Black Americans' historical struggle for right to education

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SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1991 9 sion.

P.H. McLogan, a Chicago printer, expressed their sentiment: "The duty of the appointed protectors at our school system [is] to provide for the mass of the people, not a scant education, instruction in those branches which may be deemed necessary for the immediate bread-winning, but a liberal one. ... We think that instruction in our public schools should be so ample as to dispense absolutely with the necessity of private schools. (From Ira Katznelson, "Schooling for All.")

As the high school began to develop as an institution, unions and working-class leaders protested the exclusion of workers' children. Public primary schools did not adequately prepare children for high-school entrance exams, and many working-class families could not afford to keep their children out of work.

By the turn of the century, students were compelled by law to attend primary schools, and the vast majority enrolled in public institutions. Urban school systems had developed significantly.

By the 1920s, nearly 50 percent of the population had settled in urban areas. Both foreign immigration and the migration from rural areas to the cities forced the expansion of school systems and the provision and enforcement of compulsory education. The funds spent on public education per pupil increased over three times between 1910 and 1924.

The case of Brown v. Board of Education brought the issue of American school segregation to the world's attention in 1954, but Black Americans had to organize and fight for their right to public education from its inception.

In contrast to the American labor movement, Black demands for education were tied to the challenge of their oppression on many fronts because they were denied education as a group on the basis of race.

Throughout U.S. history, universal access to public education applied only to white children. During slavery, most Southern states outlawed teaching slaves to read and write. But if the potential for rebellion inherent in a literate slave was obvious to the slave-owners, it was also clear to the slaves who sometimes managed to learn to read, often in secret.

After the Civil War and during the period known as Radical Reconstruction in the South, there was an enormous demand for schools by freed Blacks. Most of the first Southern statewide free public Arthur Rothstein schools were established under Black lawmakers, who preferred integrated schools.

When Radical Reconstruction was ended in the 1870s, schools for Black children were one of the first victims of reaction. As symbols of Black equality, the schools became targets of racist hate and some were burned down. Most, however, were closed when funding for Black education was slashed and segregation made law.

For example, when the Atlanta public school system was founded in 1872, 40 percent of the city's residents were Black. Yet Black children were given inferior schools which were so overcrowded that 10 years later, only half the Black children seeking to attend primary school could do so. No high schools were provided for Black students in Atlanta until the 1920s.

But education persisted as a symbol of freedom and advancement, and Black teachers struggled against enormous hardship to operate schools for Black children. This legacy of struggle culminated in the gains the Civil Rights movement made for Black education in the decades of the 1950s and '60s.

The intensity and mass character of the Black struggle for equal education and desegregation, contrasts with involvement of the labor movement in the establishment of public education. Because they were excluded from all avenues of power, Blacks resorted to mass action—picketing, sit-ins, marches, and boycotts—in order to achieve their demands.

This vision of education as part of the larger struggle for Black liberation and the use of mass action to press for the movement's demands is more necessary than ever today.