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National Society for the Study of Education, Volume 114, Issue 2, pp. 53–74 Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University

Post-Slavery? Post-Segregation? Post- Racial? A History of the Impact of Slavery, Segregation, and Racism on the Education of African Americans

CHRISTOPHER M. SPAN

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This chapter details how slavery, segregation, and racism impacted the educational experiences of African Americans from the colonial era to the present. It offers a historical overview of the African American educa- tional experience and uses archival data and secondary source analysis to illustrate that America has yet to be a truly post-slavery and post- segregation society, let alone a post-racial society.

America is not, and has never been, in a post-racial era. Race and rac- ism have been evolving ever-present features of the American landscape since the founding of the first colonies in the 1600s. No matter how many pundits declare the end of race and racism with the election and reelection of President Barack Hussein Obama, the ideologies and prac- tices of both are alive and well. Exceptional events, such as the election of the first African American president, do not upend the long-term, cu- mulative intergenerational, structural, and institutional realities caused by race and racism. At a time of euphoria and triumphalism over the election of President Obama and of commemorations of the sesquicen- tennial of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the 50th anniversaries of the March on Washington (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), Freedom Summer (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965), it is understandable how the average American can say with some degree of confidence and satisfaction that America has entered a post-racial era. Each event was a watershed moment in American history and forced the nation to con- front its worst practices—slavery, segregation, and racism—and imple- ment solutions to these historic wrongs.

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On the whole, most Americans believe we have remedied these past wrongs and moved beyond determining a person’s opportunities and outcomes by the color of his or her skin. The election of an African American as president was proof enough and represents the culminat- ing event of decades of dedicated struggle to make America more equal and democratic. This logic insinuates that the election of Obama laid to rest the haunting legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism; it freed America of its troubling past. In actuality, Obama’s election has only allowed the American imagination and public discourse to run wild and insist—unsubstantially—that African Americans have collectively achieved equality, that racism has ended, and that the United States has entered a post-racial era.

The problem is that the facts do not match this prescribed version of reality. As the second term of President Obama comes to a close, there is still a significant African American and White divide in every measurable category of achievement and success. Correspondingly, race and racism are just as salient, primarily because the haunting legacies of slavery and segregation were never remedied and have accumulated a debt— economic, educational, moral, and otherwise—that is incalculable and compounding on a daily basis. In his essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) magnificently offered a long-count summation of the historical wrongs done to African Americans and how damaging they have been to America and Americans in general. “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole” (Coates, 2014).

Fifty years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to summa- rize the compounding debt incurred by African Americans because of slavery, segregation, and racism. He also attempted the summarize the sullen responses on the part of Whites to address these historic wrongs, and how America in general would forever suffer until it acknowledged and resolved its torrent treatment of African Americans. In his address entitled, “To Fulfill These Rights,” Johnson uttered to the graduates of Howard University,

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. . . . You do not take a person who, for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still believe that you have been completely fair. (Johnson, 1966, pp. 636–637)

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In this brief moment, Johnson recapitulated a hundred years of Ameri- can race relations. His words spoke to the failings of a generation of White Americans who had endured a civil war, witnessed slavery’s aboli- tion, and saw the crippling effects of what intense racism and two and half centuries of slavery and segregation did to African Americans, and who did little more than complain about the new laws that made African Americans “equal” to them. Correspondingly, his words also spoke to the failings of a contemporary generation of White Americans having difficulty complying with Brown, who were mounting massive and collec- tive resistance campaigns to African Americans obtaining civil rights and equality, who opposed the migration of African Americans to the North, and who—like their predecessors—refused to acknowledge contempo- raneous legislation affirming African Americans’ “equality” to Whites. In this commencement address, Johnson informed the graduates of How- ard University that it was not enough to end the institutionalized mis- treatment of African Americans; the nation also needed to acknowledge this purposeful mistreatment and take the necessary steps to remedy the cumulative harms caused by these discriminatory practices.

Johnson understood that the impact and legacy of slavery, segrega- tion, and racism lived on. It was in the hearts and minds of the everyday American, who squabbled over the legitimacy of the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery), the 14th Amendment (which guaranteed a person equal protections under the law), the 15th Amendment (which gave African American males the right to vote), Brown, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Johnson reasoned, to upend slavery or segrega- tion by law was not the same as remedying the harms caused by them or acknowledging the benefits gained by them.

