help equip them for experiences that they did not know lay ahead—desegregating and attending Westminster.Less

Introduction

Michelle A. Purdy

in Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools

This chapter discusses the book’s central arguments. This book contends that the lines between public and private blurred as private schools became focal points of policy and spaces to avoid public ... More

This chapter discusses the book’s central arguments. This book contends that the lines between public and private blurred as private schools became focal points of policy and spaces to avoid public school desegregation during the mid-twentieth century. Leaders of independent schools also blurred notions of public and private as they responded to multiple historical, political, social, and economic factors. The first black students to desegregate schools like Westminster in Atlanta were born and raised in the decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This history posits that they courageously navigated such schools, drawing on their experiences in southern black segregated communities and in southern black segregated schools. Consequently, by virtue of their presence and actions, the first black students, including Michael McBay, Malcolm Ryder, Jannard Wade, and Wanda Ward, informed and influenced the Westminster school culture as it underwent institutional change. This narrative more forthrightly positions historically white elite schools or independent schools in the racial school desegregation narrative and contributes to an expanding understanding of black educational experiences in the third quarter of the twentieth century. While an institutional history, this book also chronicles, simultaneously, how the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) considered and advanced a focus on the recruitment of black students.Less

Racial Segregation and Inequality

Kathryn M. Neckerman

in Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education

This chapter considers a set of decisions that explicitly concerns race. They include districting and resource allocation for black and white students, as well as the policies and practices shaping ... More

This chapter considers a set of decisions that explicitly concerns race. They include districting and resource allocation for black and white students, as well as the policies and practices shaping race relations in schools. The Chicago schools, like most other northern schools, were officially color blind, yet over time they became racially segregated and unequal. The chapter traces the rise of segregation, the emergence of racial inequality in the schools, and the political controversies over these problems, along with the intercultural programs adopted in response to racial tensions. These developments had implications both for the quality of education in black schools and for the legitimacy and trust that black parents and children were willing to give to the schools. In all three policy areas—race, vocational education, and remedial education—significant changes occurred between 1900 and 1960.Less

In Spite of This Old Devil Segregation

Vanessa Siddle Walker and Ulysses Byas

in Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South

This chapter utilizes the terminology of Horace Mann Bond to demonstrate the resilience of the black professional community that worked across states to upgrade the quality of black schools. It ... More

This chapter utilizes the terminology of Horace Mann Bond to demonstrate the resilience of the black professional community that worked across states to upgrade the quality of black schools. It captures the network of black educators as it had unfolded by 1957 and demonstrates the ways the local professor could be enmeshed in a national dialogue saturated with discussions of educational ideas most significant to implement to develop black children. These included ensuring full democratic participation, responding to testing pressures, and recognizing their own roles in overturning a system of oppression. The chapter explains the ways in which the national conversation among black educators created a medium through which the professor could be informed about issues specifically devoted to black children and be given opportunities to discuss how to translate theory into practice.Less

Love, Hope, and Fear: Teachers Guiding Desegregation

Natalie G. Adams and James H. Adams

in Just Trying to Have School: The Struggle for Desegregation in Mississippi

This chapter addresses the role of teachers in school desegregation. Faculty integration was often the first step a school district took in trying to meet school desegregation orders. A young, ... More

This chapter addresses the role of teachers in school desegregation. Faculty integration was often the first step a school district took in trying to meet school desegregation orders. A young, recently graduated white teacher would be hired to teach in an all-black school, or a more experienced black teacher would be transferred to an all-white school. When the courts ruled this method of compliance unacceptable, student desegregation then took place. Teachers had to figure out how they and their students could live and learn together in classrooms, cafeterias, halls, bathrooms, locker rooms, and teacher's lounges, where the public and private spheres of people's lives often intersect. Ultimately, many teachers viewed teaching as their calling and were determined to work through school desegregation despite the many obstacles.Less

Introduction Once upon a Time in a Forgotten World

Vanessa Siddle Walker and Ulysses Byas

in Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in this book. The book presents the account of Ulysses Byas's professional development and the transfer of that development ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in this book. The book presents the account of Ulysses Byas's professional development and the transfer of that development into his local setting in six segments. These segments intentionally deemphasize the activity of students within the school and elevate the professional development activities of its leader. The book illuminates three aspects of the professorship. First, it depicts the professor as the creative agent foiling the superintendent's limited agenda for black schools. Second, the book elevates Byas's personal biography and his professional world, both nationally and within the state, and uses these components to unmask a professor at work. Finally, it details interactions with, and beliefs about, teachers and parents to demonstrate the ways Byas's daily activity was buttressed by their cooperation.Less

The (micro)politics of racial neoliberalism

Viviana Pitton

in Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

This chapter maps the event of the alternative school policy of the Toronto School Board District understood as neoliberalism, and specifically racial neoliberalism. This analysis asserts how power ... More

