Black school
Encyclopedia
Black schools originated under legal segregation in the southern United States
after the American Civil War
and Reconstruction era, in southern states' public policy to keep races separated and maintain white supremacy
. In the United States
white opposition to African American
success resulted in only the most rudimentary schools for African Americans, as proven by Gebhart v. Belton
. It often took decades after the South established public schools for systems to offer education at the high school level. Nonetheless, black teachers and students created some outstanding black high schools, including Dunbar High School
in Washington, D.C.
; Dudley High School
in Greensboro, North Carolina
, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior and Senior High School
in Little Rock, Arkansas
.
After the white Democrats regained power in southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed legal racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. They disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by various voter registration and electoral requirements. Services for black schools (and any black institution) routinely received far less financial support than white schools. In addition, the South was extremely poor for years in the aftermath of the war and dependent on an agricultural economy despite falling cotton prices. Into the 20th century, black schools had fewer books, worse buildings, and teachers were paid less. In Washington, DC, however, because public school teachers were federal employees, black and white teachers were paid the same.
The Virginia Constitution of 1870
mandated a system of public education for the first time, but the newly established schools were operated on a segregated basis. In these early schools, which were mostly rural, as was characteristic of the South, classes were most often taught by a single teacher, who taught all subjects, ages, and grades. Chronic underfunding led to constantly over-populated schools, despite the relatively low percentage of black students in schools overall. In 1900 the average black school in Virginia had 37 percent more pupils in attendance than the average white school. This discrimination continued for several years, as demonstrated by the fact that in 1937–38, in Halifax County, Virginia, the total value of white school property was $561,262, contrasted to only $176,881 for the county's black schools.
In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
launched a national campaign to achieve equal schools within the "separate but equal
" framework of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
. White hostility towards this campaign kept black schools from necessary resources. According to Rethinking Schools magazine, "Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the funding gap between black and white schools in the South increasingly widened. NAACP studies of unequal expenditures in the mid to late 1920s found that Georgia spent $4.59 per year on each African-American child as opposed to $36.29 on each white child. A study by Doxey Wilkerson at the end of the 1930s found that only 19 percent of 14- to 17-year-old African Americans were enrolled in high school." The NAACP won several victories with this campaign, particularly around salary equalization.
, was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist. A part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company
, he was responsible for establishing the Rosenwald Fund
. After meeting Booker T. Washington
in 1911, Rosenwald created his fund to improve the education of southern blacks by building schools, mostly in rural areas. More than 5,300 were built in the South by the time of Rosenwald's death in 1932. He created a system of requiring matching public funds and interracial community cooperation for maintenance and operation of schools. Black communities essentially taxed themselves twice to raise money to support new schools, often donating land and labor to get them built.
With increasing urbanization, Rosenwald schools in many rural areas were abandoned. Some have been converted to community centers and in more urban areas, maintained or renovated as schools. In modern times the National Trust for Historic Preservation
has called Rosenwald Schools as worthy of preservation as "beacons of African American education". By 2009 many communities restored Rosenwald schools.
, were forced into a limited form of desegregation before that; with the Baltimore City Public School System
voting to desegragate the prestigious advanced placement programme in 1952. However, many were still de facto segregated due to inequality in housing and patterns of racial segregation in neighborhoods. President Dwight Eisenhower enforced the Supreme Court's decision by sending US Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas
to protect the "Little Rock Nine
" students' entry to school in 1957, thus setting a precedent for the Executive Branch to enforce Supreme Court rulings related to racial integration. He was the first president since Reconstruction to send Federal troops into the South to protect the rights of blacks.
ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to force mandatory busing on Charlotte, North Carolina
and other cities nationwide in order to affect student assignment based on race and to attempt to further integrate schools. This was meant to combat patterns of de facto segregation that had developed in northern as well as southern cities. 1974's Milliken v. Bradley
decision placed a limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could only be bused across district lines when evidence existed of de jure segregation across multiple school districts. In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their districts. Busing was controversial because it took students out of their own neighborhoods and further away from their parents' supervision and support. Even young students sometimes had lengthy bus rides each day. Districts also experimented with creating incentives, for instance, magnet schools to attract different students voluntarily.
, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol
has found that as of 2005, the proportion of Black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas.
School districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers
, a 34-year-serving African-American state senator from North Omaha, Nebraska
, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999.
In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the African-American community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers’ amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".
