Teaching Democracy Before Brown: Civic Education in Georgia's African American Schools, 1930–1954

Abstract

Research on the history of civic education in United States has rarely reflected the perspectives of African American teachers and students. Through analysis of archival data, I document how African American educators in one Southern state reported teaching civic values to students in a racially segregated society before the modern Civil Rights era. These efforts occurred in spite of the inherent contradiction of teaching citizenship beliefs and practices in a society that denied African Americans their constitutional rights. In this empirical study, I explain the ways in which Georgia's African American educators crafted new curricula for their segregated public schools that included the study of African American life and culture, and describe how some African American students participated in specific social studies and civic–related classroom activities. In the process, civic education in Georgia's schools before 1954 may have shaped African American students' perspectives of agency, democracy, and equality.