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Wiki-Project: African American Liberation through Education

Article Evaluation

Reading the article Black School, the first noticeable thing to me was the lack of dates within the references to important events within the introduction. A clear and concise definition of “black schools” is not given in the first paragraph, but more or less explains why there were created and where. The writer’s content in the article relate to the subject of black schools, as well as pull from a wide variety of sources that are relevant towards the topic including New York Times articles and books.

I do believe that while introducing the topic, the writer underrepresented some key leaders that affected the beliefs African Americans had in terms of education at the time, such as the lessons from Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B Du Bois. There is also missing information that I could add to regarding the role The Great Migration, economic gains from World War II, and military desegregation had on desegregation in education that lead to the end of black schools. Language within the article was neutral in manner but have areas that could be more detailed, or use different diction to make the article more comprehensible.

There were some accounts of outdated names on referenced locations and events. Many of the links used within the article were working but were unnecessary, while more supporting information could have been linked.

Solid reflections. 5/5

Article Selection

Article I: Black School

Relevance/Distractions:

Within the introduction of the article, I found the listing of notable black high schools as a distraction or unorganized at the least.

Out of Date/Missing Info:

Many of the information presented within the article is

Improvements:

My initial thoughts for improving this article is creating a more organized manner of presenting locations, as the high school setting play an important role in this topic, but should be given a more pleasing way of being presented. Possibly I would want to explore the geographical comparisons at the time of segregation in the United States. Next, I want to turn my focus on the content of the article, I would like to add the conflicting ideologies of W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, as well as the roles of Ida B. Wells and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Another topic that I feel would be useful adding is higher education for African Americans during the segregation that created black schools. Lastly, I would like to improve the "desegregation" portion the author created and expand upon what he has already written.

Bias/Neutrality:

The author remains neutral throughout the whole article, insuring not to use any personal pronouns or tones.

Over/Under representations:

The author of this article I believe unintentionally underrepresented the leaders involved with creating "black schools," mentioning little to none of the prominent black figures during the time of legal segregation. Another section of the article I believed is underrepresented is "desegregation," I know that section could be given more detail about the political

Sources:

Within this article a majority of the sources within this article are valid, relevant, and up-to-date. The sources used are made within the last twenty years.

Why This Article:

I chose this article because of my interest in African-American studies, literature, and law. While reading it, I knew it was a topic I was not familiar with, and I could although it is informative, there is definitely room for improvement in the structure and content. I believe this is the article that could most benefit from being updated.

Article III: Historically black colleges and universities

Why This Article:

Evaluations are needed for your other two possible selections. (DB) 3.5.5

Research Question Reflection

Research Question

Young black students learning in "colored-only" school, 1916

Throughout history how has learning and higher education affected African Americans in their fight for freedom and rights. Is the role of education for African Americans still relevant or important today?

More details are needed (DB) 3/5

****Correction**** (DB) this looks better 5/5.

Who is Impacted?

My topic will be directed towards African Americans, as well as reference historical figures who played roles in speaking upon the importance of education for African-Americans including but not limited to, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963), Malcolm X (1925–1965), and Septima Clark (1898-1987).

Setting

The setting of my research question will be in the United States following the history of African Americans from circa 1600's to present day to to explain the earliest introductions of reading and writing to slaves. There may be a concentration on southern states since Jim Crow laws made education harder for African Americans to obtain.

What Aspect is Interesting?

Personally this topic is of high interest to me because of its relevance to my life as young African-American student receiving higher education. With my topic I hope to learn more about how education, historically and present day, including the basics of literary and writing gave a voice to oppressed African Americans, and how they were able to use those tools to be freed, as well obtain civil rights. I am excited to be able to see how strong figures in the black community found their agency.

Black Schools

Black schools, also referred to as "colored" schools, were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. The phenomenom began shortly after the Reconstruction era when southern states created public policies, otherwise known as Jim Crow laws, that legalized the practice of racial segregation 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, lacking necessary state funding. 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:

• Armstrong High School in Richmond, Virginia
• Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.
• Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina
• Howard Academy in Ocala, Florida
• Paul Laurance Dunbar Magnet Middle School in Little Rock, Arkansas

History[edit]

Few African Americans in the South received any education at all until after the Civil War. Slaves had been prohibited from being educated, and there was 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.

Integrated public schools meant local white teachers in charge, and they were not trusted. The black leadership generally supported segregated all-black schools. That way black principals and teachers would be in charge, or (in private schools) else highly supportive whites sponsored by northern churches. Public schools were segregated throughout the South during Reconstruction and afterward into the 1950s. New Orleans was a partial exception: its schools were usually integrated during Reconstruction.

After the white Democrats regained power in southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed legal 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, African-American and Caucasian 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 African-American 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.

Free Black Schools

Main article: Racial Segregation in the United States

Rosenwald Schools[edit]

Main article: Rosenwald Schools

Julius Rosenwald, 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.

Citizenship Schools

Main article: Septima Clark

Septima Clark, an American educator and civil rights activist was most notably known for the creation of citizenship schools in 1957. Clark's project initially developed from secret literacy courses she held for African American adults in the Deep South. Citizenship schools helped Black Southerners push for the right to vote, as well as create activits and leaders for the Civil Rights Movement, using a curriculum that instilled self-pride, cultural-pride, literacy, and a sense of one's citizenship rights. The citizenship school project trained over 10,000 citizenship school teachers who led over 800 citizenship schools throughout the South that was responsible for registering approximately 700,000 African Americans to vote.

Freedom Schools

Main article: Freedom Schools

An activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964, Charles Cobb, proposed that the organization sponsor a network of Freedom Schools. Originally Freedom Schools were organized to achieve social, political, and economic equality through teaching African American students to be social change agents for the Civil Rights Movement; Black educators and activists later utilized the schools to provide schooling in areas where black public schools were closed in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. More than 40 of these free schools existed by the end of the summer in 1964 serving close to 3,000 students.

Desegregation[edit]

Main article: School integration in the United States

Public schools were legally desegregated in the United States in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Some schools, such as the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, were forced into a limited form of desegregation before that; with the Baltimore City Public School System voting to desegregate 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 African Americans.

Busing

Main article: Desegregation busing in the United States

In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education 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.

Re-segregation[edit]

See also: Auto-segregation and White flight

According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 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.

Black 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.