History Of African American Education Research Articles

Towards a racial justice project: oral history methodology, critical race theory, and African American education

ABSTRACT Oral historians have declared the methodology a social justice project. This essay advances that discussion, positing that oral history methodology may represent a more specific racial justice project when coupled with critical race theory. An examination of the history of African American education scholarship, we argue, supports this contention. Two central questions guide this essay: (1) What does scholarship on the history of African American education demonstrate about the compatibility between oral history methodology and critical race theory? and (2) How does this methodological-theoretical pairing advance a racial justice project? We aim to show how critical race theory and oral history methodology complement one another as research tools that can strengthen the history of education’s capacity to inform current educational issues. Our essay draws on the work of historians of African American education to exemplify possibilities for any historian of education who examines systematically underserved communities of Colour. Ultimately, we argue that critical race theory and oral history methodology are compatible because they share several propositions apt for helping researchers subvert the silencing, marginalisation, and objectification of systemically underserved communities of Colour, thereby furthering a racial justice project. This essay, therefore, contributes primarily to interdisciplinary education and historical research methods literature.

The Power and Limitations of Historical Case Study: A Consideration of Postwar African American Educational Experience

This essay considers the use of case studies in the history of education. In doing this, it focuses on the recent history of African American education and several prominent studies in particular. The power and limitations of case study research are considered, drawing upon literature in sociology and qualitative research. Focusing on highly acclaimed studies, historical research on African American education is utilized to assess the interpretive frames of leading historical case studies, revealing limitations in purview. Because issues related to educational inequality remain so important today, particularly segregation, the “achievement gap” and problems in urban education, this history remains highly relevant to current policy debates. Implications for historians and other researchers utilizing case study methods are discussed in the conclusion.

Perceiving Learning Anew: Social Interaction, Dignity, and Educational Rights

What are the origins of educational rights? In this essay, Espinoza and Vossoughi assert that educational rights are “produced,” “affirmed,” and “negated” not only through legislative and legal channels but also through an evolving spectrum of educational activities embedded in everyday life. Thus, they argue that the “heart” of educational rights—the very idea that positive educative experiences resulting in learning are a human entitlement irrespective of social or legal status—has come to inhere in the educational experiences of persons subjected to social degradation and humiliation. After examining key moments in the African American educational rights experience as composite historical products, the authors determine that learning is “dignity-conferring” and “rights-generative.” They revisit African slave narratives, testimony from landmark desegregation cases, and foundational texts in the history of African American education where they find luminous first-person accounts of intellectual activity in the shadow of sanction, suppression, discouragement, and punishment. They conclude by outlining an empirical framework for studying the nexus of learning, dignity, and educational rights from a social interactional perspective.

Presidential Address: African-American Education History—A Manifestation of Faith

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of thing not seen.Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)First, I would like to thank all of the people who placed me in this position. What you did not know was I had no idea I would actually be in this situation. So, I come before you today with what is on my mind and in my heart. Many years ago, my husband Dr. Lewis A. Randolph told me I would be in this spot. Of course, I doubted him. But I thank him because he had more faith in me than I had in myself at that time concerning my trajectory in the field of the history of education. But here I stand as a child of God before you. I hope what he has given me to share with you spurns your thoughts, ideas, and your heart to continue to develop and uncover the history of African-American education.

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (review)

