African American Children & Education

1. African American Children
& Education

2. Education and African American
children were integral to the civil
rights movement, but African
American children have yet to
achieve educational equality.

3. Education during Slavery
“That all meetings or assemblages of slaves, or free negroes or
mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any
meeting-house or houses, &c., in the night; or at any SCHOOL OR
SCHOOLS for teaching them READING OR WRITING, either in the
day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and
considered an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY”
Virginia Revised Code, 1819

5. Plessy v. Ferguson

6. What Purpose Education?
• George Washington Carver, “Atlanta Compromise,” 1895
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions
of social equality is the extremist folly . . . . No race that has anything
to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree
ostracized. . . . The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is
worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an
opera-house.”
• W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 1903
“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all
deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best
of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the
contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

8. Barbara Johns, Farmville, Virginia,
R. R. Moton High School, 1951

9. Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
• Why did the Supreme Court rule that school
segregation was unconstitutional?

10. “"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has
a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is
greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of
separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the
inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the
motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of
law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and
mental development of negro children and to deprive them of
some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated
school system." Whatever may have been the extent of
psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this
finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language
in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.”

12. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ThdlPI
gB0

15. Primary Sources: Segregation Now
• How and why have the schools in Tuscaloosa
resegregated?
• How has this affected the young people
interviewed in this story?

16. “De jure” segregation has been
replaced by “de facto” segregation

22. Where do we go from here?