This chapter is a continuation of this vein of thought. It argues that just as the nation was not post-slavery following emancipation (1865) or post-segregation 60 years ago following Brown or civil rights legislation, present-day America is also not post-racial following the election and re-election of President Obama. It illustrates that African Americans are still overwhelmingly impacted by the cumulative debt of slavery, segrega- tion, and racism. Arguably there is no better sector of society to assess the aggregate impact of these harms than public schooling. As such, a short overview of the educational history of African Americans, from the earliest considerations to the present, is offered to illustrate that the nation has not remedied the injuries caused by slavery, segregation, and racism and to further illustrate that American society is not in a post- racial era.

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RACISM, SLAVERY, SEGREGATION IN EARLY AMERICA, 1619–1865

In 1974, the historian Ira Berlin, in Slaves Without Masters: The Free Ne- gro in the Antebellum South, wrote, “The desire to keep the South a white man’s country governed white racial thought and policies throughout the antebellum years. Southerners could not conceive of a society in which whites and blacks lived as equals” (p. 182). One of the best indi- cations of this desire to keep America “a white man’s country” was the blatant denial or circumscription of all rights and privileges to freeborn and freed African Americans in the region, schooling included. From as early as 1740 in colonial South Carolina, a number of antiliteracy laws were passed that sought to restrict or deny African Americans in the South from acquiring the rudiments of literacy or attending school. Re- strictions grew worse during the antebellum era. For example, in 1819, Virginia revised its statutes to make it unlawful for enslaved and free African Americans to assemble, attend school, or be taught to read or write. Anyone who violated the law was to be given 20 lashes by the lo- cal authorities (The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia, 1819). In 1831, the statutes would be revised again after enslaved African American Nat Turner led an insurrection that resulted in the death of nearly 60 Whites in Southampton, Virginia. Turner, a self-taught literate man, conceived of and led the insurrection because of his close reading of the Bible. In his mind, he believed he was doing God’s work by slaying the enemies of His chosen people “with their own weapons” (Gray, 1832, p. 11).

It was illegal in all but three slave-sanctioning states—Arkansas, Ken- tucky, and Tennessee—for African Americans, free or enslaved, to as- semble for school purposes and for enslaved African Americans to learn how to read or write. Proslavery ideologues assumed only “madmen would risk having their slaves read or mingle with literate free blacks” (Span & Anderson, 2005, p. 297) because literacy inspired thoughts of freedom. African Americans in the South were expected to only receive instruction in what would best serve them for their presumed subordi- nate stations in life. As historians Christopher M. Span and James D. Anderson noted, “these sentiments were ingrained points of view by the 1840s, and they complemented the growing number of laws banning or restricting African American literacy in the antebellum South” (Span & Anderson, 2005, p. 297). Accordingly, on the eve of the Civil War, it is estimated that only 5% to 10% of the nearly four million enslaved Afri- can Americans in the region had acquired some degree of literacy (Du Bois, 1964; Duitsman Cornelius, 1991; Genovese, 1974; Span, 2009; Span & Anderson, 2005; Williams, 2005; Woodson, 1919). Most would acquire it clandestinely, away from the watchful eyes of Whites disapproving of

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any opportunity that aided enslaved African Americans in their everyday affairs and long-standing aspirations to use their acquired learning as a means to earn their freedom.

Free African Americans in the antebellum South, universally barred from the burgeoning public schools developing in the region, attended private schools heavily scrutinized by Whites, or they learned the rudi- ments of literacy in church or from family or friends. In the few south- ern cities that did afford freeborn African Americans public schooling opportunities—Charleston, New Orleans, Baltimore—schools taught African Americans to live as subordinate second-class citizens. African Americans could not vote or hold elected office, speak their mind, bear arms, join the military, be protected from unreasonable search and sei- zure, protect themselves in the court of law, own land in any meaningful quantity, intermarry, freely travel, gain access to most opportunities or public accommodations, or be afforded equal treatment.

These limited schooling opportunities were not restricted to the South. Similar racist thought, practices, and policies existed in the Northeast and Midwest as well, where nearly a quarter million African Americans lived at the start of the Civil War (1861). “Despite black enthusiasm for education,” historian Davison M. Douglas articulated, “many white northerners who promoted public education did not include African Americans in their common school vision” (Douglas, 2005, p. 20). Af- rican Americans being required to attend separate schools dates back to the 18th century, when schooling first arose in the colonies of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Separate schools, along with a host of anti-Black laws, increased as the nation expanded further west. In the Midwest, for example, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michi- gan, and Ohio developed Black laws that banned or limited the migra- tion of African Americans to their states. If African Americans did take up residency, they were quickly segregated by law or cultural practice from virtually all forms of public accommodations and denied equal ac- cess to public schools.

