Education
Racial Battles over Education, 1900-1970
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Benefits of education
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Individuals with more education
compared to those with little education
have:
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higher incomes
more stable marriages
live longer
live healthier lives
Benefits of education
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Makes civic debate and democracy
possible
◦ ―The first duty imposed on those who now
direct society is to educate democracy.‖ –
Alexis de Tocqueville (mid-nineteenth
century)
◦ ―Education is the engine that makes American
democracy work.‖ – Drew Gilpin Faust,
Harvard President, 2007
Domination in the curriculum and
classroom
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Not all education is beneficial
◦ You can be educated to
 hate yourself and others
 prize certain accomplishments over others
 assume ―your place‖ within the social hierarchy
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Further education is the solution
6
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Indian Boarding Schools
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Boarding schools were one instrument
used to ―civilize‖ and Anglicize America’s
indigenous people and was done so in a
hurtful manner (see next slide)
The School Days of an Indian Girl.
Zitkala-Sa
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Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered
extreme indignities.
◦ People stared at me
◦ I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet
◦ My long hair was shingled
 I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my
head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my
neck .
 In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me.
Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for
now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.
Indian Boarding Schools
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American Indian children were taught that
their culture was evil and uncivilized
Christian missionaries sometimes threatened to
deny food rations to American Indian parents in
order to get them to send their children to
boarding schools
 Parental visits were discouraged
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Indian Boarding Schools
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If they resisted, children were punished
harshly; some were even killed
◦ schools used military-style discipline
◦ punished for singing traditional songs
◦ students are not allowed to speak in their
native language (see next slide)
Former student
If everybody knew part of their language
or even spoke any Indian terms you
would be spanked for it.
 You were brought in front of everybody
and when you lined up in the morning
before you go to breakfast, they would
call you out, they would have you pull
your pants down, grab your ankles and
they would spank you in front of
everybody and everybody could view it.
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Resistance
Many student were thoroughly
indoctrinated into whiteness and, on
returning home, appeared alien to their
family members.
 Others resisted
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◦ Students ran away
◦ Practiced outlawed ceremonies in secret
◦ Whispered to one another in their native
language
◦ Some even mounted organized rebellions
The Problem of Indian Administration
(1928) Lewis Meriam
Brought to the public’s attention ―that the
provisions for the care of the Indian children in
boarding schools are grossly inadequate.‖
 The abuses suffered by American Indian children
at boarding schools were much worse than those
documented in Meriam’s scathing report
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◦ In 2008, mass graves were found at former boarding
schools located in Canada containing hundreds if not
thousands of bodies of children, some of whom, many
believe, were punished to death.
Indian education reform
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In 1933, John Collier became the Commissioner
on Indian Affairs
◦ Loosened the grip of Anglo-American colonialist
education
◦ Encouraged bilingualism
◦ Placed schools on reservations
◦ Made sure that schools provided students with a safe
and healthy environment
◦ Introduced Native American literature, poetry, and
philosophy into school’s curriculum through new
textbooks written in collaboration with tribal elders
Education by Indians
In 1966, the first Indian-controlled school
was established on the Navajo
Reservation.
 Three years later, the first tribal college,
Navajo Community College, was founded.
 Today, in many reservation schools, tribal
language is taught beside English. Native
American folklore and literature is read
along with Mark Twain and Jane Austen.
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Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
African-American education
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Reasons for why whites worked to deny
blacks educational opportunities
◦ It would be more difficult to exploit them as
cheap labor
 ―Educate a nigger and you spoil a good field hand!‖
 It would give them access to stable jobs
 It would give them access to money or maybe
power
African-American education
Reasons for why whites worked to deny
blacks educational opportunities (cont.)
 Whites would incur a symbolic cost
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◦ Poor whites knew education was ―the great
equalizer‖ (see next slide)
Gunnar Myrdal. An American Dilemma
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The poorer classes of whites are in
competition with Negroes for jobs and for
social status. One of the things which
demarcates them as superior and increases
the future potentialities of their children is
the fact that white children in publically
supported school buses are taken to fine
consolidated schools while often Negro
children are given only what amounts to a
sham education in dilapidated one-room
schools or old Negro churches by underpaid,
badly trained Negro teachers
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Industrial
education!
Are you
kidding?
Booker T. Washington
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The ―Atlanta Compromise‖ (1895)
◦ Made two concessions
 Called blacks’ desire for political power a mistake
 Said that blacks should not strive for equality with whites
◦ Advised blacks to dedicate themselves to working hard,
even in the lowest sectors of society, instead of fighting for
equal rights
 Seek to develop better trained workers: skilled field hands,
manual laborers, and domestic servants; not doctors or lawyers
 The solution to ―the race problem‖ was for blacks to accept their
dominated position and to work hard in jobs reserved for them.
Booker T. Washington
◦ In turn, he asked whites to treat blacks fairly
◦ The races were to be separate but cooperative
 ―In all things that are purely social we can be separate as
the fingers, yet as one hand in all things essential to
mutual progress.‖
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Whites liked the compromise Washington
proposed
◦ Received philanthropic support and political
backing to begin a program of ―industrial
education‖ at the Tuskegee Institute he founded
in 1880
Criticisms of Booker T. Washington
◦ Many black leaders believed that Washington’s program served racial
domination and legitimized an unjust educational system.