The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
after the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
and Reconstruction era, in southern states' public policy to keep races separated and maintain white supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
. In the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
white opposition to African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
success resulted in only the most rudimentary schools for African Americans, as proven by Gebhart v. Belton
Gebhart v. Belton
Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862 , aff'd, 91 A.2d 137 , was a case decided by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1952 and affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court in the same year. Gebhart was one of the five cases combined into Brown v...
. It often took decades after the South established public schools for systems to offer education at the high school level. Nonetheless, black teachers and students created some outstanding black high schools, including Dunbar High School
Dunbar High School (Washington, D.C.)
Dunbar High School is a public secondary school located in Washington, D.C., United States. The school is located in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington, two blocks from the intersection of New Jersey and New York Avenues...
in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
; Dudley High School
James B. Dudley High School
James Benson Dudley High School is located in the Southeastern quadrant of Guilford County in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina. Dudley High School was founded in 1929 as the first black high school in Guilford County, in a school system segregated by law...
in Greensboro, North Carolina
Greensboro, North Carolina
Greensboro is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the third-largest city by population in North Carolina and the largest city in Guilford County and the surrounding Piedmont Triad metropolitan region. According to the 2010 U.S...
, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior and Senior High School
Dunbar Magnet Middle School
Dunbar Gifted & Talented Education International Studies Magnet Middle School is a magnet middle school in Little Rock, Arkansas and administered by the Little Rock School District....
in Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock is the capital and the largest city of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 699,757 people in the 2010 census...
.
History
Few blacks in the South received any education at all until after the Civil War, as slaves were prohibited from being educated. Slaves had been prohibited from being educated, and there were generally no public school system for white children, either. The planter elite paid for private education for its own children. Legislatures of Republican freedmen and whites established public schools for the first time during Reconstruction. Many public schools in the South were segregated from this point forward; it was a condition that freedmen agreed to in order to get agreement to establish the system.After the white Democrats regained power in southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed legal racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. They disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by various voter registration and electoral requirements. Services for black schools (and any black institution) routinely received far less financial support than white schools. In addition, the South was extremely poor for years in the aftermath of the war and dependent on an agricultural economy despite falling cotton prices. Into the 20th century, black schools had fewer books, worse buildings, and teachers were paid less. In Washington, DC, however, because public school teachers were federal employees, black and white teachers were paid the same.
The Virginia Constitution of 1870
Constitution of Virginia
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia is the document that defines and limits the powers of the state government and the basic rights of the citizens of the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. Like all other state constitutions, it is supreme over Virginia's laws and acts of government,...
mandated a system of public education for the first time, but the newly established schools were operated on a segregated basis. In these early schools, which were mostly rural, as was characteristic of the South, classes were most often taught by a single teacher, who taught all subjects, ages, and grades. Chronic underfunding led to constantly over-populated schools, despite the relatively low percentage of black students in schools overall. In 1900 the average black school in Virginia had 37 percent more pupils in attendance than the average white school. This discrimination continued for several years, as demonstrated by the fact that in 1937–38, in Halifax County, Virginia, the total value of white school property was $561,262, contrasted to only $176,881 for the county's black schools.
In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
launched a national campaign to achieve equal schools within the "separate but equal
Separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...
" framework of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses , under the doctrine of "separate but equal".The decision was handed...
. White hostility towards this campaign kept black schools from necessary resources. According to Rethinking Schools magazine, "Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the funding gap between black and white schools in the South increasingly widened. NAACP studies of unequal expenditures in the mid to late 1920s found that Georgia spent $4.59 per year on each African-American child as opposed to $36.29 on each white child. A study by Doxey Wilkerson at the end of the 1930s found that only 19 percent of 14- to 17-year-old African Americans were enrolled in high school." The NAACP won several victories with this campaign, particularly around salary equalization.
Rosenwald Schools
Julius RosenwaldJulius Rosenwald
Julius Rosenwald was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist. He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for the Rosenwald Fund which donated millions to support the education of African American children in the rural South, as well...
, was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist. A part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Sears, officially named Sears, Roebuck and Co., is an American chain of department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in the late 19th century...
, he was responsible for establishing the Rosenwald Fund
Rosenwald Fund
The Rosenwald Fund was established in 1917 by Julius Rosenwald and his family for "the well-being of mankind."...