Reviewed by: Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom Steven Mintz Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. By Heather Andrea Williams. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 304. $29.95.) At a time when public attention is fixated on the racial gap in student achievement—think No Child Left Behind, school vouchers, and a litany of complaints about the stigmatizing effects of "acting white"—Self-Taught, a history of African American education in the South from the antebellum era through Reconstruction, could scarcely be more timely. It explores a time period when education was a political act, not only challenging claims of racial inferiority but signifying self-determination, self-worth, and the capacity to interpret Scripture for oneself. Above all, participation in politics—through newspaper editorials, letters to public officials, and petitions to legislators—depended on education. Williams's goal in this forcefully argued, richly researched study is to place African Americans, slave and free, at the center of the story of black education in the mid-nineteenth-century South, a position that has long been monopolized by the Freedmen's Bureau, benevolent organizations such as the American Missionary Society, and Northern missionary teachers. She begins her book by showing how an estimated five to ten percent of enslaved African Americans succeeded in "stealing" an education despite laws and customs that forbade it. Like Janet Duitsman Cornelius in When I Can Read My Title Clear, she offers vivid examples of the ways that enslaved people learned to read and write in clandestine schools, from forbidden books, or with the aid of sympathetic whites. [End Page 94] In subsequent chapters, Williams underscores the high value that former slaves placed on education. She persuasively demonstrates that when Northern benevolent societies sent teachers to the South, they were responding to a widespread demand among the ex-slaves, who not only donated their churches and built cabins for schools and paid tuition but also served as teachers in large numbers. As early as 1868, African American teachers outnumbered white teachers by at least five percent. Indeed, it was the black emphasis on education that ultimately inspired working-class Southern whites to demand publicly funded school systems for their children. Self-Taught is far more critical of the Northern missionary societies than such previous books as Robert Morris's Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction and Jacqueline Jones's Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks. Promised funding for black schools frequently failed to materialize. Black teachers were dispatched to the least desirable rural areas, and black mothers, but not their white counterparts, were denied teaching positions. Worse yet, many Northern missionaries (with the notable exception of the Quakers) expected to control the administration and curriculum of the schools, and they withheld financial assistance when blacks challenged their authority. Williams also chastises the benevolent societies for their color consciousness and their excessive paternalism. A major theme in Self-Taught is the struggle for control, pitting Southern blacks against secular and religious Northern benevolent societies and white Southerners of various classes. One the book's most fascinating sections explores African American efforts to maintain autonomous educational institutions, including an instance in St. Louis in 1864 in which a local black school board challenged white missionaries by demanding a black-run school system. But the gravest threats to black education came from unreconstructed white Southerners. Arson and physical violence directed against teachers and students were common. In a number of instances, whites who had served as trustees for antebellum black churches sued to prevent the structures from housing black schools. The book concludes by summarizing a 1911 study of black Southern schools by W. E. B. Du Bois and a team of researchers at Fisk University. In that year, when approximately 30 percent of nonwhites over the age of ten were illiterate, a majority of black children did not attend school. Those who did had a school term that lasted just three to six months. Most black teachers, Du Bois concluded, were underpaid and undertrained. Black school facilities were "wretched and inadequate," and worst of all, a focus on manual and industrial training diminished the amount of time...

Sociolinguistic Foundations to African Centered Pedagogy: A Literature Review

PERIOD I: INDIGENOUS VOICES PERIOD II: COLONIZATION OF THE LITERATURE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE BEHAVIORS PERIOD III: POST COLONIAL STUDIES: TOWARD AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE BEHAVIORS PREFACE To the contemporary investigator of African centered pedagogies, merely looking within the broad background of educational research would miss a substantial portion of the entire ethnographic range of investigations. An integral body of literature reposes in two other significant areas: first, within the indigenous voices of African American writers, pioneer ethnographers and scholars; and secondly, within the ethnographic investigations of the field of sociolinguistics. This literature review will focus upon the sociolinguistic foundations of the ethnographies which have formed a substantial part, both in conceptual and applied contexts, of the discussion and development of African centered pedagogies in more recent years. core issue in the relationship between sociolinguistics and African centered pedagogies is the study of the culture-specific behavior of the African American speech community; the pedagogical corollary of that relationship is the applied strategies of using those patterned and valued ways of speaking for teaching and learning effectiveness in formal classroom settings. point of departure in my own readings is with the writings of Carol Lee. This author touches upon the concept of as a valued form of oral discourse in the African American speech community. Signifying can be characterized as the verbal art of using dual meanings, innuendo and the play upon the sound and meanings of words. As a form of discourse, signifying has been the focus of much investigation. Carol Lee briefly discusses some of the background literature and touches lightly upon many other researchers' work within the field of sociolinguistics. Her article is replete with references on the topic. Since this is such a rich and important focus of research, it is important to delve more deeply into this valuable body of literature. scope of the review of this body of literature might be delineated in the following historically based outline: Period I: Indigenous Voices To ignore the indigenous voices in the critical history of African American education, or to bypass those perspectives in the earliest of ethnographies, is to deny African Americans that recognition of self-knowledge that would be factually and grossly incorrect. earliest recorded voices have commented on the processes of education (or schooling, might be more accurate) in relation to the cognitive abilities and language behaviors of African Americans. Maya Angelou, in her poignant autobiography entitled I Know Why Caged Bird Sings (1969) has described eighth grade graduation day in her native Stamps, Arkansas. graduation speaker was unequivocal about the visiting artists and the microscopes going to the white schools, while how proud the town was that the athletes (Black students graduating) would be going on to the agricultural and mechanical college. Angelou states: The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises (p. 151). Although Angelou's memoir was not published until 1969, the period of recollection for this dubious kind of graduation ceremony is set in the 1930's and 40's--at the time when African American cultural and artistic contributions were making a mark in the rest of the country (and world). indigenous voices, contemporary to this period, were indeed recorded, although not published widely at the time. Ironically, while Maya Angelou was listening disappointedly at a biased graduation drama in Arkansas, across the country in Washington, DC, the Black intellectual and philosopher, Carter Woodson was graphically portraying her and many others' plight in the pivotal MisEducation of the Negro (1933). …