Both rhetoric and action were extreme in the North. For example, at the 1850 Indiana constitutional convention, one proponent “outra- geously suggested that it would be better to kill off” African Americans “at once, if there is no way to get rid of them” (Douglas, 2005, p. 27) than to allow them to migrate and reside in the state. As the nation continued its westward expansion to California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, so too did these restrictions and attitudes. Historian Leon Litwack (1961) illustrated that by 1860, every northern and western state restricted, seg- regated, or denied African Americans the right to send their children to school equal to Whites. What this means is that before the catchphrase

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“separate but equal” took firm root in the postbellum segregated South, it was an everyday reality in every northern, midwestern, and western state—states that established, by law or cultural practice before the Civil War, a dual system of public schools—one for White children and one for “colored” children. This institutionalized mistreatment of African Americans desiring to attend school on an equal basis only intensified following the Civil War and continued, almost uninterrupted, until the 1954 Brown decision (Douglas, 2005).

The root of the blatant denial of African Americans’ access to a quality and equitable education was racism. Whites simply could not conceive of African Americans being their equal or of their children attending school with Blacks. Arguably the most famous example of how White racism impacted African American education in the North prior to the Civil War occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s. In 1847, Black Bostonian Benjamin Roberts sought to enroll his 5-year-old daughter Sarah in the school closest to their residence. Sarah was denied admission to this school (and four others) because of the color of her skin, and the Boston School Committee, which made this determination, informed Sarah’s father that she could only attend the school designated for African Americans in the city. Infuriated over the decision, Roberts sued. Robert Morris, the first African American lawyer in the nation, and future Senator Charles Sumner, litigated his case (Kendrick & Kendrick, 2004).

In Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), Morris and Sumner brilliantly argued the case. Sumner’s argument, in particular, “relied on provisions of the Massachusetts constitution that gave every citizen equal rights in civil and political affairs” (Irons, 2002, p. 15). He concentrated his argument on five key considerations. As stated by Sumner: (1) The Constitution of Massachusetts decreed that “all men, without distinction of color or race, are equal before the law”; (2) the “legislation of Massachusetts . . . made no dis- crimination of color or race, in the establishment of Public Schools”; (3) “The Court of Massachusetts has never recognized any discrimination, founded on color or race, in the administration of the Public Schools”; (4) “The exclusion of colored children from the Public Schools, open to white children, is a source of practical inconvenience to them and their parents, to which white persons are not exposed, and is, therefore, a violation of Equality”; and (5) “The separation of children in the Pub- lic Schools of Boston, on account of color or race, is in the nature of Caste, and is a violation of Equality” (Fraser, 2014, pp. 67–69). Sumner firmly believed the Massachusetts Court would see the error of the Bos- ton School Committee and rule in favor of his client.

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The court felt otherwise and ruled in favor of maintaining separate schools. In his presiding decision, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw concluded, “the good of both classes of schools will be best promoted by maintain- ing the separate primary schools for colored and white children” (Fraser, 2014, p. 73). Black Bostonians and those sympathetic to their aspirations deemed the decision a major setback. Still, few better encapsulated the compounding and cumulative effects of racism and segregation than Sumner. To him, inequality, in itself, was “a vestige of ancient intoler- ance directed at a despised people” and that “a degraded and neglected class, if left to themselves, will become more degraded or neglected” (Fraser, 2014, p. 71). Sumner felt the separate schools of Boston were of the same character. He profoundly inquired of the court, “Who can say” if separate schools “do not injure the blacks?” (Fraser, 2014, p. 71). “Shut out by a still lingering prejudice from many social advantages, a despised class,” he ardently reasoned,

they feel this proscription from the Public Schools as a peculiar brand. Beyond this, it deprives them of those healthful animat- ing influences, which would come from a participation in the studies of their white brethren. It adds to their discouragements. It widens their separation from the rest of the community and postpones that great day of reconciliation. (Fraser, 2014, p. 71)

He deduced “the separation of schools so far from being a benefit to both races, is an injury to both. It tends to create a feeling of degrada- tion in the blacks, and of prejudice and uncharitableness in the whites” (Fraser, 2014, p. 72; see also Irons, 2002, p. 15). Sumner was essentially asking the court to consider a fundamental question with regard to the purpose of public schools: Was segregation, degradation, prejudice, and uncharitableness what Massachusetts, and by default, the nation, wanted public schools to teach its children?