This chapter maps the event of the alternative school policy of the Toronto School Board District understood as neoliberalism, and specifically racial neoliberalism. This analysis asserts how power and force operate within educational equity attempts and illustrates the necessary but insufficient attempts at educational equity that rely solely on moral and epistemological, including statistical, arguments. The chapter focuses on the material and ontological aspects of the policy environment affecting the event. The spatial and temporal analysis of this chapter underscores how objects and subjects easily interchange positions depending on the location of the analysis, including how (1) policy ‘activists’ simultaneously are policy ‘subjects’; (2) school mission statements are simultaneously efforts to develop a brand within quasi educational markets; (3) discourses of parental choice are conflated into contradictory discourses of educational entrepreneurialism and equity and, (4) moral statements against racism are erased through pressures to maintain the dominant policies and practices of colourblind (neoliberal) multiculturalism.Less

Changing Views of Post–Civil War Black Education in the Fiction of Lydia Maria Child, Ellwood Griest, and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1867–1878)

Peter Schmidt

in Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920

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 ... More

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.Less

Conclusion

Kathryn M. Neckerman

in Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education

This book has sought to explain the origins of the troubles of inner-city schooling that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, coinciding with the changing urban conditions of the post-World War II era. ... More

This book has sought to explain the origins of the troubles of inner-city schooling that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, coinciding with the changing urban conditions of the post-World War II era. These problems cannot be attributed to urban change alone. School policies are a critical part of the explanation. There is no question that inner-city schools were handicapped by resource scarcity. The problems of poor facilities, overcrowding, inexperienced teachers, and double-shift schedules were only too plain. These resource deficits did not result from economic and demographic change, however: after 1945, Chicago's public schools had more money, not less, to spend on education. Instead, these deficits reflect decisions made by school officials about how to allocate funds and students. Students were segregated by race, and fewer resources were allocated to black schools.Less

The Emergence of White Opposition to African American Education

in Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America

On April 13, 1827, the African Improvement Society (AIS), a new association dedicated to elevating black people's “moral, intellectual, and religious condition,” was inaugurated in New Haven's North ... More

On April 13, 1827, the African Improvement Society (AIS), a new association dedicated to elevating black people's “moral, intellectual, and religious condition,” was inaugurated in New Haven's North Church. The AIS was made up largely of whites who opposed slavery and championed colonization, and its mission was to uplift people of color. Yet its founders doubted black people's moral and mental capacity. Prior to the late 1820s, whites in New Haven were largely tolerant of African Americans' literary and religious instruction. As radical abolition eclipsed colonization, however, educators began to affirm the African Americans' place in the polity rather than have them deported. In order to understand why white tolerance for black schooling deteriorated in New England around 1830, it is useful to listen to Aristides, the most vocal opponent of the AIS in New Haven. His arguments — his conception of education as a zero-sum game, his conflation of black improvement with citizenship, and his contention that uplift would thwart black removal — would soon become mantras in white diatribes against black schooling.Less

Epilogue: Afrocentrism and the Neoliberal Ethos

Russell Rickford

in We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

This chapter examines the ideological transformation of Pan African nationalism from the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century. The proliferation of black nationalist schools in the last ... More

This chapter examines the ideological transformation of Pan African nationalism from the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century. The proliferation of black nationalist schools in the last quarter of the twentieth century signaled the survival of some Black Power ideas. It also demonstrated how social movements may be stripped of oppositional meaning. By the 1980s, many Afrocentric models embodied a brand of black nationalism that equated symbolism with struggle while eschewing systemic political transformation. Some independent black institutions collaborated with conservative proponents of educational vouchers and charter schools, a sign of the symbiotic relationship between bourgeois identity politics and the corporate establishment. In the face of such accommodationism, organs such as Northern California’s Oakland Community School and Jackson, Mississippi’s Black and Proud Liberation School strove to re-energize radical traditions of alternative education.Less

Policy and biopolitics: the event of race-based statistics in Toronto

Kalervo N. Gulson and P. Taylor Webb

in Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

This chapter connects race-based violence, ideas of counting and race-based statistics, with ideas about racial biopolitics. The focus is on two events. The first is a 2008 a report into school ... More

This chapter connects race-based violence, ideas of counting and race-based statistics, with ideas about racial biopolitics. The focus is on two events. The first is a 2008 a report into school safety, the Falconer Report, which urged for the use of ‘race-based statistics’ in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which reignited the overall move towards Black-focused schooling. We connect this report, and its plea to use race-based statistics in discipline related incidents in schooling, to racial profiling and policing in Toronto in the early 2000s. The chapter concludes with the TDSB decision in 2004-5, to collect race-based statistics, as a second policy event that preceded the Falconer Report.Less

