An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North by Zöe Burkholder

Abstract

Reviewed by: An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North by Zöe Burkholder Campbell F. Scribner (bio) Education, Education history, African Americans, Civil rights, Integration An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North. By Zöe Burkholder. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 297. Cloth, $34.95.) An African American Dilemma is Zöe Burkholder's third book about the history of racial inequality in American education, and like her previous offerings it provides a rigorous, insightful, and unsparingly clear treatment of its subject. The book's title refers to Gunnar Myrdal's classic, An American Dilemma, which examined the cycle of hatred and dispossession that sustained American racism during the early twentieth century. 1 Confronting the issue from the perspective of Black students, parents, and community leaders, Burkholder introduces a second dilemma: namely, whether to pursue civic equality through racially integrated schools or to build sustaining communities in racially separate schools. Both approaches came with tradeoffs and shortcomings, and the persistence of anti-Black racism meant that neither could be implemented entirely on its own terms. Indeed, as Burkholder observes, "neither has been entirely successful," but it is for that very reason that "both ideals—integration and separation—reappear with each new generation" (4). Burkholder's task, and the real strength of the book, is to forgo simplified endorsements of either integration or separation—to accept the conflict over Black schooling as a genuine dilemma—and to demonstrate how intelligent and good-faith actors made difficult (and different) decisions based on the particularities of their own times and places. The book's historical analysis extends into the 1970s, but readers of this journal will probably take greatest interest in the opening chapter, which describes Black education in the North from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Burkholder synthesizes a number of recent studies with her own archival research to present one of the best overviews of Black education in the early nineteenth century to date. There are a few touchstones with which any historian of the period will be familiar: Judge Lemuel Shaw's rejection of Sarah Roberts's plea to integrate the Boston public schools (28–29), for instance, or the attack on Prudence Crandall's female academy (17), both of which speak to the era's institutional racism and vigilante violence. To these, Burkholder adds a [End Page 193] cast of lesser-known activists and settings, from cities like Cincinnati and Detroit and a number of small towns across the North. None of these communities followed a prescribed path for Black public education. Neighboring towns took sharply different approaches to challenging or working within implicitly segregated school systems (36). Some parents found that exclusion from common schools or abuse by white teachers made separate schools the most desirable option for their children. Others valued the proximity and academic quality of the common schools and fled segregated institutions at the first opportunity. Some insisted on common schooling as the path to equal citizenship, while others saw it as the most practical means to good education. It is precisely this sort of variety, complexity, and unpredictability that sustains the vitality of Burkholder's dilemma, and which offers a richly nuanced narrative. Unsurprisingly, the same contingency led to bitter political struggles between and within Black communities. For integrationists, hard-won access to common schools could not be jeopardized by internal dissent. Thus, Frederick Douglass wrote in 1847, "We should feel the most intense mortification if, while many of the most respectable white people of this city should be in favor of admitting our children to equal privileges in the use of our common schools, a single colored man should be found opposed to the measure" (29). Integrationists also accused their opponents of selfishness, arguing that they were merely trying to protect Black teachers, whose livelihoods depended on separate schools. "Should thousands [of children] be losers that a few be gainers?" they demanded (38). For their part, separatists pointed out that white teachers, whether in common or "colored" schools, "are nearly always mentally, morally, or financially bankrupt, and...