Part 2

Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision
by Peter Irons, Ph.D., J.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

Opposition to educating blacks was not limited to the South. In 1831, Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker, admitted Sarah Harris, the daughter of a respected black farmer, to her school in Canterbury, Connecticut. Led by a local politician, Andrew Judson, who later served as a federal judge, townspeople objected loudly and passed a resolution that educating black girls would damage "the persons, property, and reputations of our citizens." Judson voiced the sentiments of many northern whites: "The colored people can never rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of the whites."

Fueled by Judson's rhetoric, Canterbury's white residents refused to trade with Miss Crandall, threw filth into her well, hurled rocks and rotten eggs at her home, and set fire to her schoolhouse. None of these attacks eroded her determination to keep her school open, and she admitted more black girls. The Connecticut legislature then passed an act making it illegal to teach blacks and whites in the same school, and a defiant Prudence Crandall was arrested, convicted, and jailed, although the state supreme court later quashed her indictment and she returned to her school. Finally, a mob attacked the schoolhouse with iron bars and virtually wrecked the building. Miss Crandall decided not to risk her students' lives and reluctantly closed her school in 1834.

The next year, after the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire opened its doors to black students, "a mob of several hundred men and nearly a hundred yoke of oxen dragged the seminary to a swamp, left it there in ruins, and drove the teacher from town." Also in 1835, white mobs attacked the black schools in Washington, D.C., destroyed several buildings, threatened the white teachers, and ransacked the homes of black students. One of the white teachers, Miss Miner, asked a mob member, "What good will it do to destroy my school-room? I shall only get another and go right on." She continued teaching black children until the eve of the Civil War in 1860, when another mob burned her school to the ground.

The Civil War ended the legal institution of slavery, at the cost of six hundred thousand lives, most of them young men who fought neither to abolish nor defend slavery but simply to survive the carnage of the bloodiest war in American history. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, three years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, conferred state and national citizenship on the former slaves and promised a federal guarantee of "the equal protection of the laws." Firmly in the control of "Radical Republicans" whose Reconstruction policy imposed a military government on the former Confederacy, Congress granted the franchise to the former slaves, who flocked to the ballot boxes and elected delegates to conventions that rewrote the constitutions of the southern states. Several of these constitutions provided for systems of free public education, and black children began attending school in large numbers. In Mississippi, for example, the legislature-controlled by black members and their white Republican allies-established a school system in 1870 that enrolled 127,000 black children the following year, 39 percent of the school-age black population. Even under Reconstruction and black rule, Mississippi's public schools were segregated, because white parents refused to pay taxes for integrated schools. Close to a century passed before the first black child in Mississippi attended school with whites.

The South Carolina constitution, written by black legislators, required that all schools be racially mixed, and black and white children attended classes together in many communities. The state also established an integrated teachers college, which trained many black teachers. Other southern states, however, experienced serious problems with public education, largely because many white voters refused to pay taxes to support black education. Even in states that funded black schools, the lack of qualified black teachers made it difficult to maintain academic standards.

Many of the schools for black children that did exist in the South during the Reconstruction period had been established by the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency created by Congress to provide aid and services to former slaves, to help them purchase land, farming equipment, and supplies, and to give them enough schooling to read, write, and keep books. Bureau agents set up classes for adults and also provided schools for children, largely staffed by white teachers from the North, most of whom were young women who had never been to the South and were treated with scorn and outright hostility by many whites. One female teacher in northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, abandoned her job after being shunned by every white person in the community. "If you are mean enough to teach niggers," one told her, "you may eat and sleep with them." Male teachers were a small minority, but they became targets for threats. One teacher in Alabama received this anonymous and barely literate warning: "You have set up a nigger school in the settlement which we will not allow you to teach if you was a full blooded negro we would have nothing to say but a white skin negro is more than we can stand you can dismiss the school imediately or prepar yourself to travail we will give you a chance to save yourself and you had better move instanter." Some white teachers faced greater dangers than threats. Captain James McCleery, the Freedmen's Bureau superintendent of education in Texas and northwestern Louisiana, barely escaped a band of night riders in Louisiana by hiding in a swamp all night. One of his teachers in Henderson County, Texas, was grabbed by a white mob, stripped naked, covered with tar and cotton, and given two minutes to run before he faced a volley of rifle fire.

