Federal policies removed many American Indian children from their homes to attend boarding schools into the 20th century.
Children continued to be removed from their homes and placed in boarding schools at the time citizenship was granted to Native Americans in 1924. Not until then did concerned citizens seriously investigate the horrible conditions in these schools. Red Cross investigators found that children at the Rice Boarding School in Arizona were fed “bread, black coffee, and syrup for breakfast; bread and boiled potatoes for dinner; more bread and boiled potatoes for supper” (Szasz, 1974). The poor diet and overcrowded conditions contributed to the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis and trachoma (Spring, 2011). Investigators found that boarding schools were supported by the work of students who attended classes half the day and worked the other half. The 1928 Meriam Report by Johns Hopkins University attacked the government’s policies of removing Native American children from their homes. Following the release of this report, the government began to support community day schools and native cultures (Spring, 2011).
Video Link Watch a video about boarding schools.
American Indian Control
When John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency in 1960, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to involve American Indians in policy decisions. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported the creation of the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Navajo reservation, in part to preserve the Navajo language and culture. In addition, Navajo parents were again able to control the education of their children.
As the Civil Rights Movement grew in intensity in the 1960s, America Indian tribes began to participate in a Pan-Indian movement that recognized that tribes shared a common set of values and interests. The American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Indians of All Tribes led demonstrations demanding self-determination. At the same time, a Senate report, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge, condemned previous federal educational policies for Native Americans. The report said “a careful review of the historical literature reveals that the dominant policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of forced assimilation. … [because of] a desire to divest the Indian of his land” (Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, 1969, p. 9).
Federal policy began to change. Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 provided support for bilingual programs in Indian languages and English. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which gave tribes the right to operate their own schools. The 1988 Tribally Controlled Schools Act gave grants to tribes to operate their own schools. In a complete switch of earlier policy for assimilation and the destruction of native cultures and languages, the 1990 Native American Languages Act promoted the preservation of traditional Native American languages.
African Americans
The education of African Americans is also built on a history of discrimination, but their relationship with the European colonizers was different than that of the American Indians. They were not the native inhabitants of the United States. For the most part, they had not chosen to immigrate to the United States, but entered involuntarily by force. They did not own land that the settlers wanted, but they were a critical source of labor necessary for the southern economy. Most African Americans were owned and sold, and had little control over their own lives. Until the early part of the 20th century, most African Americans lived in the South where before the Civil War it was illegal to attend school. Although literacy was a punishable crime for African slaves in the South, at least 5% of them were literate by the outbreak of the Civil War (Anderson, 1988).
Participation in Schools After the Revolutionary War
African American children in the North most often attended segregated and inferior schools. Charity schools for freed slaves opened at the end of the 18th century in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore (Kaestle, 1983). African American children could attend Boston schools at that time, but most did not because of their poor economic situations and the hostile reception of them in schools. In 1798 a group of black parents petitioned the School Committee for a separate school to protect their children from the hostile environment. The School Committee did not accept the parents’ proposal at first, but it changed its position in 1806 and opened a segregated school with public funds and money from white philanthropists (Spring, 2011).
By the 1820s black parents decided that the segregated school was providing an inferior education for their children and began to demand better conditions and teachers. They petitioned the Boston School Committee in 1846 to desegregate schools. Even though the School Committee found the segregated schools unacceptable, it took no action to change those conditions or to require its public schools to be open to African American children. In response, Benjamin Roberts sued the city for excluding his daughter from all-white schools near their home. He lost his case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court when it ruled that the city had provided “a separate, but equal” school for his daughter. Not long afterwards, in 1855, however, the state legislature passed a law that prevented the segregation of schools based on race or religion, becoming the first state to outlaw school segregation. The Boston schools were integrated that year (Spring, 2011).
Education in the South
Before the end of the Civil War, former slaves in the South were fighting for universal education. They craved literacy but were unwilling to wait for the government to provide schools. They established and staffed their own schools with African American teachers throughout the South. The African American teachers, school officials, and other leaders adopted the common school ideal with the New England classical liberal curriculum. The curriculum in elementary schools included reading, spelling, writing, grammar, diction, history, geography, arithmetic, and music. In the black colleges, students studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, and philosophy (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read about segregated schools in the South.
To pursue the goal of universal education, the former slaves sought the help of Republican politicians, northern missionary societies, the Union army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been created by Congress in 1865. However, it was very important to them that they control their own education, which was sometimes difficult as northern missionaries moved into the South to establish schools. When John W. Alvord was appointed the national superintendent of schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, he discovered a system of at least 500 “native schools” as he traveled across the South (Anderson, 1988). These schools had been established and were being managed by ex-slaves who were committed to ensuring that African American children and adults would learn to read and write as soon as possible. In some communities, black churches developed Sabbath schools that offered literacy instruction in the evenings and on the weekends. In these schools, the speller was as prevalent as the bible (Anderson, 1988).
