Segregation, Desegregation, Resegregation: African American Education, A Guide to the Literature

Harvard Sitkoff

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
15 (Winter 2001). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2001, Organization of American Historians

Fittingly, the student protests (occasionally abetted by their teachers) of the civil rights era that forced schools to add African American history courses to their curricula, that pressured instructors to give blacks their rightful place in U.S. history courses, and that ultimately led to a fundamental reconceptualization of American history with race at its core, has resulted in increased scholarly attention to the history of African American education. And that new scholarship reminds us again that history is not written in a vacuum, that historians are influenced by their zeitgeist, that the writing of African American history reflects the history of African Americans and of relations between black and white.

John Hope Franklin, in "On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History," delineates four periods or generations (1). The first, from George Washington Williams's History of the Negro Race in America (1882) to Booker T. Washington's Story of the Negro (1909), sought primarily to describe the positive role of blacks in American life. Written primarily by African Americans not trained as professional historians, such works depicted the adjustment of the race to the dominant white world. When read primarily as documents that reflect their times, rather than as works of historical scholarship, they serve a useful function.

In 1915 W. E. B. Du Bois's The Negro and the founding of the Association for the Study of the Negro Life and History, followed by the launching of the Journal of Negro History a year later, ushered in the second phase. Dominated largely by Carter G. Woodson, it emphasized black achievements in, and contributions to, American life and culture. Woodson's launching of Negro History Week in 1926, and of the popular Negro History Bulletin (for teachers and students) shortly thereafter, were intended to inform both blacks and whites that the Negro had not been "a negligible factor" in the history of the nation. This university-trained generation of African American historians, far more analytical than its predecessor, sought the advancement of the race by developing racial pride and self-respect.

Then, from Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) to the end of the 1960s, came a generation of historians, mostly and increasingly white (and referred to derisively as "neo-abolitionists"), that focused less on the achievements of African American elites and more on the oppression of blacks by whites. Fighting for the integration of African Americans into the mainstream of American life--as well as fighting to integrate African American history into the mainstream of American history--its writings countered demeaning stereotypes of blacks while documenting the sordid history of discrimination. It sought, often successfully, to describe a past that would reinforce the black struggle to dismantle Jim Crow, end disfranchisement, and desegregate schools and public accommodations.

After the peak of black activism and the emergence of a new social milieu in the 1970s, the fourth and by far the largest generation of historians of African America (increasingly, but not yet mostly, black and/or female, as a consequence of the opening up of the historical profession) revised the all-too-common portrait of African Americans as hobbled victims of racial oppression. Drawing sustenance from women's studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and other scholarly fields concerned with "theory," and also from post-civil-rights-era developments in black America, this latest outpouring of scholarship highlights black agency and group solidarity. It stresses the resilience and vibrancy of a distinct black community life, rather than the damaging effects of segregation emphasized in the earlier liberal, integrationist paradigm.

African Americans desired and appreciated formal education even when enslaved, claimed those writing in the first and second generations. But that quest, and its occasional attainment, mattered less to the third generation historians, whose racial egalitarianism found expression in wholesale condemnations of slavery. To Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, among others, the enormous horror of the peculiar institution was what mattered, not the exceptions to the rule. They focused on the extreme harm to the bondsmen, on the dehumanizing manifestations of white racism, on what white oppression did to African American behavior and personality. By so dramatizing the utter victimization of blacks, historians in the civil rights era routed the ideas of Ulrich B. Phillips and other defenders of slavery. The third generation demolished all notions of the plantation as a civilizing school for savage Africans, of slavery as a benevolent institution.

For those in the era of Black Power and Black Nationalism, however, the affirmation of blackness and black self-worth made the focus on African Americans as damaged goods untenable. Looking at slavery from the bottom up, studying slave life and behavior through the eyes of the slaves themselves, historians of the fourth generation emphasized an autonomous African American culture and community, one that included an unquenchable desire to learn to read and write. Black education as part of a tradition of resistance to white hegemony would be stressed by Ira Berlin, John Blassingame, Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, Leslie Owens, George Rawick, and Sterling Stuckey, as they replaced the closed plantation system of Elkins with one that gave slaves social space to learn (2). In the past quarter of a century, this "community-and-culture perspective" of slavery became the new orthodoxy. It is strikingly manifest in the monographs of Sylvia Frey and Thomas Webber on the relationships between black religion and black education, and between both and black resistance.

A similar "community-and-culture perspective" dominates the writings of the fourth generation about blacks in the North. The accent is less on the crushing and overwhelming oppression of African Americans by whites and more on the autonomy and cultural cohesiveness of blacks. For Robert Cottrol, James Oliver Horton, Sidney and Emma Kaplan, Gary Nash, William D. Pierson, Christopher Phillips, Shane White, and Julie Winch, antebellum free blacks were much more than "slaves without masters." They relied on their own resources, rather than white benevolence, to construct the foundations of free black life in the United States. Emphasizing collective self-help, and both formal and informal mutual support networks, African Americans established independent churches and schools. More than just the response of being excluded from white schools, they reflected the value African Americans placed on creating institutions controlled by blacks as well as the deep-seated desire to learn, to gain an education that African Americans associated with freedom and the rights of citizenship.

