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passes on of the U.S. first laws that shut slaves out from schooling
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Foregrounding intentionality, the works of folks’ ancestors, and putting faces to names --- grounding this work in the PEOPLE! Honoring and recognizing the struggle and immense labor that folks are putting in to not only advocate for their current communities but in offering their roots of resistance for generations to come!!! Which stories have you heard before/faces have you seen before? What do you notice missing from this timeline?
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The Tenth Amendment lays the foundation for state control of education
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to forcibly assimilate Native Americans opens on the Yakama Reservation. The Yakama Indian Reservation is a Native American reservation in Washington state of the federally recognized tribe known as the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The tribe is made up of Klikitat, Palus, Wallawalla, Wanapam, Wenatchi, Wishram, and Yakama peoples. -
"But both before and after the Civil War for the great majority of Black people, there was no school at all they could attend for higher education. In most states, especially in the South, there was no higher education available for Black people, at least not of a significantly quality. Like doctoral studies were unavailable. To the extent there were some opportunities, they tend to focus on agriculture and vocational training and teaching training."
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Emergence in the late 1800s of Black colleges, what we know today as PBI (Predominantly Black Institutions) or HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), in contrast to "flagship schools" and other "renowned" schools in most states that were "reserved with essentially 100% affirmative action quotas for white people" Thurgood Marshall College Fund
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African Americans mobilize to bring public education to the South for the first time. After the Civil War, and with the legal end of slavery, African Americans in the South make alliances with white Republicans to push for many political changes, including, for the first time, rewriting state constitutions to guarantee free public education. In practice, white children benefit more than Black children.
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Two years after the Emancipation Proclamation: Alabama State University, Barber-Scotia College, Fayetteville State University, Howard University, Johnson C. Smith University, Morehouse College, Morgan State University, Saint Augustine’s University and Talladega College, were all established. Images of Howard University alum with a degree in Fine Arts, Chadwick Boseman -
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for black and white children to attend the same schools.
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1870s - 1960s
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and voting laws designed to disenfranchise black voters.
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The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the state of Louisiana has the right to require “separate but equal” railroad cars for Blacks and whites. This decision means that the federal government officially recognizes segregation as legal. One result is that southern states pass laws requiring racial segregation in public schools. Image of Black women in Kentucky protesting Education Oppression Timeline -
being one of Charles Hamilton Houston's most well-known students -
We see pushback and progress, especially with the founding of the NAACP -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- in 1909 and then Charles Hamilton Houston, who became special counsel in 1934.
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founded the NAACP's essentially -- well, Thurgood Marshall officially did, but Charles Hamilton Houston created a clinic at Howard, where he trained people to become lawyers to challenge racial injustice, -
and officially founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). -
that discriminated against black Americans.
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which promoted black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Later in the decade, Garvey moved his headquarters to New York City and the UNIA became a large grassroots movement. And they began challenging segregation in a variety of contexts, but including targeting "separate but equal" schools. -
And some of the major victories, they had University v. Murray was in Maryland in 1936, which admitted the first Black student to the University of Maryland,
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A Supreme Court case;
The other one was a lower court case in which the Supreme Court held that states couldn't pay to send a Black student to another state, where they could get a higher education. They had to provide it in the state that they did, which encouraged states to create some schools, but again, they usually weren't nearly of the quality of their flagship schools. -
In 1948, McLaurin was denied admission into the University of Oklahoma (OU) to pursue his Ph.D. in education because of a state law that made it a crime for Blacks to attend any school with whites. After challenging that law in federal district court and winning on September 29, 1948, he was admitted into the university two weeks later on October 14 over its strong objection and became the first and only Black student among the 12,173 white ones there. -
which involved the University of Texas: They had created a makeshift school and said, look, we're providing an education. And the court talked about the intangible qualities of higher education that the University of Texas that offered a much more superior education than creating just a school room across the road in the county court house where someone would get instruction on their own.
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highlighting and honor the empowering project of a community coming together and providing access to an education/resource that was so violently denied -
OU President George Lynn Cross decided to embarrass McLaurin by segregating and isolating him in all classes by putting him in anterooms with a separate desk, by segregating and isolating him in the library, in the cafeteria, the restrooms, and at sporting events. Think about that level of suffocating humiliation for a minute -
Downtown Charlottesville; Swanson had been admitted to the law school here, but the university denied him under laws against "integrated teaching". And in part, applying these two new Supreme Court cases, the federal court in downtown Charlottesville ruled that Gregory Swanson had to be admitted. [So UVA was integrated by its first Black student in 1950.] https://www.law.virginia.edu/uvalawyer/fall-2016/article/justice-starts-right-here-remembering-gregory-swanson-uva-and-uva-laws) -
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MAY 1959: ELAINE JOHNSON COATES BECOMES THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO GRADUATE FROM THE UMD CITATION: “May 1959: Elaine Johnson Coates becomes the first Black woman to graduate from the UMD,” Claiming Their Space: Black Student Activism at the University of Maryland, accessed October 15, 2023, -
First grader Ruby Bridges is the first African American to attend William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She becomes a class of one as parents remove all Caucasian students from the school. -
But as became clear into the 1960s and 1970s, simply stopping "outright exclusion" does not make up for the decades and centuries of denying Black people the opportunity to develop educational resources in their families and in their communities.