Most planters resisted universal education for former slaves and impoverished whites. Their opposition was, in part, due to economics. The planters needed a workforce that would work for low wages; it depended heavily on child labor, which led to schools being opened as late as December. They supported low taxes, opposed compulsory school attendance, and discouraged universal public education. Eventually, they began to provide schools for low-income white students, but they failed to provide schools for black children in most communities. The gains made by African Americans in the 1860s were quickly stymied and the proportion attending school began to drop (Anderson, 1988).
Education at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Although ex-slaves had founded their schools with a classical curriculum, some leaders questioned the need for such advanced study. They argued that black children would be better served with training for the trades and learning their appropriate role in the Southern culture. With this goal in mind, Northerner Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded Hampton Institute in Virginia to prepare teachers. Most of Hampton’s early students had completed only the eighth grade. They were required to work long hours in a sawmill, on the school’s farm, or in the school’s kitchen or dining room to develop the ethic of hard work that Southern landowners expected of their laborers. One of Armstrong’s top students, Booker T. Washington, founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 to extend Armstrong’s pedagogy.
Most African Americans had a different vision for their education. They saw Washington giving in to the white demands of industrialists who wanted a steady, complacent workforce at low wages. The primary spokesperson for a different vision, W. E. B. Du Bois, wanted no compromises with the powerful white elites. Instead, he wanted to challenge the oppressive southern economy. He argued that black education should be about preparing the African American leaders of the future. He supported the classical education that was available in black colleges like Atlanta and Wilburforce. While Washington supported segregated schooling, Du Bois became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the organization that spearheaded the effort to desegregate schools later in the century. By 1915, the Du Bois supporters had prevailed; the Hampton-Tuskegee model began to lose favor among its previous supporters (Spring, 2011).
At the beginning of the 20th century, most African American children did not attend elementary school because no schools existed for them, and they were not allowed to attend the schools that white children attended. If they wanted a school, African American families in the South often had to build their own schools even though they paid local and state taxes to support white segregated schools (Spring, 2011). When African American children could attend school, their schools were usually inferior to those attended by white students. The schools lacked equipment and supplies. They were allocated textbooks after they had worn out their usefulness in the white schools. Families and leaders in the African American community turned to the courts for support in accessing resources for the education of their children.
School Desegregation
Nearly 100 court cases from 20 states and the District of Columbia were filed for equal education in the 19th century. African Americans in the North won a majority of their cases, prohibiting segregation in their public schools (Hendrie, 2000). Nevertheless, segregation continued in the South. After Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to ride in the “colored” section of a train in Louisiana, he protested that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been abridged. The United States Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that “separate but equal” facilities were legal. This decision supported the segregation of schools for the next six decades.
The NAACP decided to pursue a legal path toward desegregating public schools. Five cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas, and the District of Columbia were percolating in the lower courts in the mid-1940s. The first four cases were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953 by Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African American Supreme Court justice. In 1954 the Court declared that “[i]n the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The fifth case, Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), declared that the federal government could not segregate schools in the District of Columbia.
Most school districts did not respond to this mandate until after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many white families fiercely resisted the desegregation of their schools. In cities like Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Guard protected African American students who were entering white schools for the first time. Virginia’s Prince Edward County School Board resisted desegregation, closing its public schools for five years. White families established private Christian schools or moved to the suburbs where the population was primarily white to avoid integration. The 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision moved desegregation efforts to another level when it upheld district-wide busing to overcome segregation.
As schools were desegregated, many African American teachers and principals who had worked in segregated schools were not invited to teach in the integrated schools, leaving many of them without jobs. However, the race of the students in schools did change in the three decades following the Brown decision. In the mid-1960s only 2% of black students attended integrated schools; by the late 1980s, 45% of them were in integrated schools (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003). During this period, rural and small-town schools across the South were integrated. The achievement gap between black and white students closed substantially, students of color had greater access to quality schools and college admission, and students were better prepared to work and interact in a multicultural society (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Even more dramatic than the desegregation of schools during this period was the dismantling of Plessy v. Ferguson and its resulting Jim Crow laws , which did not allow African Americans to use the same facilities as whites.
By the mid-1980s federal court sanctions for integration began to be lifted. After the Supreme Court allowed federal courts to end desegregation plans with Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell in 1991, many federal courts prohibited school districts from voluntarily using race-conscious assignment policies to maintain diversity in their schools (Boger & Orfield, 2005). Because of de facto segregation in many communities, neighborhood schools were often comprised of students of the same race. Segregation in schools began to return to pre-1970 levels. At the beginning of the 21st century African American and Latino students were again much more likely than other students to attend schools that are characterized by poverty and their peers are predominantly other students of color. Half of the nation’s schools are highly segregated white schools, but the degree of poverty in those schools is considerably less. Although the ability to attend less impoverished schools provides all students a better chance at being successful in school and life, the one-time goal of integrating schools has been abandoned (Boger & Orfield, 2005).
Latinos
Whether Mexican American students could attend the same schools as whites depended on whether they were classified as white. There was no common agreement on the race of Mexican Americans. In 1897, Texas courts ruled that Mexican Americans were not white. However, California classified them as Caucasian until 1930 when the Attorney General categorized them as American Indians (Spring, 2001). As a result of not being white, most Mexican American children attended segregated schools through the first half of the 20th century. The same separate but equal laws applied to them as to African Americans.