The "community-and-culture perspective" also marks the recent literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction. As much as it highlights notions of white Republican failings (including racism) and of a new form of slavery replacing the old one, the fourth generation depicts African Americans seeking as much control as possible over their own lives and depending on their own communities. Regarding the Civil War, most now follow James McPherson in asserting that African Americans were not merely passive recipients of the war's benefits, and that blacks provided leadership in the struggle for emancipation, education, and equal rights. But while McPherson focused on free "Negro orators and writers," later historians emphasized the contributions of the slaves themselves. Much like Du Bois countering the image of the hapless slave, the works of Barbara Fields, Eric Foner, Samuel L. Horst, and the ongoing series of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, overseen by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, stress the agency of bondsmen in their own liberation.

To an even greater extent, African American "agency" and "autonomy" are the dominant terms in the latest scholarship on Reconstruction. While the debate over the role of the Freedmen's Bureau and "Yankee schoolmarms" continues (3), fourth generation historians agree on the enormous enthusiasm of the freedmen to acquire education and to send as many children as possible to school. James D. Anderson, Allen Ballard, Ronald E. Butchart, Robert C. Morris, and William P. Vaughan describe in great detail African Americans providing the impetus and initiative for their own education, filling the makeshift schools in contraband camps; establishing their own day, evening, and Sunday schools in abandoned buildings after emancipation; constantly pressing the Freedmen's Bureau for financial and material aid; and increasingly doing the teaching as well as the learning in the more than four thousand freedmen's schools servicing a quarter of a million black children.

James D. Anderson and others in the fourth generation, moreover, make clear that this commitment to education as the key to achievement and advancement hardly ended with the demise of Reconstruction. Whereas the third generation, whether writing about the rural South or urban North, zeroed in on the constraints that racism imposed on post-Reconstruction African Americans (4), those in the fourth highlight the creation of indigenous, distinctive black institutions and organizations--even, as Andrew Ward movingly describes, singing the spirituals to finance African American college buildings. Resistance to white oppression and the internal positive values of the black community, as well as black self-help and educational uplift, would be featured by Thomas C. Cox, Spencer Crew, Douglas Daniels, David Gerber, Janet Sharp Hermann, David Katzman, Kenneth Kusmer, Roger Lane, Earl Lewis, Leon Litwack, Robert McCaul, Neil McMillen, Elizabeth Pleck, and Joe William Trotter Jr. Such notions would be even more manifest in the studies of African American education by James D. Anderson, Vincent P. Franklin, Michael W. Homel, James L. Leloudis, and Robert G. Sheer.

Here special mention must be made concerning the ever growing scholarship on African American women, who figure so centrally in the history of black education as students, teachers, parents, and community activists. A debt is owed to Adelle Logan Alexander, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Dorothy Salem, Stephanie Shaw, Tera W. Hunter, and still others, for giving black women their deserved recognition as creators and sustainers of so many black educational institutions. Not infrequently, moreover, the expansive views of education held by African American women led to their involvement in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. And, some argue, the expansion of education fostered by black women virtually guaranteed a future challenge to Jim Crow and white supremacy.

But not in the short run. In the era Rayford Logan termed "the nadir" of black life in the United States, African Americans in the South were denied equal access to the very school systems they helped to establish. And the little education they received more often than not accommodated them to positions at the bottom of society. To some historians, particularly James D. Anderson and Donald Spivey, this outcome was the direct result of the funding of African American schools by white supremacist philanthropists who determined that industrial education for blacks be "schools for servitude," "schooling for the new slavery." Still others, like Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr., reject the notion that northern white philanthropists conspired to develop a permanent caste education for African Americans. The ideas of black educators are indispensable to this debate, and the best guides to their outlooks include Arnold Cooper, Leroy Davis, Edmund L. Drago, Kevin Gaines, David L. Lewis, and August Meier. Whatever the motives or goals of white philanthropists and African American educators, however, black students and their parents had their own views, and, as Raymond Wolters shows, would disrupt schools to get their way. Some representative histories of historically black institutions of higher learning which until the mid 1960s graduated more than half the African Americans earning college degrees, are by Clarence Bacote, Edward A. Jones, Maxine D. Jones and Joe M. Richardson, Rayford Logan, and Florence M. Read.

