African American Children& Education

Education and African American children were integral to the civil rights movement, but African American children

have yet to achieve educational equality.

Education during Slavery

“That all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY”Virginia Revised Code, 1819

Plessy v. Ferguson

What Purpose Education?• George Washington Carver, “Atlanta Compromise,” 1895“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly . . . . No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. . . . The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”• W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 1903“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

Barbara Johns, Farmville, Virginia, R. R. Moton High School, 1951

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

• Why did the Supreme Court rule that school segregation was unconstitutional?

“"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system." Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ThdlPIgB0

Primary Sources: Segregation Now

• How and why have the schools in Tuscaloosa resegregated?

• How has this affected the young people interviewed in this story?

“De jure” segregation has been replaced by “de facto” segregation

Where do we go from here?