EDUCATION, AFRICAN AMERICAN

EDUCATION, AFRICAN AMERICAN. Whites have traditionally determined the type and extent of education for African Americans in the United States; these educational policies have largely reflected the prevailing white culture's ideas about the role of blacks in society, especially their relations with nonblacks. Thus, public activity in this area has mirrored closely the general attitudes of the white majority toward the black minority. Both whites and blacks have recognized the relationship between education and control, so policies related to the education of African Americans have extended from prohibition to encouragement.

The education of blacks began with religious instruction, for some justified slavery as part of a divine plan for the conversion of heathen Africans to Christianity. The Quakers in Philadelphia were leaders in providing education for African Americans, having initiated elementary schools for them as early as 1745. Various churches established special missions to bring the gospel to plantation slaves, and masters were under church injunction to provide for the religious instruction of their slaves when no regular white pastor or missionary was available. Clandestine schools existed in various southern cities, often in violation of legal prohibitions in local black codes. Prohibitions of this nature date back to legislation passed in South Carolina in 1740. The conflict between the desire to teach religion and the opposition to the education of slaves led to efforts to promote religious instruction without letters; blacks learned Christian doctrine, but very few learned to read or write.

A violent reaction against any form of education for slaves set in after any slave plot or uprising involving literate blacks. When Nat Turner, a literate black preacher who drew his inspiration from reading the Bible, led an insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, the reaction spread across the South. Stern penalties punished any one who taught blacks to read and write, and conviction and punishment were frequent. Nevertheless, a number of slaves learned from owners or members of owners' families, who taught them either out of kindness or for the advantages a literate slave provided. A survey of the biographies of blacks who reached adulthood as slaves and attained prominence after empancipation reflects both the extent of such clandestine teaching and learning and the importance placed on education by blacks seeking to break the bonds of slavery.

During this first phase of black education, extending up to the Civil War, states with the largest numbers of African Americans maintained the most stringent prohibitions against their education, but some slaves were nevertheless able to circumvent such laws. At emancipation, more than 95 percent of blacks were illiterate. During the second, very brief phase, covering the period from the start of Reconstruction to the 1890s, blacks and white allies feverishly attempted to overcome the past effects of slavery through education. Immediately after the Civil War, agencies of northern church missionary societies set up numerous schools for empancipated slaves in the South. The Freedmen's Bureau materially aided these early foundations. Titled "colleges" and "universities" by optimistic founders, these institutions had to begin on the lowest level. New England "schoolmarms" carried on a large part of the instruction. With a clientele dazzled by the promise of learning, they were strikingly effective.

Public education in the South had its origin, legally, in systems patterned after midwestern prototypes and enacted by combinations of African American carpetbaggers and poor white members of Reconstruction governments, the latter known as "scalawags." The destitution of the South prevented any considerable development of the ambitious schemes devised, and the effect of the attitudes reflected in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and later Supreme Court decisions undermined public efforts in support of African American education. Nevertheless, between the time of emancipation and 1900, black literacy increased from less than 5 percent to more than 50 percent.

During the third phase, which extended from the 1890s to 1954, black education was hampered by legal racial segregation in southern states, by local de facto segregation in border and northern states, and by preponderantly inferior financial support for black schools. The "equal" aspect of the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy never materialized, although some small effort was made in that direction before 1954.

Local school districts diverted state education funds to the support of schools for white children. In some southern counties with high percentages of African Americans, per capita distribution of school funds reached the proportion of $40 to $1 spent, respectively, on the white child and on the black child. With growing prosperity in the South and a smaller proportion of African American children in the population, the vast differences began to decrease in the 1920s, but they remained substantial. By 1934 there were only fifty-nine accredited high schools for blacks in the South, and twenty of these were private. Of the thirty-nine public institutions, ten were located in North Carolina. Mississippi had none, South Carolina had one, and Alabama and Florida had two each.

Attacks on legal segregation in education, first successful in the 1930s, continued until the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared segregated education by race to be unconstitutional. By that time, the issue of education for African Americans was shifting from rural to urban areas, where a majority of the African American population had moved. Since 1954 trends in African American education have included the following: (1) slow and modest integration of public schools in the South and in small towns throughout the nation; (2) increasing segregation in education by race in those urban areas where blacks concentrate in central cities and whites have moved to suburbs; (3) concern on the part of African Americans about the content of the curriculum and the degree to which it supports racial bias; and (4) efforts by urban African Americans to gain greater influence in the schools their children attend through the movement for community control.

Higher Education

The higher education of blacks in the United States dates back to an occasional student at a northern college during the eighteenth century. After several unsuccessful efforts to establish a college for blacks, in 1854 supporters of the African colonization movement founded the Ashmun Institute, later called Lincoln University. In the South the end of the Civil War encouraged the founding of numerous colleges for former slaves. Some have ceased to exist, but in 1970 there were more than fifty fully accredited private institutions, some of which also enrolled white students. In the years prior to World War II, most African Americans receiving college degrees graduated from these institutions.

State-supported institutions of higher education were slower to emerge and, like public schools for blacks, were not well financed. Support improved after World War II, but, without exception, these institutions were receiving less financial support than their white counterparts when the Supreme Court announced the Brown decision.

College attendance among African Americans has increased since the Brown decision, and the percentage attending all-black institutions has declined significantly. Despite severe financial difficulties, the traditionally black private institutions continue to provide education for a sizable portion of the African American student population. The formerly all-black state institutions remain largely black but are legally open to all. Nonetheless, blacks continue to attend college at lower levels than do whites.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Eric, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Fairclough, Adam. Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Lomotey, Kofi, ed. Going to School: The African-American Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Lomotey, Kofi, ed. Sailing against the Wind: African Americans and Women in U.S. Education. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Henry N.Drewry/a. e.

See alsoAfrican Americans ; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ; Desegregation ; Education, Higher: African American Colleges ; Plessy v. Ferguson .