Conclusion: The Price for Running Twice as Fast

Vanessa Siddle Walker and Ulysses Byas

in Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South

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 ... More

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.Less

Common Schools and Black Schools

Andrew Valls

in Rethinking Racial Justice

Integration of public schools has been thought of as a primary means to achieve racial equality, yet the Supreme Court has made it more difficult to use race to achieve integration. The Court is ... More

Integration of public schools has been thought of as a primary means to achieve racial equality, yet the Supreme Court has made it more difficult to use race to achieve integration. The Court is wrong to do so, but scholars who place too much faith in integration are also mistaken. While integration of schools is one viable means to achieve equality of educational opportunity, it also often involves serious costs for African Americans. At the same time, predominantly black schools offer benefits that are too often ignored. Any approach to racial justice in schooling must keep these costs and benefits in mind, and a flexible and pragmatic approach is better than one that relies heavily on integration.Less

Overcoming Challenges

Jenny M. Luke

in Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South

As one explanation for the longevity and centrality of lay midwifery in southern childbirth culture, chapter 11 focuses on the lack of medical support and hospital facilities available to African ... More

As one explanation for the longevity and centrality of lay midwifery in southern childbirth culture, chapter 11 focuses on the lack of medical support and hospital facilities available to African Americans in the Jim Crow South. It reaches back to the early twentieth century and examines the challenges faced by black medical schools and hospitals, and the establishment of the National Medical Association. The problems associated with segregated facilities and the consequences of the Hill-Burton Act failed to ease the pressures on the black medical profession. The Slossfield Community Center in Birmingham Alabama is used as a case study to emphasize the both the obstacles faced by black hospitals and physicians, and the benefits of a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to wellness.Less

There's a New Day Conning

Tom Eamon

in The Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory

This chapter discusses four young men from North Carolina A&T State College, an all-black public school, who quietly seated themselves on lunch counter stools in Woolworth's five-and-dime. The ... More

This chapter discusses four young men from North Carolina A&T State College, an all-black public school, who quietly seated themselves on lunch counter stools in Woolworth's five-and-dime. The demonstrators were met with icy stares, and the lunch counter closed for the day, but larger numbers of students came on subsequent days. Greensboro liked to think of itself as one of the most progressive cities in the South, a place with many colleges, a humanitarian streak brought on by its Quaker legacy, and bustling commerce and industry. It was also one of the region's first cities to implement small-scale integration in the public schools. Still, it remained a segregated city. The sitin movement that started in Greensboro galloped across North Carolina and the old Confederacy. A new day was dawning, but it was fraught with risk and a potential for violence.Less

I Never Jim Crowed Myself: Navigating the Boundaries of Race in the River City

Luther Adams

in Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970

This chapter tells the story of Miss Minnie Mae Jones, later Mae Street Kidd, as she stood and waited on the platform of the Louisville and Nashville (L & N) train station in Millersburg, Kentucky. ... More

This chapter tells the story of Miss Minnie Mae Jones, later Mae Street Kidd, as she stood and waited on the platform of the Louisville and Nashville (L & N) train station in Millersburg, Kentucky. Her mother Anna Belle stood at her side; her clothes were packed in a brand-new trunk her mother had bought for the occasion. As Mae recalled, a lot of tears were shed that day; she was leaving Millersburg “for good.” In her own words, “The time had come and sooner or later [I] would have to leave.” Although she had spent most of her life in Millersburg, at the time of her migration she had some familiarity with life outside her hometown. Since the black school in Millersburg did not go beyond the eighth grade, her mother sent her to the Lincoln Institute in Shelbyville, Kentucky, where Mae spent two years in a “place of love and harmony and hard work.”Less

A Fool’s Education: Albion TourgÉe’s A Fool’s Errand, The Invisible Empire, and Bricks Without Straw (1879–1880)

Peter Schmidt

in Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920

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 ... More

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.Less

The Democratic Path

Robert A. Burt

Frank Iacobucci (ed.)

in Justice and Empathy: Toward a Constitutional Ideal

This chapter illustrates the Supreme Court's approach to school desegregation. It argues that the Court changed from a hierarchical institution to a more egalitarian or conversational democratic ... More

This chapter illustrates the Supreme Court's approach to school desegregation. It argues that the Court changed from a hierarchical institution to a more egalitarian or conversational democratic model that recognized the work of others outside the court system (such as psychologists whose views outlined the unequal feeling of segregated black school children) and largely left enforcement of desegregation to local federal district court judges. Overall, the Court adopted an impressive strategic approach to school desegregation. After acknowledging the democratic deficit for blacks in their exclusion from legislative representation, the chapter proposes that the local federal district courts served as surrogate democratic chambers for whites and blacks to work out their differences peaceably.Less