School Litigation in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Ancient Humans Were Aware Of The Tides, but did not know that the far-off moon influenced the ebb and flow of the earth’s oceans. Similarly, the forces that over two hundred years caused black parents to oscillate between segregated and integrated education for their chil­dren were often hidden or disguised. What was obvious was the desire to provide their children with an education. Black children were taught in churches and community halls. Beginning in the nineteenth century, black parents in a few northern cities enrolled their children in public schools as soon as those schools were available,. When, as was often the case, the schooling proved disappointing, frustrated parents attributed the ineffective instruction at the schools to one of two assumptions that turned out to be faulty:…1. If the schools were all black, failure was attributed to the racially segre­gated character of those schools. “If whites were attending these schools,” black parents concluded, “conditions would be better.” This has been the predominant diagnosis both in the nineteenth and, as I shall describe in chapter 10, in the twentieth century. 2. If their children were attending predominantly white schools, blacks assumed that these schools were demonstrably better in physical resources and, thus, the quality of education would be better. In fact, however, school officials provided better schools for middle- and upper-class white students than for the children of the working class. And whatever a white school’s quality, it might not be available to black children or, if it were, it might not be appropriate to meet their needs. Because school officials favor whites, black parents often conclude, our children don’t stand a chance in the integrated schools…. The experience of black parents in Boston, Massachusetts, with separate and integrated school policies, is both instructive and repre­sentative. When public schools opened in Boston in the late eighteenth century, black children were neither barred nor segre­gated. But by 1790, racial insults and mistreatment had driven out all but three or four black children. In this regard, the Boston children’s experience was no different from those of other “free” black children in northern schools. Racial hostility rendered educational equality for black children impossible even though they were attending the same schools as whites.