"Womanhood Glorified": Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909-1961

a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun, of our new day begun. Let us march on 'till victory is won. These words from James Weldon Johnson's Lift Every Voice and Sing can be used to describe vividly African peoples' struggles to obtain literacy, equal access to schooling, and educational advancement in American society. Unlike the situation historically for other ethnic groups, African Americans have had to fight and struggle for the legal right and access to formal schooling. From the period of their legal enslavement in this country, African Americans have possessed a strong desire for education. From the lessons shared in the darkest of night in the midst of slave quarters to current generations of college graduates, African Americans have struggled to educate themselves and their children. (1) When examining the history of African American education, there are some names that are somewhat familiar, such as Fannie Jackson Coppin, Booker T. Washington, Lucy Craft Laney, Major Richard Robert Wright, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Laurence Clifton Jones, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Septima Poinsette Clark. Reference can be made to famous institutions in all parts of the country. Many of these institutions, however, were founded by white philanthropists and/or missionaries and educated black males and females, such as the Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, and the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school examined in this essay, however, does not fit into either of these categories because it was founded by an African American woman, for African American women and girls, and initially it was funded completely by the African American community. This essay examines the National Training School for Women and Girls (later renamed the National Trade and Professional School for Women an d Girls), founded in 1909 by Nannie Helen Burroughs in Washington, DC. (2) This school educated African, African American, and Caribbean women from ages fifteen to adulthood in areas that would allow them to be independent women with a commitment to serve their God, their families, and their communities. (3) As a school founder, orator, and social and political activist, Nannie Helen Burroughs built a school for African American women and girls in Washington, DC, that produced well-trained women who were well qualified to compete in the work force. What made Burroughs' school unique? Among other things, it was not co-educational, it was not funded by any white benefactors, and it was not limited to training women and girls for the traditional 'female occupations. Burroughs wanted to train God-fearing women who would be self-sufficient and committed to the uplift of their race. The activities and accomplishments of educator Nannie Helen Burroughs have been often overlooked by historians examining the African American experience. Historian and feminist scholar Sharon Harley pointed out that although Burroughs was one of the best known and most respected figures among African Americans in the 20th century, she remains absent from most contemporary historical works. (4) However, more recently, Burroughs' efforts have not gone totally unnoticed, and several scholars have begun to document Burroughs' contributions to African American women's advancement, the National Baptist Convention, and the African American community in general. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, in her book Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, described Burroughs leadership activities within her denomination, and Opal V. Easter assessed Burroughs work as an educator among adult African American women. (5) Karen A. Johnson's recent book Uplifting the Women and the Race focuses o n the social and political activism and educational philosophies of Nannie Helen Burroughs and Anna Julia Cooper. …

