Conference: Teaching Race and slavery in the American classroom - Gilder Lehrman Center 2022 Annual Conference
Panel: History of U.S. Education: What’s Race Got To Do With It?
Book recommended: Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (How Things Worked), Johns Hopkins University Press (August 1, 2017)
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*The black and white school enrollment did not equalize until around 1970 – the long standing impact of racism in American life, which meant that black families had less access to educational resources than most white Americans. I don’t need to tell you that this was because our public schools have been segregated in fact or law for much of their history. And worse, they are more segregated today than they were a couple decades ago.
*I wrote my book because I wanted to revitalize the original purposes and aspirations that convinced Americans to turn education from a private good and a parental responsibility as it was understood at the time of the Revolution, into a public good and taxpayer and citizen responsibility as it had come to be understood by the 1830s and 1840s.
*The increasing unwillingness by those on the cultural left as well as those on the religious right to embrace Public School's traditional mission of socialization, of how to bring a diverse people to come together as Americans.
*While the common schools were racist, as were most Americans at the time, maintaining racial supremacy was not one of the primary reasons why the public schools emerged after the Revolution. The primary reasons were educating citizens, encouraging every individual, although not every individual's right, talents, equalizing opportunity, and forging a nation.
*Schools proved themselves on the ground and parents invested because they saw the advantages to their children. But in that investment, they also invested in other people’s children, so the schools actually won the argument by being really good.
*But race and racism did shape who had access to public education and on what terms. And as I was writing my book, I believed it was essential that Americans also know that the racial inequalities of our Public Schools were there from the very beginning. So, let me turn now to how race mattered.
*On the eve of the Civil War, 28% of black children were in school in New York State, 38 % in Pennsylvania, and 40% in Ohio, well below the numbers of white children. In the entire south, on the other hand, only about 3% of free black children were enrolled.
* As historian of education Cambria Baumgartner has written, segregation and integration practices where hyper local, which is why it’s hard to tell a shared story. They were different not only between schools within the same districts, but they change within schools themselves over time.
* Northern schools were largely segregated and most tax dollars went to support white education, leaving black Americans behind. Black Americans pushed for tax refunds so that they could use that money to support their own schools, and many jurisdictions actually agreed. But most of the funding went to support white children.
* African Americans responded in multiple ways. First, they started their own schools or patronized academies that would accept black students, because black parents and children were deeply committed to education. But second, and most importantly, black Americans sought integration, for African Americans access to public schools was needed, not only because it provided opportunity for their children, but it was proof that you belonged to the nation, that you were an equal citizen among others.
* One of the most famous examples of this is black abolitionist Benjamin Roberts, who sued Boston to mandate racial integration. Roberts and his black and white allies took the case all the way to the State Supreme Court in 1850, but they did not win the case. They lost, but they didn’t give up and they continued to mobilize and convince the state legislature to outlaw racial segregation in Massachusetts schools.
*One of their arguments, which was rejected – the minority who supported integration wrote this about the value of integration: our common school system suits our institutions, it promotes the feelings of brotherhood, and the habits of Republican equality. By being together, equality is promoted. To debar the colored race from these advantages, even if we still secure them equal educational results, is a sore injustice and wrong and is taking the surest means of perpetuating a prejudice. It is vital that diverse Americans come into the same buildings and spend time together, and learn about each other as equals.
*Many Blacks felt that America was to racist a society to ever treat black and white students equally within the same buildings. But Roberts had a different understanding of America. Public education, the nation itself, could belong to all Americans. It was essential that black and white Americans therefore, indeed all Americans, because this was also an age of increasing immigration, be educated in common. Common institutions forge mutual respect, as well as a common shared national identity.
*White Americans realized this, which may be why they responded with violence at the prospect of integration. Too many whites did not want a multi-racial nation. In Canaan, New Hampshire, for example, in 1835, a mob of white people used 95 yoke of oxen to drag Noyes Academy, a private school that educated black students into a swamp. And it was not an isolated incident.