The Roberts case is important because it served as the legal precedent for countless public accommodation and school segregation cases for the next century. Because public education was not (and still isn’t) a fundamental right and was a matter left to the states, state officials and judges across the nation used Roberts as a way to legally establish or vali- date segregated schooling, even after the passage of the 14th Amend- ment in 1868 (Logan, 1997). In his book Jim Crow’s Children, Peter Irons thoroughly explained the use of Roberts as legal precedence. He showed that failed school desegregation cases across the nation between 1849 and 1890 served as prima facie and case law for Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which legalized racism and sanctioned segregation by law in every South- ern state until the Brown decision 60 years later. Accordingly, Roberts v.

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City of Boston (1849) served as the foundation and legal precedent for promoting school segregation in the decisions of Ohio’s State v. McCann (1871), California’s Ward v. Flood (1874), Indiana’s Cory v. Carter (1874), Louisiana’s Bertonneau v. Board of Directors of City Schools (1878), New York’s King v. Gallagher (1883), and Missouri’s Lehew v. Brummell (1890). Each of these cases, correspondingly, served as legal precedent and language for Plessy and the 1899 opinion Cummings v. Richmond County, which upheld “the right of a Georgia county to provide secondary educa- tion for white students, but none for blacks” (Irons, 2002, p. 29). Both Supreme Court rulings codified whiteness as the preferred racial demar- cation in American society and undermined any opportunity of African Americans attending schools on an equal basis for another 75 years. As the historian Harvey Fireside (2004) correctly deduced, both Plessy and Cummings legalized racism in America.

POST-SLAVERY? SEGREGATION AND RACISM IN AMERICA, 1865–1954

Between 1863 and 1865, the abrupt ending of slavery did little to change the racial understanding and expectations whites had of themselves and of those freed from enslavement. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois surmised perhaps the ultimate understanding of how slave-owning southern whites in particular came to grips with the demise of slavery and the sudden loss of their slave property and absolute control over African Americans. For decades following emanci- pation, they simply could not see that the end of slavery benefited them as much as it did the former slave. It was only when they “discovered,” as Du Bois put it, that “to free the slave . . . freed the master” benefited their own self-interests did White southerners, former slaveholders or not, acknowledge that slavery would never be reconstituted in its origi- nal design (Du Bois, 1999, p. 18). This “discovery,” however, was a long and arduous development and upholds the premise that America was not a post-slavery society following the Emancipation Proclamation or adoption of the 13th Amendment. That slavery was upended through war, an executive order, a constitutional amendment, northern aboli- tionism, and the energies and efforts of fleeing enslaved African Ameri- cans set in the minds of southern Whites that emancipation was a bless- ing to southern blacks and a curse or punishment to them. As such, in the immediate postwar years, southern Whites fought to reestablish a system and culture reminiscent of slavery (Black codes, the debt peon- age system of sharecropping, mass incarceration of African Americans for petty offenses, and unrestrained violence as a form of coercion) even though this system and culture undermined the South’s very ability to

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fully participate in emerging industrialization endeavors modernizing every region of the United States (Fox-Genovese & Genovese, 2005; Le- mann, 2007; Link, 1992; Taylor, 1993).

Notwithstanding, Jim Crow—segregation by law—was firmly locked into place in the South by 1915. Between 1877 and 1901, America had entered what historian Rayford Logan referred to as the “nadir of Ameri- can race relations” (Logan, 1997, pp. 52–53). In the South, Whites would impose an unrestrained form of White supremacy, violence, segregation, and racial discrimination unseen in the history of the nation. By 1895, formerly enslaved African Americans across the South lost many of the civil rights they obtained following emancipation and were forced to live a life of second-class citizenship in the region. If African Americans as- pired for anything more, they subjected themselves to unrestrained and unmitigated violence.