Segregation in public education at every level increased in the first half of the twentieth century, whether due to the racism of school administrators, a consequence of residential segregation, or a matter of law. Judy Jolly Mohraz wisely reminds us that no single paradigm encompasses all communities at all times. Depending on local circumstances, some African American communities militantly demanded integrated schools, while others adopted an accommodationist stance. Divisions existed within African American communities as well: the elite did not speak for all blacks. And as there was considerable variation in the nature, intensity, and duration of Jim Crow education, so Spencer Crew, David Gerber, Judy Jolly Mohraz, Howard Rabinowitz, and Lillian Serece Williams indicate differences in the black responses to discrimination and especially segregation. By no means, David Cecelski and Vanessa Siddle Walker aver, did all African Americans seek desegregation.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did. Stories of the campaigns it waged to end segregated education are recounted by attorneys Jack Greenberg and Constance Baker Motley, and by biographers Genna Rae McNeil and Gilbert Ware. The long, twisting path trod by the Supreme Court from Plessy to Brown is scrutinized by Charles F. Lofgren, John Howard, J. Morgan Kousser, and Andrew Kull. The NAACP's efforts and the debates within the Supreme Court that it caused are skillfully analyzed by Mark V. Tushnet. The historical background and the real lives behind the five individual cases that the high court decided in Brown v. Board of Education are narrated by Richard Kluger. Jordan Schwartz is indispensable on Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Gary Orfield is a sure guide to post-Brown educational developments.

These studies, moreover, are just a tiny part of a vast literature, overwhelmingly liberal in viewpoint and in favor of the Brown decision, on the struggle against segregated education. The efforts on behalf of desegregation and against resegregation at the local level are featured in Liva Baker, Davison Douglas, Ronald P. Formisano, Tony Freyer, Gregory Jacobs, William Kellar, Robyn Duff Ladino, J. Anthony Lukas, Robert A. Pratt, and Robert C. Smith, while the desegregation of southern universities is the focus of Russell H. Barrett, E. Culpepper Clark, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, James Meredith, and Calvin Trillin. The most vigorous opponents of Brown are the subjects of Numan V. Bartley, Michael Belknap, David R. Colburn, Robbins L. Gates, Neil McMillen, Benjamin Muse, and Francis M. Wilhoit. For the role of the lower courts, see Jack Bass and Jack Pelatson; and for the Supreme Court after Brown, see Jordan Schwartz, Mark Tushnet, and J. Harvie Wilkinson.

Few historians have been openly critical of Brown (5). But increasingly, scholars like Jennifer Hochschild are raising probing questions and others, such as David J. Armor, Steven C. Halpern, and Austin Sarat, are underlining the limitations of legal change. Going further, Michael J. Klarman and Gerald Rosenberg minimize the role of the courts in general, and Brown quite specifically, in securing meaningful racial change. And further yet, the critical race theorists Derrick A. Bell, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, and Girardeau Spann stress the inherent conservatism of the courts and their repeated unwillingness to "do the right thing" for African Americans.

It is hardly novel that those who have written the history of African American education desired to write history that would speak to their present. It is simply yet another example of the tension between detached scholarship and history as advocacy. Much as C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow minimized the length and depth of Jim Crow to undercut assertions of segregation's inevitability and immutability and thereby foster racial change, so an earlier generation gloried in the heroic accomplishments of individual African Americans and a later one took up the pen on behalf of black self-definition and self-determination.

1. John Hope Franklin, "On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History," in The State of Afro-American History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 13-22. For a somewhat different division of African American historiography into five periods, see August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 73.

2. See also David Freedman, "African-American Schooling in the South Prior to 1861," Journal of Negro History 84 (Winter 1999):1-47.

3. Randy Finley, Louis S. Gerteis, William S. McFeely, Leon F. Litwack, Richard Lowe, Daniel A. Novak, and William L. Richter are among those who criticize the Freedman's Bureau for its racism, depict it as an agent of social control and/or paternalism, and see it as a tool of the planters or as pressing northern capitalist priorities on the freedmen. Herman Belz, Barry A. Crouch, Jacqueline Jones, and James M. McPherson, among others, see its virtues as well as some of its faults, while emphasizing the enormous difficulty of its endeavor. The range of views is captured in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction, Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), and analyzed in LaWanda Cox, "From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks," in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and John David Smith, "'The Work It Did Not Do Because It Could Not': Georgia and the 'New' Freedmen's Bureau Historiography," Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (Summer 1998): 331-49.

4. Representative works include Constance M. Green, The Secret City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York, 1890-1920 (New York, Harper and Row,1966); and Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). These should be read in conjunction with David B. Tyack, "Growing Up Black: Perspectives on the History of Education in Northern Ghettos," History of Education Quarterly 9 (1969): 287-97.

5. A significant exception to the rule is Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

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Harvard Sitkoff, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is the author or editor of numerous books, including A New Deal for Blacks (1978); The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (1993); Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Reevaluated (1984); A History of Our Time, with William Chafe (5th ed., 1999); Postwar America: A Student Companion (2000); and Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century (2001). His articles and essays have appeared in the American Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, and Wilson Quarterly, among others, and he is the co-author of the textbook The Enduring Vision (4th ed., 2000). A frequent lecturer abroad, Sitkoff has been awarded the Fulbright Commission's John Adams Professorship of American Civilization in the Netherlands and the Mary Ball Washington Professorship of American History in Ireland.