*Now, the story in the South is both simpler and more complex. Simpler, in the sense that it goes without saying that white Southerners did not permit enslaved people to be educated officially. Many states banned teaching enslaved people to read, especially after Nat Turner’s rebellion. But enslaved and free black people in the South risked much to learn. In cities, there was a whole host of covert schools, and in Mississippi, one observer recalled, there were pit schools near a Mississippi plantation, where enslaved people would dig a hole in the ground, cover it with brush – a hidden place for enslaved people to learn how to read.
*That’s how much education was valued by those denied it. But the more complex part is that slavery shaped the entire political system of the South. It affected the delivery of all public goods, including education. Because the South’s tax system depended on taxing slave owners, and because slave owners dominated the state houses, it was hard even for working middle-class whites to raise the kinds of taxes they wanted to support public schools.
*But there was another issue that frightened slaveholders. If education was what it mattered to develop competent, capable, virtuous citizens, could that matter more than race? In other words, public education was so radical, because it threatened the very foundations of the South’s racial order - 631 African-American schools were destroyed by violence between 1864 and 1876 - that’s what historian Campbell Scribner found in the Freedmen’s Bureau record, suggesting that that’s only what made it into the records - A significant legacy of American education was that white skin comes to be associated with full membership in the nation, a cycle yet to be fully broken.
*But yet from the very early stages of the Republic, black parents have sought to educate their children, and those children have risked violence to get an education. And from the earliest decades of public education in America, public schools both reflected American presumptions of white supremacy and reinforced them. In other words, I try to make clear in my book that the public schools are not innocent institutions in the story of American racial hierarchy, and the story of American racism. By denying black Americans access to the same schools, the public schools sent the message that black Americans were not fully American.
*Does knowing this history mean that the major story we need to tell about America’s educational history is about race? Does it matter, as we tell complex stories of our past, that most of the advocates of public school were civic egalitarians, albeit not egalitarian always on the case of race, and that public schools sought to purposefully replace private tuition with public dollars? Does it matter that our common schools democratize access to a liberal education that had once been the preserve of the elite? At a time when privatization is on the table, if fact it’s taking place in some states, does it not matter that popular support for education as a public good depends on the development of common institutions?
*Can we tell multiple stories of institutions that are both shaped by and contribute to America’s racist history? I think we can, I think we must, but I struggle with this question a lot. I tried to tell the truth as best as I could grasp it in my book, to be honest about the role of race and racism, while not reducing the story of American public education to it.
*In a racist society, it is easy, perhaps too easy to flip this racist script and see race and racism as the primary cause and foundation for every American idea, policy, and institution. Because racism is honestly everywhere.
*Some on the left, and we have to admit this, see racism as the constitutive fact of American history. Conservatives are not wrong when they point this out. They’re also not wrong to worry if the left’s narrative is correct that everything else in American history is too corrupt to be salvaged, much less celebrated. There is in fact no usable past available for causes Progressive or Conservative. Now, to be clear, we must condemn the Republicans’ overreach laws that aim to silence asking hard questions about America’s racist past, laws that are actually hateful, but we must remember that the institutions of the past are not pure and purity cannot be our standard. And that is true for both the right and the left.
*Wholesale acceptance and wholesale rejection are flip sides of the same coin. They simplify complex histories of people who are complex people with multiple motives. They create stereotypes and we should not do that, and it’s not useful, I would argue, to do that either.
*Right now, I believe in some kind of moderation. We must work against those who deny the centrality of racism in American history, while also avoiding the temptation to make racism the most salient and only feature or the primary feature of every story we tell about the American past. I can see the temptation, why, we want to wrong our country’s most serious injustice, but it simplifies, and I also worry, given our current moment, it does not help, and it does not help even in the case of where there are resources in our past to achieve goals that might be shared by those on the left.
Main ideas selected by Sorina Georgescu
You may see the entire panel here:
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