The South lagged behind every critical development occurring in the United States because of its preoccupation with reestablishing and main- taining a racial caste system and in ensuring that freed African Ameri- cans and their children did not benefit from emancipation. Emancipa- tion was to be a burden and not a blessing to African Americans, and this was particularly true with regard to rise of public schooling. As public schooling at the expense of the state took root in the Northeast and Midwest in the early to mid-19th century, it was virtually nonexistent in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery and fear of enslaved African Americans acquiring even the rudiments of literacy limited the creation and implementation of public education in the South. Concomitantly, the same fear of African Americans achieving their aspirations, through schools, of becoming something more than the expectations of Whites influenced how public schooling would evolve in the South following the Civil War. The irony of these developments is that “the first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South,” as Du Bois would surmise, “came from Negroes . . . and public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea” (Du Bois, 1964, p. 638). African Americans appointed or elected to their state’s legislatures following the Civil War would propose, develop, and enact legislation that ensured the establishment of state-supported pub- lic school systems for all children irrespective of race, gender, socioeco- nomic status, or previous condition of servitude.

Accordingly, every southern state would develop and implement a public school system within the first decade of emancipation (Ander- son, 1988; Du Bois, 1964; Foner, 1988; Jones, 1980; Span, 2009; Wil- liams, 2005), and although Whites were overwhelmingly opposed to this development, their children would nonetheless be the primary

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beneficiaries. In 1870, five years after emancipation, 1.2 million White children (up from barely 250,000 a decade earlier) attended a public school in the South, in comparison with only 123,000 African Ameri- cans (U.S. Census, 1870). By 1875, just Mississippi and South Carolina would enroll more African American than White children in a public school because both states had majority-Black populations that collec- tively voted and elected state and county officials sympathetic to their educational aspirations (Foner, 1996; Span, 2009). By 1890, approxi- mately 1.2 million African American and more than 3.3 million White children would enroll in a public school (U.S. Census, 1890)—schools initially spurred on and brought into existence by the enthusiasm and initiatives of former slaves. Less than one percent (.39%) of the 804,000 African American children of secondary school age in the South were enrolled in a public or private high school—only 958 were enrolled in a public high school—and this percentage would rise to only 2.8% in 1910, and 18% in 1934 (Anderson, 1988). As the rise of public school systems swept across the South in the first decade of emancipation, the region developed what already existed in the Northeast, Midwest, and West: a dual system of schools—one for White children and one for “colored” children. By the start of the 20th century, southern state and school officials established systems that funded schools for White children at the expense of African American children. African Ameri- cans enduring Jim Crow were afforded, according to historian James D. Anderson (1988), only a “system of second-class education” (p. 3). This “system of second-class education for blacks did not just happen,” Anderson affirmed, “it was a logical outgrowth of a social ideology de- signed to adjust black southerners to racially qualified forms of politi- cal and economic subordination” (p. 3).

Legalized racism, a citizenship status more reminiscent of slavery than freedom, de jure segregation, and limited or denied schooling opportuni- ties forced a number of African Americans to migrate out of the South. Between 1915 and 1920, about a half million African Americans would leave the South in pursuit of better opportunities in northern cities. By 1930, another million southern-born African Americans also migrated north. “All told,” wrote Davison Douglas (2005),

about 10 percent of blacks living in the South moved North be- tween 1915 and 1930. Whereas in 1910, ninety percent of the country’s African American population lived in the South, those demographics would dramatically shift over the course of the next half-century. By 1960, half of the nation’s black population lived outside the South. (p. 131)

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The outmigration of southern African Americans to the Northeast, Midwest, and West resulted in the expansion of anti-Black sentiment, laws, and housing policies that purposefully segregated Blacks and their children. If the neighborhoods they were forced to move into were seg- regated, the neighborhood schools their children attended were as well. As Douglas (2005) noted, “school districts used racial gerrymandering to preserve racial separation” (p. 146). Every northern city—from midsize cities like Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, Indianapo- lis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and Trenton, to large metropolises such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles— redlined African Americans into racially segregated areas. “By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks” (Coates, 2014). Chicago was not alone, however. The “logic” for racial discrimination was simple. Whites felt that they and their children should not have live and attend school with African Americans. To appease White parents who did not want their children to attend school with African Americans, school officials allowed Whites to transfer their children to a school more reflective of their expectations. The same affordances were not given to African Americans.