 Whites received the best training
 Blacks were prepared for tedious and backbreaking work—slavery in new guise
◦ Others pointed to the growing inequality between white and black
schools
 E.g., blacks in North Carolina received 28% of school funds in 1900 but only 13% in
1915.
◦ Others worried about the psychological damage Washington was
inflicting on the minds of black youth
 Essentially, teaching them to accept white society’s message about their inferiority.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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W. E. B. Du Bois was an outspoken critic of Washington
◦ First African American to graduate with a Ph.D. from Harvard
◦ Cofounded the NAACP
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Wrote In the Souls of Black Folk, in which he comments about
education and trades
◦ believed that black education should be no different than white
education
 ―Shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and
both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make
carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of
fools.‖
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Du Bois chastised Washington for
perpetuating a kind of symbolic violence, for
failing to criticize white supremacy:
◦ ―Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the
old attitude of adjustment and submission. . . . His
doctrine had tended to make the whites, North
and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem
to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as
critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in
fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the
hands of none of us are clean of we bend not our
energies to righting these wrongs.‖
W. E. B. Du Bois
By denying blacks access to higher learning,
Washington was closing the black mind.
 The talented tenth
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The brightest and the most talented members of the
race should educate themselves in order to uplift all
blacks
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―I freely acknowledge that it is possible, and sometimes best,
that a partially underdeveloped people should be ruled by the
best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own
good.‖
Some criticize Du Bois’s beliefs as elitist
Washington vs. Du Bois
Booker T. Washington
•Tuskegee Institute
•“Atlanta Compromise”
W.E.B. Du Bois
•NAACP
•No compromise
•Industrial education
•Education should
develop better trained
laborers
•Equal education
•Talented tenth—the most
talented members of the
race should educate
themselves to uplift all
blacks
What were the benefits and shortfalls of each program?
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Backlash
 In
1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the
Supreme Court hand down a decision that
dismantled the legal basis of racial
segregation
 The
Supreme Court suggested that states
respond to Brown with ―all deliberate speed‖
 Southern
whites mounted a backlash against
desegregation, forming Citizens Councils
 The
Little Rock Nine desegregated Central
High with an armed military escort
Brown’s Legacy
Because Americans’ neighborhoods are segregated
and because where you live
determines where you go to school
schools remain separate and unequal
even though legalized segregation is no more
Residential
segregation
School segregation
How segregated was your high
school?
Within your high school, did you
notice a pattern of separate and
unequal?
That is, were some students
overrepresented in the
accelerated classes?
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education
Whiteness in Education
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Eurocentric history
Normalizing whiteness
Whiteness on college campuses
Whiteness in Education
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Eurocentric history
Normalizing whiteness
Whiteness on college campuses
Eurocentric History
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Eurocentric accounts consider the stories
and experiences of Americans of
European descent to be central to
American history, while marginalizing the
stories of non-Europeans
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E.g., the Emancipation Proclamation (but not the horrors of
slavery)
Eurocentric History
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the following concepts could still be
found within state-approved textbooks as
late as the 1950s
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justification for slavery
criticism of Reconstruction
mourning the fall of the Southern system
inflating whites’ sense of accomplishments
regarding slavery
Eurocentric History
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ignore how nonwhite groups contributed to the
development of the United States
◦ Nat Turner’s slave revolt
◦ memoir of an Asian American railroad worker
◦ stories from African American sharecroppers
◦ diaries of Mexican farm workers in California
Eurocentric History
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Cast America as a white nation and dull
the sharp edge of past injustices
◦ the following historical events are usually
glossed over by Eurocentric historians and is
not as well known among the majority of U.S.
citizens:
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the hell of being a slave in the United States
anti-immigrant violence and discrimination
story of Emmett Till
the Indian Wars
Whiteness in Education
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Eurocentric history
Normalizing whiteness
Whiteness on college campuses
Normalizing Whiteness
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Literature
◦ Literary classics written by white authors
◦ Non-white characters are racially marked
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Anthropology
◦ Eroticization of nonwhite cultures
◦ White cultures considered uninteresting, normal
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Feminism
◦ Movement led by white women
◦ Overlooks how the experience of being a woman varies
across racial and class lines
How has whiteness informed
your education?
Is whiteness normalized in your
current classes?
If so, what are the consequences of
this normalization?
Whiteness in Education
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Eurocentric history
Normalizing whiteness
Whiteness on college campuses
Whiteness on College Campuses
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Nonwhite students often feel isolated and
unwelcome on campus and in dorms
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They sometimes receive differential treatment
and are given lower marks by instructors
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They are confronted by racist jokes, remarks,
Halloween costumes, and school mascots
Nationally, 1 in 4 students of color
report having been a victim of racially motivated verbal or
physical attacks
during their college career
Education
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Benefits of education
Indian boarding schools
African-American education
Washington vs. Du Bois
Brown v. Board of Education backlash
Whiteness in education