Introduction: Cultural Capital and African American Education

This Special Issue of The Journal of African American History examines the role of African Americans in providing financial and other material resources for the support of public and private schools established in black communities in the United States from the antebellum era to the 1960s. Over the last three decades there have been regular reports in books, magazines, and newspaper articles describing the precarious financial conditions for urban public school systems with a majority of African American and other nonwhite student populations. Urban public school systems are dependent upon state legislators and local politicians for their funding, and as these school systems became majority black, there has been a greater unwillingness to make sure that the educational expenditures are equalized for students in urban and suburban, rich and poor school districts. The failure of state and local judges and other officials to mandate the equalization of funding for urban and suburban public school districts has m eant that public school administrators in financially strapped urban school systems, many of whom are African Americans, have eliminated many academic programs, such as art, music, science, and math programs, and most extracurricular activities; have been unable to introduce the latest forms of educational technology into the classrooms, and have been forced to hire large numbers of uncertified and underqualified teachers. This has resulted in extremely high levels of academic failure, as measured by newly mandated standardized tests, and consistently high dropout rates, particularly among African Americans and other children of color in financially depressed urban public school systems. (1) The failure of state and local officials to provide equal or even adequate funding for all-black or predominantly black public schools is not a new development in the history of African American education in the United States. In the period from the end of the Civil War to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 outlawing legal segregation in public education, white legislators in most of the southern states (and many northern states) also refused to utilize public expenditures to insure the equalization of funding for black and white public schooling. In fact, scholar and educator W. E. B. Du Bois, in the famous Atlanta University Studies devoted to The Negro Common School (1901) and The Common School and the Negro American (1911), pointed out that African Americans in most southern states were paying more in public taxation than they were receiving in state and local funding for separate black public schools. As a result of this situation, in the period from 1890 to 1910, southern b lack taxpayers were in effect providing the funds for the public schooling of white children. Southern white school officials consistently refused to supply adequate funding for black public education until they felt threatened by the possibility of court-mandated public school desegregation in the late 1940s and 1950s. (2) As a result of the discriminatory funding practices of white state officials, African American children throughout the country attended inadequately funded public schools from the Reconstruction era to the 1960s. Many times the resources needed for basic instruction, including blackboards, pencils, books, chairs, desks, even land and buildings, had to be supplied by members of the local black communities. In many instances, southern white public school officials were only willing to provide funds for the salary of the black elementary school teachers, who were paid much less than similarly qualified white teachers. Everything else needed for the instruction of black children had to be supplied by African Americans in the local black communities. In 1988 historian James D. Anderson in The Education of Blacks in the South, 1861-1935 pointed out that since the end of the Reconstruction era, black southerners had adapted to a structure of oppressive education by practicing double taxation. …

Community, Commitment, and African American Education: The Jackson School of Smith County, Texas, 1925-1954

This essay presents a narrative about the Jackson School in Smith County, Texas, utilizing the voices of former teachers and students who experienced its origin and evolution between 1925 and 1954. It covers the significant events in the story of the school as remembered by African American community members who participated in the day-to-day life of the school. community members of Jackson Heights, Texas faced overwhelming odds in the struggle to provide quality schooling for the community's children. Their stories of sell-sacrifice and effort provide encouragement for today's educators and add to the understanding of the history of African American education. stories of these people, from a retired tenant farmer to a retired administrator, give depth and understanding to how a community was able to develop the resources and commitment to provide excellent education in spite of outside political pressures, unequal distribution of funds, and inequitable treatment within the wider community. Although t his essay only addresses the period of time before desegregation, Jackson School continues to be supported by the Jackson Heights community. Community members continue to refer to our although the Jackson School currently serves as a primary school for the entire district. Men and women from Jackson Heights drop by the school on a regular basis to have lunch in the cafeteria with the children and share memories of their school. While few written records exist to document the evolution of this school, the personal memories are rich and vivid and provide evidence of the individual and collective efforts to develop social and human capital for the community. Former teachers and students of Jackson School describe a highly successful school with strong community ties, and extensive parent participation. As Peter Coleman reported in studies about school and community, The most important task facing the school in the immediate future is collaboration with parents in building active communities of learners. (1) Michael Fullan indicates that schools and community ideally would function as a unitary whole. (2) That ideal notwithstanding, Coleman found that most schools today exist in constricted worlds where parents and the wider community are outsiders, seldom engaged in reciprocal relationships with the school. Today's educational and community leaders seek ways to develop and maintain mutually beneficial relationships, but succeed infrequently. (3) Former teachers of Jackson School tell of the essential contribution of resources by the Jackson Heights community that encouraged the development and maintenance of these mutually beneficial relationships. This cultural capital contributed by the community allowed the teachers to fulfill their personal and professional commitments to the children, the school, and the community. It was the material and spiritual support from the African American community that sustained the teachers and allowed them to meet their individual and collective goals. CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND EDUCATION In examining Jackson School, two recent studies provide understanding of the system of education in place throughout the South during this time period and tell of the interactions of African American culture, community, and education. Vanessa Siddle Walker studied the history of an African American school community in a small town in North Carolina from 1933 to 1969, the period of legal school segregation. (4) While acknowledging the gross inequalities present in the segregated school systems of the South, she chose to study the successes of the school within the framework of its challenges. Using historical ethnography and drawing on state and local documents and interviews with former students and teachers, Siddle Walker explored parent involvement with and advocacy for Caswell County Training School, and the ethic of caring demonstrated by the teachers and principals of Caswell County Training School. …