POST-SEGREGATION? SEGREGATION AND RACISM, 1954–2004

This practice endured throughout the nation following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Brown was supposed to immediately end seg- regation. Instead, the opposite happened. In the South, where segrega- tion by law remained virtually undisturbed for three generations, massive resistance campaigns were launched to ensure that the Supreme Court decision was not implemented. As Irons (2002) noted, “local officials and school board members heeded calls for defiance of the Court’s rulings,” and throughout the South, school districts developed “freedom of choice” plans or “pupil placement” plans, or private schools to avoid compliance and desegregation efforts (Irons, 2002, p. 173). This allowed Whites to use monies collected for public school purposes to send their children to a private school of their choice (the school choice and voucher move- ments prevalent today arose because of resistance to desegregation). Vir- ginia took the most extreme action in this regard. In 1956, two years after Brown, the state legislature passed a law that sought to close any school that attempted to comply with Brown. After the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the law in 1959, school officials in Prince Edward County voted to close all public schools. Consequently, all schools were closed in the county until 1964. In the interim, Whites enrolled their children in

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Prince Edward Academy and used “tuition grants from public funds” for them to attend the segregated private school (Irons, 2002). With no alternative schooling options, African Americans who remained in the county had no schools for the five years (Lassiter & Lewis, 1998). After the schools reopened in 1964, less than 2% of African Americans in the county attended a desegregated school (Chemerinsky, 2003).

Before the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, no southern state in any meaningful way attempted to comply with Brown. Case in point, between 1955 and 1964, the num- ber of African Americans students attending school with Whites “in the states of the former Confederacy rose from zero to 2 percent. At this pace,” it was deduced, “full integration would not be achieved another five hundred years” (Irons, 2002, p. 190). Some states made no effort at all. As legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky (2003) illustrated, “in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, not one African American child at- tended a public school with a white child in the 1962–1963 school year” (p. 1603). Given this resistance and the slow pace to comply with Brown, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy removed desegregation complaints from the courts and placed them under the authority of the Depart- ment of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). He demanded that HEW threaten to “withhold federal education funds from districts that continued to segregate” (Klarmen, 2004, p. 363; Span & Rivers, 2012). According to historian Michael J. Klarmen (2004), “the percentage of southern black children in desegregated schools shot up from 1.18 per- cent in 1964 to 6.1 percent in 1966, 16.9 percent in 1967, 32 percent in 1969, and roughly 90 percent in 1973” (p. 363).

Despite the apparent gains, America was not even close to being a post- segregation society. Segregation and educational inequality were as ram- pant in the North as they were in the South, and regardless of these re- alities, northern school districts were not subject to the same compliance and jurisprudence as were those in the South because they did not segre- gate schoolchildren by law. When the Court ruled in Brown and Brown II (1955), it determined that only intentional discrimination and segrega- tion were violations of the equal protections clause of the 14th Amend- ment. School segregation in the North was deemed an unintended by- product of past discrimination or contemporaneous cultural practices (de facto segregation) rather than the result of racism, past and present. Thus, school segregation in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, from a litigation standpoint, was north of Brown’s jurisdiction, and the impov- erished dilapidated infrastructures that African Americans attended and called their schools were nothing more than enduring concrete testimoni- als of past—not present—injustices and harms.

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The rise of suburbs around major metropolises in the North exacer- bated school segregation and any viable solutions to remedy the prob- lem. By the 1970s, the demographics of America’s northern cities were rapidly becoming majority African American and Latino and less White. The opposite was occurring in the surrounding suburbs of these large cities; the demographics of these areas and their schools were almost exclusively White as “white families moved to suburban areas to avoid being part of desegregation orders affecting cities” (Chemerinsky, 2003, p. 1605). Despite efforts to desegregate public schools in northern cit- ies and their suburbs, it became increasingly impossible to achieve with the dramatic demographic and residential shifts. Some school districts sought to implement creative solutions—for example, adopting inter- district desegregation plans across city–suburban lines—but their efforts met massive resistance, more White flight, and the burden of proving in a court of law how city and school officials intentionally discriminated or caused harm to those seeking remediation or a quality school experi- ence for their children.