. After meeting Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
in 1911, Rosenwald created his fund to improve the education of southern blacks by building schools, mostly in rural areas. More than 5,300 were built in the South by the time of Rosenwald's death in 1932. He created a system of requiring matching public funds and interracial community cooperation for maintenance and operation of schools. Black communities essentially taxed themselves twice to raise money to support new schools, often donating land and labor to get them built.
With increasing urbanization, Rosenwald schools in many rural areas were abandoned. Some have been converted to community centers and in more urban areas, maintained or renovated as schools. In modern times the National Trust for Historic Preservation
National Trust for Historic Preservation
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an American member-supported organization that was founded in 1949 by congressional charter to support preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods through a range of programs and activities, including the publication of Preservation...
has called Rosenwald Schools as worthy of preservation as "beacons of African American education". By 2009 many communities restored Rosenwald schools.
Desegregation
Public schools were technically desegregated in the United States in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs Board of Education. Some schools, such as the Baltimore Polytechnic InstituteBaltimore Polytechnic Institute
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute is a US public high school founded in 1883. Though established as an all-male trade school,it now is a institution that emphasizes mathematics, the sciences, and engineering. It is located on a tract of land in North Baltimore at Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane,...
, were forced into a limited form of desegregation before that; with the Baltimore City Public School System
Desegregation of the Baltimore City Public School System
Desegregation of the Baltimore City Public School System happened in 1956 after the United States Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation in schools went against constitutional law...
voting to desegragate the prestigious advanced placement programme in 1952. However, many were still de facto segregated due to inequality in housing and patterns of racial segregation in neighborhoods. President Dwight Eisenhower enforced the Supreme Court's decision by sending US Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock is the capital and the largest city of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 699,757 people in the 2010 census...
to protect the "Little Rock Nine
Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine was a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then...
" students' entry to school in 1957, thus setting a precedent for the Executive Branch to enforce Supreme Court rulings related to racial integration. He was the first president since Reconstruction to send Federal troops into the South to protect the rights of blacks.
Busing
In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of EducationSwann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools...
ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to force mandatory busing on Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. In 2010, Charlotte's population according to the US Census Bureau was 731,424, making it the 17th largest city in the United States based on population. The Charlotte metropolitan area had a 2009...
and other cities nationwide in order to affect student assignment based on race and to attempt to further integrate schools. This was meant to combat patterns of de facto segregation that had developed in northern as well as southern cities. 1974's Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 , was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United...
decision placed a limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could only be bused across district lines when evidence existed of de jure segregation across multiple school districts. In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their districts. Busing was controversial because it took students out of their own neighborhoods and further away from their parents' supervision and support. Even young students sometimes had lengthy bus rides each day. Districts also experimented with creating incentives, for instance, magnet schools to attract different students voluntarily.
Re-segregation
According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is a non-fiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his books on public education in the United States. Kozol graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958 with a degree in English Literature. He was awarded a Rhodes...
has found that as of 2005, the proportion of Black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas.
School districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers
Ernie Chambers
Ernest W. Chambers is a former Nebraska State Senator who represented North Omaha's 11th District in the Nebraska State Legislature. He is also a civil rights activist and is considered by most citizens of Nebraska as the most prominent and outspoken African American leader in the state...
, a 34-year-serving African-American state senator from North Omaha, Nebraska
North Omaha, Nebraska
North Omaha is a community area in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. It is bordered by Cuming and Dodge Streets on the south, Interstate 680 on the north, North 72nd Street on the west and the Missouri River and Carter Lake, Iowa on the east, as defined by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Omaha...
, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999.
In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the African-American community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers’ amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".
The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.
See also
- United States school desegregation case law (category)
- African American cultureAfrican American cultureAfrican-American culture, also known as black culture, in the United States refers to the cultural contributions of Americans of African descent to the culture of the United States, either as part of or distinct from American culture. The distinct identity of African-American culture is rooted in...
- African AmericanAfrican AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
- Timeline of the African-American Civil Rights Movement
- The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in AmericaThe Shame of the NationThe Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is a book by educator and author Jonathan Kozol. It describes how, in the United States, black and Hispanic students tend to be concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body.Kozol visited nearly...
- Wiley H. Bates High SchoolWiley H. Bates High SchoolWiley H. Bates High School is a historic school building in Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It was completed in 1932, and replaced the original Annapolis Colored High School. The school building is named after Wiley H...
, Black School in Annapolis, Maryland