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Those institutions founded after 1964 are known as predominantly Black institutions (PBIs), but are included in this study as part of the "101 HBCUs". -
to accomodate Cuban refugee children -
becomes law. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion or national origin.
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In 1968, the Party’s headquarters mandated that all chapters inaugurate “serve the people” programs. Community service had become a central component of the BPP’s mission, and the group committed itself to organizing nearly two dozen social and educational programs to benefit Black communities across the nation, from free medical clinics to voter registration drives.
By 1970, a People’s Free Medical Clinic was a requirement in every chapter. -
As part of their commitment to Black communities, the Black Panther Party (BPP) began liberation schools led by volunteers after school in storefronts, churches, and homes in 1969. Following these early schools and recognizing the failure of public schools to adequately prepare Black youth for the life ahead of them, the BPP formed the Intercommunal Youth Institute (later renamed the Oakland Community School) in January 1971, to begin breaking this “seemingly endless cycle of oppression.”
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Black parents and White teachers clash in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of New York City, over the issue of community control of the schools. Teachers go on strike, and the community organizes freedom schools while the public schools are closed. Teachers march in support of the community control board during the Ocean Hill–Brownsville teacher dispute, October, 1968.(Louis Liotta / New York Post Archives) -
Facing a white community refusing school integration, Black parents in this small rural county organize their own schools and march every day for months. They march all the way to Raleigh twice, endure tear gassing, and even fight a gun battle with the Ku Klux Klan. White leaders eventually capitulate, and negotiate an integration plan with black parents/students. Unlike many Southern integration plans, the Hyde County sends some white teachers and students into previously all-black schools.
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So people started to realize we have to do more than just stop overtly saying no. We have to try and affirmatively admit more people than our current process does.
So you started to see affirmative action. But as usual, you see pushback:
Bakke 1978 struck down an affirmative action program at the University of Davis Medical School. Crosen in 1989 applied strict scrutiny to affirmative action, which makes it very difficult to engage in. -
Invalidation of affirmative action; "overt and covert" forms of racism; the struggle to access education continues and will continue. What about the "content of education"?: when no Black people were going to higher education, the schools didn't even think it was worth teaching about the Black experience and to the extent that they did, it was to reinforce white supremacy and Black inferiority.
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Colorblindness is the racial ideology says the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity (Williams, 2011).
1. Amounts to a dismissal of the lived experiences of POC, also suggests that racism does not exist as long as we ignore it.
2. In the context of enduring structural and systematic racism, racial colorblindness serves as a device to disengage from conversations of race and racism entirely. (Asare, 2017) -
BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) will explain that race and ethnicity MATTERS, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. Being racialized is something we see and live with every day.
When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. ("Debunking the Myth of Color Blindness in a Racist Society") -
The renowned social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford, who gave a terrific lecture standing at this podium just two years ago for MLK. She talks about how liberals will often cite disparities, how many Black people are incarcerated, how many Black people live in poverty, the wealth gap, and more. But she says we have to be careful because if you just cite those disparities, to people who don't understand the reason for that, it tends to actually reinforce racist notions. -
And today, as I mentioned at the outset, you see people pushing back on the idea that we can teach about race in elementary and secondary schools and also, of course, we see people questioning the teaching of race in higher education as well as divisive, promoting white safe hatred seems to be some of the rationales.
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"In the context of education, antiblackness is about the ways in which K–12 schools reify “disdain, disregard and disgust” (ross, 2020a, para. 4) of Black children; how blackness becomes synonymous with social unacceptability and inherent deficiency." Hytten and Stemhagen -
“Race neutral is the new separate but equal, because it lacks so much support in recent historical context,” Yeshitila said. “It allows for the various racial inequities that already exist to continue existing, and that is racism. Not addressing racism is racism.” SFFA Lawsuit -
A race-blind approach to admissions would ignore Harvard’s long history of being a white-only institution, as well as the lasting impacts of systemic racial discrimination, which “resulted in worse socioeconomic conditions for students of color, impacting the strength of their application” (The Harvard Crimson). Leah Yeshitila ’26 said she feels “sad” to see what she feels is a “misuse of the equal protection clause from the Brown v. Board of Education case” to overturn affirmative action.
