We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. Today, we’re going backward slightly again to cover the second difficult chapter in American education.
Zion School for Colored Children, South Carolina, circa 1868; image in the public domain.
If you were Black in early America, enslaved or not, getting an education was difficult. We know from personal memoirs and writings that a handful of enslaved Black people, like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, were educated or allowed access to education by their enslavers. We also know from the existence of the Bray School and a few other institutions like it that there were attempts to more formally educate enslaved and free Black people prior to the Revolutionary War. And we know from Black oral history in Virginia that there may have been an underground network of enslaved and free Black educators — men and women who had learned to read and write, maybe even at the Bray School — who passed on their learning to their friends and neighbors.
Tolson’s Chapel, built in 1866 in Sharpsburg, Maryland, served as a church and Freedman’s Bureau school; image in the public domain.
But we also know that the most common condition of enslaved Black people was to be uneducated. White, European enslavers believed that education was a conduit for the enslaved to realize their own inhumane exploitation and that could lead to widespread rebellion. They were not wrong. In 1831, a literate enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led a revolt against his white enslavers in Virginia. Turner’s literacy allowed him to read the Bible and find stories there that convinced him that slavery was contrary to God’s law and in those circumstances, revolt was not just necessary but divinely blessed. Turner’s revolt was brutally quashed after just 24 hours, but it led Southern states to oppress enslaved people further, including making education for them illegal. An additional reason for this was that one of the major justifications for slavery was the supposedly inherent lack of intellectual ability in Black people. This lesser ability was part of what fitted them for enslavement. This argument was completely undermined by Black people learning to read and write; outlawing education was a means of extending that fiction for as long as possible. In 1833, an Alabama law declared that “any person or persons who shall attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read, or write, shall upon conviction thereof of indictment be fined in a sum not less than $250” (about $7,600 in today’s dollars). Note that the law applied to enslaved and free Black people. However, there’s evidence that some enslavers may have looked the other way: many enslaved people were in charge of complex operations that would have been very difficult (if not impossible) to manage without being able to read. It’s possible that they were given some instruction in order to be of maximal use to their enslavers.*
Memphis Massacre of 1866, during which the Black Freedmen’s schoolhouse was burned to the ground. Image in the public domain.
What is very clear, though, is that enslaved people were poised to take advantage of any and all chances to learn that came their way. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, when U.S. army units began arriving in Virginia in 1861, members of the free Black community immediately began opening up schools for Black people, staffed by Black teachers and white Northerners. Among Black Americans of this period, education was the primary means by which newly-freed slaves could begin to access economic opportunities like good jobs and land ownership. Multiple religious denominations, both Protestant and Catholic, established schools for Black people immediately after the war. A sweeping wave of Black and abolitionist White legislators established public schools as well during the Reconstruction era. But the attempts to bring parity to the South were often heavy handed and punitive and resulted in backlash from White Southerners. Small surprise that efforts to disrupt or cease the education of former slaves were intense, destructive, and often had fatal consequences for Black communities. As White supremacists regained power in the 1870s and stocked state and local legislatures and sheriff’s offices, they were able to pass the infamous Jim Crow laws that suppressed or destroyed much of the progress achieved by Black Southerners during Reconstruction.
The Veasey School for Colored Children, Georgia 1941; note that the building is propped up with rocks and one window is broken. Image in the public domain.
And yet, Black schools demonstrated remarkable success. Following the end of the Civil War, literacy rates among Black Americans skyrocketed, rising from 20 percent in 1870 to nearly 70 percent by 1910. That they had as much success as they did given the circumstances is frankly amazing, because in no way were Black and White schools similar. Virtually all rural schools were in relatively basic buildings with no indoor plumbing, but schoolhouses for Black students were truly dilapidated, with broken windows, sagging floors, and leaking roofs. There were often few books, and other supplies like paper and pencils were also lacking. Books that were available were usually outdated castoffs from other schools. Funding for Black schools was significantly less than for their White counterparts. Black schools were also overcrowded and — because of the poor conditions of the buildings — unsafe. Black teachers were poorly paid, and their salaries were often in arrears — something that was often blamed on the difficulty of collecting taxes in rural areas.** Black, rural schools often ran on shortened schedules to save money, further reducing the overall contact time with the teacher. All schools were segregated at this time, so a Black student had no other options, unless his or her family had the money to send them to a private boarding school, and of course, most did not. Here’s some hard data that gives us a glimpse of this discrimination: In 1937–38, in Halifax County, Virginia, the total value of White school property was $561,262, compared to just $176,881 for the county’s Black schools.*** And here’s another tidbit: NAACP studies of unequal expenditures in the mid-to-late 1920s found that Georgia spent $4.59 per year on each Black child as opposed to $36.29 on each White child. And another: In Mississippi in 1945-46, Black teachers were paid an average of $426 per year versus $1,211 per year for White teachers.
Students at the Berry O’Kelly Teacher Training School in North Carolina, circa 1915. Image in the public domain.
Despite all this, the most talented and educated Black people frequently chose to become teachers. In the Black community, teaching was a highly respected profession.^ By 1900, the Black community had trained and put to work 30,000 Black teachers in the South. Outstanding Black teachers in the North went on to earn advanced degrees and teach in prestigious schools in places like Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York. Many Black women became teachers and some went on to serve as principals and even to found their own schools. As part of the Citizenship School Project, the Black community trained over 10,000 Citizenship School teachers who led over 800 Citizenship Schools throughout the South that were responsible for registering approximately 700,000 African Americans to vote.^^ Out of this movement arose the leaders and thinkers who would press for desegregation of schools so that Black students could have the same facilities and resources as White students. This goal was finally realized in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but it came at a cost.
Brown v. Board decimated the robust network of Black teachers and administrators. In many places, when Black schools were closed their teachers were summarily fired and not rehired by the newly segregated schools. In the South, historians estimated that about 38,000 Black teachers lost their jobs, but a new study puts that number much higher — about 100,000. It appears from new research that the loss of Black teachers was mostly a Southern phenomenon, but access to higher education and discriminatory hiring practices constrained the numbers of Black teachers in the North in ways that made it impossible for the percentage of Black teachers to keep pace with the growing percentage of Black students. Even more discriminatory practices during the peak of southern school desegregation resulted in a steep reduction in the diversity of the teaching force overall, and that imbalance is still with us today. About 6% of all teachers are Black, versus the 15% of all students who are Black. And that imbalance has a distinctly negative impact on those students.
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*These people had to be somewhat unusual across the totality of enslaved people prior to the Civil War, but their education, however minimal, would have been necessary because the lack of education could be profound. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography spoke of most slaves not knowing their own ages and not knowing the months of the year. He also spoke personally of not only not knowing where Massachusetts was, but not even being aware that it existed.
**There was a long, slow reluctance in the South to fund any schools in rural areas for a couple of reasons. First, rural areas made up the greater part of the South by a wide margin — there just weren’t many cities in the South, and the cities that existed were smaller than their northern counterparts. Second, conservative lawmakers argued that there wasn’t a need for education in rural areas because most residents were tobacco and cotton farmers who, they contended, were not benefitted by book learning.
***The South as a whole was extremely impoverished after the Civil War, something that lasted for decades. So in an economy that was already stretched thin, Black schools and citizens were even further marginalized by the lack of funding.
^And it still should be, by everyone.
^^This was necessary because in the South, White legislators created barriers to voting that included literacy tests. The Citizenship Schools were created specifically to help Black citizens become literate so that their lack of literacy could no longer be used to disenfranchise them. They could register to vote because they had the skills to pass the literacy tests.