Teachers who ignored the hostility and threats often lost their schools to violence. Black schools were burned and pillaged throughout the South. Seven schools were burned in Georgia in 1866; three schools were burned that year in Texas. A school at Orangeburg, South Carolina, was fired into; the black school in Hardinsburg, Kentucky, was blown up on Christmas Eve in 1867. Despite the efforts to drive them from the South, the vast majority of the Freedmen's Bureau teachers stuck with their schools and their black students. By 1870, more than nine thousand teachers were instructing some two hundred thousand black children, about 12 percent of the school-age population. Northern missionary groups also sent teachers into southern states, and black churches set up schools for their children. All together, these public and private groups offered schooling to perhaps one of every five black children in the South, which meant that four out of five black children received no education at all during the Reconstruction period and remained illiterate, as their parents had during slavery.

The small minority of black children who did attend school during Reconstruction had an obvious zest for learning. One white teacher in Mississippi reported that when her students turned in their slates or copybooks, "my face was eagerly watched, to find therein approval or disapproval (they were quick to read the human countenance) and if a word of praise fell from my lips, a look of triumph would light up their sable faces as to make even them look beautiful." The condescending tone of this remark, however unintended, reflected the superior attitude and status of the white teacher. But even the most sensitive and understanding teachers encountered problems that stemmed from the reality of black life and culture in the rural South. The learning of black children was clearly hindered by the fact that virtually all came from families with illiterate parents, who could not help their children with lessons. Cut off from the written word, southern blacks had retained the oral traditions of their African roots, which they adapted to their churches and communities, where everyone joins in calling out verses and children's rhymes. Most teachers in Reconstruction schools reported that students in the early grades were quick to learn the alphabet, numbers, spelling of simple words, and the rote memorization of short poems and Bible passages, a reflection of this oral culture. Even in crowded classrooms, children enjoyed chanting in unison as they went through letters, numbers, and verses. One teacher in Virginia wrote that "instruction is necessarily mostly oral, as much time would be lost if we trained pupils singly. The little things gave us almost undivided attention, and are much stimulated by recitations in concert."

Past the primary level, however, teachers expressed frustration at the inability of black children to master arithmetic and composition. Part of the problem lay in textbooks designed for northern white students. A black child on a Mississippi farm was unlikely to associate a picture of Xerxes with the letter X or to know that a "newsboy" was an n word. One scholar of black education has noted this problem of Reconstruction schools: "In the world of the rural black schoolchild, very little of what was taught and of its presentation had much relationship to daily existence. The drudgery of manual labor, the lively conversations in the black people's cabins, and the generally non-literate nature of southern living for both races had almost nothing to do with what instructors talked about, once the concrete naming of things had passed."

The most difficult subject for black children was mathematics, which teachers in the nineteenth century approached from an abstract perspective. Children were not allowed to count on their fingers, or given problems that dealt with real objects like apples, chickens, or cotton bales. One critic of "mental" arithmetic wrote that teachers, most of them poorly trained in the subject, were often "completely nonplussed in any attempt to explain what they have done, or analyze the principles upon which it is performed." As a result, the "neglect of mathematics, the single most unmet need of black education, resulted in mass innumeracy, as tragic as illiteracy, a deficiency that has received more attention."

There were additional barriers to effective learning that came from outside the schoolhouse. The need for black children to plant, hoe, and harvest crops cut weeks and even months from already short school years; many children lived miles from school and could not walk on dirt roads when it rained; children got sick or injured and had no medical care; and because hostile whites sometimes ran teachers out of town or burned schools, even when children arrived at school, it was not always staffed or even standing. What is remarkable about the Reconstruction period is not that so few black children got so little good education, but that teachers and students alike persevered in the face of such enormous odds. It is also a testament to their faith in the liberating power of education that black parents-most of them illiterate themselves-worked hard to build schools, raise money for books and teachers, and give their children the desire to learn. One former slave, Charles Whiteside, was told by his master that he would remain in slavery " 'cause you got no education, and education is what makes a man free." This remark spurred Whiteside's determination that each of his thirteen children would attend school, no matter how long and hard he would have to work. It was worth all the labor "to make them free," he said.

Copyright © 2002, Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Peter Irons is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five previous award-winning books. The most recent, A People's History of the Supreme Court, was awarded the Silver Gavel Certificate of Merit by the American Bar Association.