The Journal of Negro Education: A Chronicle of Black Education
The Journal of Negro Education (JNE) stands as a hallmark in the field of education, a pioneering scholarly journal dedicated to the study of Black education. Founded in 1932, it has served as a crucial platform for identifying, analyzing, and addressing the unique challenges and opportunities within the education of Black people in the United States and globally.
Genesis and Purpose
Established in 1932 by Charles Henry Thompson, who served as its editor-in-chief for over three decades, the Journal of Negro Education emerged from a pressing need. At the time, mainstream educational journals only sporadically addressed Black education. The JNE was founded to systematically and comprehensively focus on the education of Black people. The journal aimed to define the problems, provide a forum for analysis and solutions, and serve as a vehicle for sharing statistics and research on a national basis.
Thompson, along with Howard University's President Mordecai W. Johnson and former Howard Law School Dean-turned-NAACP Chief Counsel Charles Hamilton Houston, ensured the Journal was instrumental in documenting and promoting the desegregation efforts spearheaded by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations.
Historical Context and Early Influence
The journal's origins are deeply rooted in the historical context of Howard University in the early 20th century. The Journal of Negro Education emerged during a period when African Americans were actively seeking to document their history and experiences. Carter G. Woodson, who earned a PhD from Harvard in 1912, becoming the second African American to do so, established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915. A year later, Woodson published the first issue of the Journal of Negro History. Woodson firmly believed that historians had a responsibility to collect, preserve, and publish the records of African Americans to prevent them from becoming an insignificant factor in the assessment of humankind.
Woodson's profound influence on authenticating and interpreting the African American experience earned him the appellation of “the father of Black history.” Woodson explained that the journal was established for the compilation of sociological and historical data on the African American experience and for the study of people in the wider African Diaspora.
Read also: International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education: An overview.
As one of the most influential members of what historian Joe W. Trotter describes as the “second generation of African American historians” (between World War I and the 1920s), Woodson employed a more scrupulous, methodical, and analytical approach to the systematic search for the truth about African American history, especially that of African Americans. Through the journal, he challenged the racist bias of majority studies on the enslavement of Africans, Reconstruction, and African history.
Contributions to Desegregation
The Journal of Negro Education played a pivotal role in the fight against segregation. Some of the groundbreaking research studies used to argue Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and other desegregation cases were published in the JNE. For example, Howard Hale Long's 1935 yearbook article “Some Psychogenic Hazards of Segregated Education of Negroes” and Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark's 1950 article, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” which reported their classic empirical study on preference of African American children for White dolls versus Black dolls-research that contributed to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision that struck down racial segregation in public schools.
Evolution and Continued Relevance
In subsequent years, headed later by Editors-in-Chief Walter G. Daniel, Earle West (Acting Editor), Charles A. Martin, Faustine C. Jones-Wilson, Sylvia T. Johnson, Rc Saravanabhavan, Frederick D. Harper, and Ivory A. Toldson, the JNE continues to serve as an invaluable chronicle of almost every development in Black education of any consequence.
Experts and researchers in education, sociology, history, and other fields have contributed significant articles to the Journal's pages. Some of these contributors include noted authorities such as James Banks, Horace Mann Bond, Ralph J. Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, James P. Comer, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Geneva Gay, Edmund W. Gordon, Robert Havighurst, Dorothy Height, Dwight O.W. Holmes, Charles S. Johnson, Alain L. Locke, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, James M. Nabrit, Jr., Dorothy B.
Scope and Impact
Although edited and published under the sponsorship of the School of Education at Howard and (until 1992) its Bureau of Educational Research, the Journal is not now and has never been merely a local organ of Howard University . Its Editorial/Advisory Board, peer reviewers, contributors, and content have consistently reflected the international scope of interest in educational issues affecting people of African descent and other people of color throughout the world.
Read also: Engaging Science Education
The journal's aim is to identify and define the problems that characterize the education of Black people in the United States and elsewhere, to provide a forum for analysis and solutions, and to serve as a vehicle for sharing statistics and research on a national basis. The current subscription count of The Journal of Negro Education is around 1,350 and includes individual, institutional, and library subscriptions.
Scholarship on Black Education
Several books and publications shed light on the history and complexities of Black education, providing context for the Journal of Negro Education's contributions.
- Education for Liberation completes the study Dr. Richardson published in 1986 as Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 by continuing the account of the American Missionary Association (AMA) from the end of Reconstruction to the post-World War II era.
- James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.
- Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People challenges the conventional wisdom that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and abolitionism.
- In the book, Black Cultural Capital: Activism that Spurred African American High Schools, authors describe the role of the Black community in the development of high schools. Their narratives reveal White educators’ unwillingness to implement state laws requiring the education of all children. Their lack of engagement galvanized Blacks to petition boards to adhere to the law. Additionally, they forced school districts to hire Black teachers and provide facilities for Black children equal to those of White children.
- The Encyclopedia of African American Education covers educational institutions at every level, from preschool through graduate and professional training, with special attention to historically black and predominantly black colleges and universities. Other entries cover individuals, organizations, associations, and publications that have had a significant impact on African American education. The Encyclopedia also presents information on public policy affecting the education of African Americans, including both court decisions and legislation.
- Heather Williams demonstrates the centrality of black people to the process of formal education - the establishment of schools, the creation of a cadre of teachers, the forging of standards of literacy and numeracy in the post-emancipation years. As she does, Williams makes the case that the issue of education informed the Reconstruction period - the two-cornered struggle between North and South over the rebuilding of Southern society, the three-cornered struggle between white Northerners, white Southerners, and black people over the nature of education, and the less well known contest between black Northerners and black Southerners over the direction of African American culture.
- Drawing on quantitative datasets, as well as oral history, this compelling narrative examines how African Americans narrowed the racial gap in high school completion. The authors explore regional variations in high school attendance across the United States and how intraracial factors affected attendance within racial groups. They also examine the larger social historical context, such as the national high school revolution, the civil rights movement, campaigns to expand schooling and urging youth to stay in school, and Black migration northward.
- This volume focuses broadly on the history of the social welfare reform work of nineteenth-century African American women who founded industrial and normal schools in the American South. Through their work in architecture and education, these women helped to memorialize the trauma and struggle of black Americans.
- In this examination of the American school system, a career education expert determines how a variety of federal, state, and local policies and initiatives have affected disadvantaged inner-city youth and broadened the achievement gap between black and white students. A work in progress for 20 years, this commentary is built upon a core philosophy that all children can learn but that systematic inequalities have not yet been overcome.
- Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers, the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) was open to African American members but excluded them in practice. In 1926, a separate black PTA was created to serve the segregated schools of the American South. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, black and white PTA leaders faced the difficult prospect of integrating all national, state, and local units, which resulted in a protracted unification process that lasted until 1970.
Read also: Planning Education Research
tags: #journal #of #negro #education #history