Schools, Markets, and Family in the History of African-American Education

Arguments about the rise in relative education levels of African-Americans invoke (1) improvements in the quality of schools attended by blacks or (2) affirmative action regulations affecting schools and employers. Missing from these arguments is an explanation of the emergence of black education levels exceeding those of whites once the influence of family background factors has been controlled. School quality improvements, by themselves, could not have produced high observed black education levels net of family background factors. This study finds that black educational attainment net of family background influences became higher than that of whites in the 1950s--too early to be explained by affirmative action programs. This leaves the possibility that more subtle effects of government policy on labor markets and schools played a significant role in the rise of black education. Alternatively, it could be that a favorable orientation toward education in the African-American community has played a role in its members' educational advance.

The Establishment of Louisville Municipal College: A Case Study in Racial Conflict and Compromise

By examining factors leading to the creation of Louisville Municipal College for Negroes in Louisville, Kentucky, this article presents a case study of a southern African American community's use of political power to achieve educational gains in the early decades of the 20th century. Three streams of historical development are traced as they relate to this development: (a) the history of African Americans in Kentucky, (b) the history of African American education in Kentucky, and (c) the history of education in Kentucky, particularly that of the city of Louisville and the University of Louisville, the parent institution of Louisville Municipal. INTRODUCTION Opened on February 9, 1931, as a segregated Black branch of the University of Louisville, Louisville Municipal College for Negroes was the product of decades of organized political pressure on the part of African American Kentuckians. This pressure--beginning before the Civil War, lasting through the Reconstruction period, and continuing until after World War I--contributed decisively to the founding of the college as well as to the advancement of other education goals shared by the African American community of Louisville and its leadership. The effective application of this pressure was possible due to the confluence of three streams of historical development, specifically: (a) the history of African Americans in Kentucky, ) the history of African American education in Kentucky, and (c) the history of education in Kentucky, particularly that of the city of Louisville and the University of Louisville. This article argues that the process of Louisville Municipal's establishment, indeed, the college's very existence and purpose, can be accurately understood only by examining these streams and their interactions. Moreover, it contends that examination of the factors surrounding the creation of this institution presents an excellent opportunity for the study of the effective use of African American political power to achieve educational gains. AFRICAN AMERICANS IN KENTUCKY African Americans entered the region of Virginia west of the mountains as early as 1751 and played important roles in the early settlement of what later became the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Clark, 1937; Lucas, 1992; Rice, 1975). Because soil and climatic conditions in Kentucky did not lend themselves to cotton cultivation and large-scale plantation agriculture, and because tillable land was scarce in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, African Americans came to be concentrated in what is known as the Bluegrass or central region of the commonwealth, where they worked primarily as enslaved laborers on small farms and as free or enslaved laborers or servants in urban areas (Clark, 1937; Lucas, 1992). By 1784, the roughly four thousand African Americans residing in Kentucky represented about 10% of the commonwealth's population (Coleman, 1940). By 1830, there were 165,213 enslaved and 4,917 free persons of African ancestry, 170,130 in total, representing nearly 25% of all Kentuckians (McDougle, 1918). Although Kentucky's African American population increased in absolute numbers over time, the state's White population increased far more significantly. For example, the number of African Americans held in bondage or residing freely in Kentucky increased to a total of 236,167 persons by 1860; however, the statewide percentage of African Americans declined to 20.4%. By 1890, Kentucky's 268,071 African Americans represented only 16.9% of its 1,590,462 citizens (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1974). These demographic trends rendered the threat of Negro domination--the typical rationale for the disenfranchisement of African Americans in other former slave-holding states--less ominous in Kentucky (Wright, 1992). Ironically, while this smaller proportionate number enabled Black Kentuckians to retain some limited freedom to exercise their right to vote by the turn of the century (Hudson, 1981), the franchise could be used effectively only in Louisville, with its high concentration of African Americans (19. …

The Educational Philosophies of Washington, DuBois, and Houston: Laying the Foundations for Afrocentrism and Multiculturalism

The history of African American education in the United States dates back to the first arrival of African slaves on American shores, where, according to one researcher: ... the education of the black race in the Virginia Colony was inexorably interwoven with the history of the church. The teaching of blacks by church missionaries began there in 1619, when the first twenty black indentured servants landed in Jamestown. (Holte, 1947, p. 4)