A Long and Tedious Journey: African Americans and the History of Education
Introduction
Throughout history, Black Americans have endured a long and challenging journey in their pursuit of educational opportunities. From the restrictions imposed during slavery to the fight for equal access in the face of segregation, their story is one of resilience, determination, and the transformative power of education. This article explores the key milestones, persistent disparities, and enduring legacy of African Americans in the realm of education.
The Struggle for Education During Slavery
During the period of slavery, Blacks suffered tremendous hardships in their pursuit of education in their efforts to learn to read, write and become articulate. White people denied education for African Americans during slavery. That, however, did not stop enslaved African Americans from creating their own hidden education systems. For example, enslaved African Americans would form secret groups to teach each other how to read and write. These groups and systems would have to be hidden due to great risk associated (usually threat of physical violence).
Moreover, during the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, few Blacks were able to become literate. Before Emancipation, whites generally denied or restricted African Americans’ access to education in an effort to justify and maintain slavery. Learning to read therefore became a symbol of freedom for African Americans in the former slave-holding states.
Reconstruction Era: Seeds of Educational Opportunity
During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans in the former slave-holding states saw education as an important step towards achieving equality, independence, and prosperity. As a result, they found ways to learn despite the many obstacles that poverty and white people placed in their path. The widespread illiteracy made it urgent that high on the African-American agenda was creating new schooling opportunities, including both private schools and public schools for black children funded by state taxes.
Legislatures of Republican freedmen and whites established public schools for the first time during the Reconstruction era. After the war, Northern missionaries founded numerous private academies and colleges for freedmen across the South. Most of the major Protestant bodies participated in establishing, staffing and funding the schools.
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In Sharpsburg, Maryland, a small church known as Tolson’s Chapel was at the center of local blacks’ efforts to educate themselves and their children. African American Methodists built Tolson’s Chapel in 1866, just two years after the end of slavery in Maryland in 1864. For much of the period between 1868 and 1899, this modest building near the site of the Civil War Battle of Antietam served as both a church and a school. As African Americans built lives as free people in a free society during Reconstruction, they eagerly sought opportunities to learn.
African Americans had other reasons for making literacy a priority after slavery ended. Many hoped that education would improve their economic circumstances and offer some protection from fraud and exploitation. They also saw education as important preparation for participating in civic life.
Challenges and Support During Reconstruction
African Americans faced significant challenges in their efforts to create schools during Reconstruction. One problem was a shortage of qualified teachers. In the early years of Reconstruction, local African Americans who could already read and write shared their knowledge with family, friends, and neighbors. In Sharpsburg, Maryland, for instance, David B. Simons, a literate African American and trustee of Tolson’s Chapel, likely taught some children and adults in the town in the mid-1860s. However, given the small number of literate African Americans in most communities in the former slave-holding states, there were not enough local teachers to meet the demand.
In addition, black communities often struggled to afford to pay a teacher’s salary. In hopes of getting financial assistance and more qualified teachers, African Americans in Sharpsburg and many other communities turned to the federal government’s Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Established by Congress in March 1865 , this agency was commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Since the underfunded Bureau had limited money and staff to devote to building schools, it worked with Northern benevolent organizations and African American communities to place Northern teachers in freedpeople’s schools in the Southern and border states.
Finding a building to use as a schoolhouse was often a challenge since few local whites were willing to sell or rent property to African Americans to use as schools. For many communities, including Sharpsburg, the solution was to use African American churches. African American congregations owned these buildings and, unlike most white landowners, were usually willing to support the schools. Ezra Johnson and John J. Carter held classes in Tolson’s Chapel, a church constructed by black Methodists in Sharpsburg in 1866. To outfit the building for use as a school, local residents applied liquid slate to the side walls of the church to create chalkboards.
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Despite the sacrifices required to send children to school, African American children filled schoolhouses in the Southern and border states during Reconstruction. In 1868 and 1869, at least twenty-five students attended school in Tolson’s Chapel. This number includes twelve children who had been born into slavery. Adults sought education as well.
Like most white teachers from the North, Ezra Johnson taught in African American schools for only a short time. In contrast, black teachers from the North typically had a steadfast commitment to helping their fellow African Americans reach the goal of equality through education. Consequently, they were more likely to teach in the former slave-holding states for extended periods of time.
The Freedmen’s Bureau ended its support for schools in 1870, just as Sharpsburg residents were writing to the Bureau in hopes of getting a third teacher. Although more than one thousand Northerners traveled south to teach freedpeople, most African American communities in the former slave-holding states never saw a teacher from the North. As a result, most teachers in freedpeople’s schools were local African Americans.
African Americans’ Commitment to Education
African Americans’ commitment to education had lasting effects on the former slave-holding states. By the fall of 1872, African American children in Sharpsburg were attending a racially segregated public school in Tolson’s Chapel. The establishment of public schools in the former slave-holding states owed much to African Americans’ commitment to education. In the former Confederate states, African Americans used their power as voters and legislators to create the frameworks for public education during the late 1860s and 1870s.
By establishing their own schools and advocating for public education, African Americans claimed education as one of their rights as citizens. Their dedication to that right laid the foundation for public schools for blacks and whites in the Southern and border states.
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Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
Most historical Black colleges and universities started in the 1860s and served first as elementary then secondary schools providing the newly freed slaves with a normal education. In 1854, the American Missionary Association founded the first historical Black college and university which is currently called Lincoln University. Other early Black colleges and universities included Wilberforce University established by the African-Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio in 1857, Fisk University founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association after Sherman’s March through the South in 1864, and Florida A&M University which was founded in 1887 as a land grant institution established by the second Morrill Act of 1890. Fort Valley State University, Alabama A&M University, Tennessee State University and Virginia State University were other examples of land grant institutions established by the Morrill Act of 1890.
From 1865 to early 1900, baccalaureate degrees were awarded to 1,195 Black Americans with only 195 earned from abolitionist schools and the remaining 1,000 received from newly found historical Black colleges and universities.
Over the past 150 years, there have been many notable moments in the evolution of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). By 1943 the struggle for funding led Dr. Fredrick D. Patterson, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to publish an open letter to the presidents of other black colleges and universities. He urged them to pool their resources and fundraising abilities and work together to help all black colleges and universities prosper. Just one year later, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) was created to solicit donations for black colleges nationwide.
Still today, HBCUs are standouts for student achievement. While representing just three percent of the nation’s institutions of higher learning, they graduate nearly 20 percent of African Americans. HBCUs no longer exclusively serve African Americans. Today’s institutions have a significant percentage of non-African American students, including Asian, Latino, white American and students from many foreign countries.
Students attending HBCUs are immersed in a nurturing and intellectually stimulating environment that connects them with African-American history and inspires them to carry the indefatigable African American spirit forward. When African American students have many options for higher learning, HBCUs are still in high demand because of their unique educational environment and their proven record of helping African Americans achieve success.
Notable Black Scholars
Black History includes success stories of numerous Blacks who have contributed to the progress made in higher education. Several Black academicians can be noted as a respected authority in their discipline advancing the field through research and scholarship.
Perhaps one of the most notable scholars in Black History is W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), a Black sociologist who founded the second department of sociology in the United States at Atlanta University. His most significant contributions to the field of sociology include the establishment of a scientific laboratory, professional conferences, and academic journals for research. In his research, Du Bois underscored that Black Americans experience a dual heritage involving a conflict of identity which characterizes what he called a “double-consciousness.” This double-conscious involves the plight of Black Americans as they struggle with living in a society that supports prosocial values such as democracy, equality, and freedom while at the same time not questioning an ideology that condones prejudice, discrimination, racism, racial oppression, and injustice. Black Americans suffer from this “double-consciousness” and experience the prevailing consequences that arise in society.
In addition to W.E.B. Edward Alexander Bouchet (1852-1918) finished his dissertation in physics in 1876 at Yale becoming the first Black American to earn a Ph.D.
Segregation and Disparities in the Jim Crow South
After the white Democrats regained power in Southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed Jim Crow laws mandating segregation. They disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through poll taxes and literacy tests. 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, its infrastructure destroyed, and dependent on an agricultural economy despite falling cotton prices.
Southern education was not very good - even for white children. Southern schools were racially segregated. Blacks and whites had to attend different schools. The separate school systems were not equal. Fewer African Americans were enrolled in school. Black children were often pulled out school because they were needed on the farm. There were not as many public schools available for blacks. If a town did not have enough money for two separate schools, they built only one school - for white children.
Black teachers did not receive as much training as white teachers. There were limits on what blacks could be taught in school. White school leaders did not want black children to be exposed to ideas like equality and freedom.
Fortunately, some schools for black children were built with money sent by Northern foundations. The Rosenwald Foundation was most important of these. It gave over four million dollars to help build nearly 5,000 black schools throughout the South.
Challenges to Segregation
In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a national campaign to achieve equal schools within the "separate but equal" framework of the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. White hostility towards this campaign kept black schools from necessary resources.
The case of Sarah Roberts vs. The City of Boston is a case about a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts and her parents, who tried to send her to a nearby, predominantly white school during the Jim Crow era of segregation in the United States. She was denied admission, however, based on her race as an African American girl, marking an early effort to challenge racial segregation through the education system. Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled against the Roberts family, the hearing ultimately highlighted the injustice of segregation in the United States Education System. Additionally, the ideas from this challenge were known to herald the well-known 1954 Brown vs.
The Civil Rights Movement and Educational Equality
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. Septima Clark, an American educator, civil rights activist, and the creator 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 activists 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.
Affirmative Action and Access to Higher Education
Affirmative Action refers to a federally sponsored program implemented to guarantee equal opportunity and support diversity in the workplace and institutions of higher education. Affirmative Action represents programmatic efforts designed to correct past discrimination and alleviate current discrimination against disadvantaged or marginalized groups. In institutions of higher education, Affirmative Action programs seek to reduce discrimination against disadvantaged or marginalized groups by increasing equal opportunity. Through such efforts, groups such as Blacks who were traditionally excluded and underrepresented in higher education, can now have increased access. Advocates for Affirmative Action have viewed the exclusion and underrepresentation of minorities in higher education as a problem.
Due to numerous court battles, states began to pass legislation that banned the use of affirmative action in public colleges and universities. Long and Bateman (2020) conducted a comprehensive study of the long-term effects of this legislation and found a statistically significant decrease in Black student enrollment due to bans on affirmative action programs at 19 public universities. Additionally, a disparity of 14 percentage points existed between Blacks and Hispanics in college enrollment for states that banned affirmative action programs.
Persistent Disparities in Education
According to the most recent data, Blacks only make up 13.5% of the total college enrollment compared to whites who make up 55.9 percent of the enrollment in both two-year and four-year public and private institutions. Earlier SAT score data has reflected that Black youth are less likely to enroll in college.
Graduate enrollment has declined for both whites and Blacks, with Blacks experiencing a sharper decline. Based on the most recent data, although educational attainment has increased for all groups, racial and ethnic disparities continue to persist. Disparities become even more evident when race intersects with sex. When analyzing the educational attainment of all persons 25 and older earning bachelor’s degrees or higher in 1970, 14.4% were white males while 4.2 % were Black males. By the year 2019, educational attainment for all both whites and Blacks increased but disparities remained. Of all persons 25 and older earning bachelor’s degrees or higher, 40.8% were white males while only 28.4% were Black males. Based on earlier data, Black males experience higher attrition rates and lower retention rates in higher education.
Black females have experienced a greater increase in faculty positions than Black males. Moreover, there is an overrepresentation of Blacks in the lower faculty ranks compared to whites. For example, Blacks held only 2.2% of all full-time professorships nationwide compared to holding 3.8% and 5.3% of associate and assistant professorships respectively, and 5.6% of instructor positions.
Research continues to underscore that substantial inequities for Black faculty and administrators remain. Using descriptive data from secondary analysis, Perna investigated the status of Black faculty and administrators based on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Research findings indicated that disparities remain for full-time Black faculty and administrators in higher education. Disparities for Black faculty are more pronounced than for Black administrators. Moreover, disparities were greater among Black faculty ranked as full professors than Black faculty who held the rank of instructor. Similarly, disparities were greater for Black faculty who had achieved tenure than for non-tenured Black faculty.
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