In 1968, Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon would use the frus- trations that Whites, North and South, had regarding desegregation ef- forts—particularly busing—in his bid for the presidency. He adopted what many historians have called the “southern strategy” and “found that playing on white fears of school integration could become a winning electoral hand” (Irons, 2002, p. 204). Developed by White conservatives in the Republican Party in the 1960s, the southern strategy aggressively sought the political patronage and votes of “southern white Democrats with overtures to their racial concerns” (Feagin, 2006, p. 255). Nixon’s strategies of race-baiting Whites to vote him into the White House illus- trated the persistent volatility of American race relations; it also showed the willingness of some to prey on Whites’ misguided prejudices and fears of African Americans amid this era of legal and social change. In his infamous 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater unapolo- getically recounted how the messaging for this strategy was adopted and implemented to invoke White racial solidarity against school desegrega- tion, Black advancement, civil rights, and equal protections measures for African Americans and other underrepresented groups. As the strategist for Senator Strom Thurman, President Reagan, and President George H.W. Bush revealed,

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting

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taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally eco- nomic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt more than whites. . . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nig- ger, nigger.” (Perlstein, 2012)

The frustrations evoked from this prejudiced strategy and Nixon’s elec- tion and reelection proved to be the downward turning point for desegre- gation and school equality efforts across the nation. During his presidency, Nixon appointed four Supreme Court justices—Warren E. Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and William H. Rehnquist—231 federal judges, 46 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, and 181 judges to the United States district courts (Black, 2007; Sugrue, 2009). His appoin- tees were far less progressive or sympathetic toward desegregation and educational equality efforts spurred on by Brown and the host of desegre- gation and civil rights litigation following the 1954 decision. According to Joe R. Feagin (2006), “Nixon instructed his officials to weaken enforce- ment of most federal court school desegregation orders, removed numer- ous strong civil rights advocates from federal government positions, and pressed the FBI to go after civil rights activists and groups” (p. 255).

Nixon’s appointees shape the parameters of desegregation in the North; invariably these judiciaries laid the groundwork for the end of desegregation and educational equality efforts in the nation. In 1972, the Supreme Court, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez, ruled that education was not a fundamental right in the United States and that no one was guaranteed access to a quality education under the law. Two years later, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court decided against interdistrict desegregation plans in Detroit in Milliken v. Bradley. Detroit’s school system was 73% African American, and this reality left little room to effectively desegregate schools within city limits. Busing was the preferred method, but there were no longer any schools within city limits available to bus children to achieve the desired demographic goals. In addition, busing caused an undue burden to African American children who were already being bussed more than an hour away from their homes to schools that were as poor in quality as the ones in their neighborhoods. To ease this burden and continue desegregation efforts, a federal district court “imposed a multi-district remedy to end de jure seg- regation” in Detroit (Chemerinsky, 2003, p. 1607). Forty-four suburban school districts surrounding Detroit were chosen to participate in this desegregation plan, but all refused to participate, arguing that they did not cause or perpetuate the segregation African American children en- dured in Detroit. The Supreme Court agreed and ruled the interdistrict

A History of the Impact of Slavery, Segregation, and Racism on the Education of African Americans 67

desegregation method impermissible. “Three of the five votes were by Nixon appointees: Chief Justice Warren Burger, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell” (Sugrue, 2009, pp. 486–487). In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Burger acknowledged that Detroit had for decades intentionally segregated schoolchildren by race but concluded that no evidence could be found that any of the surrounding suburban school systems forced to take part in this interdistrict desegregation plan had any direct involve- ment in the systemic segregation that harmed African Americans and plagued Detroit’s school system. Accordingly, unless proof of discrimina- tion could be provided, busing children across city–suburban lines was deemed unconstitutional and could not be implemented as an effective remedy in Detroit or any major metropolis in the nation.

The parameters established in Milliken proved to be the death knell to desegregation efforts in the North. As one legal scholar noted,

Milliken ha[d] a devastating effect on the ability to achieve de- segregation in many areas. In a number of major cities, inner- city school systems are substantially African American and are surrounded by almost all-white suburbs. Desegregation requires the ability to transfer students between the city and suburban schools. There simply are not enough white students in the city, or enough African American students in the suburbs, to achieve desegregation without an interdistrict remedy. Yet, Milliken pre- cludes an interdistrict remedy unless plaintiffs offer proof of an interdistrict violation. (Chemerinsky, 2003, p. 1607)

The results have been truly devastating. By the 1990s, the nation saw a reversal of the desegregation gains made in the preceding decades. Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield (2003) ascertained that

the desegregation of black students, which increased continu- ously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has now receded to levels not seen in three decades. Although the South remains the na- tion’s most integrated region for both blacks and whites, it is the region that is most rapidly going backwards as the courts termi- nate many major and successful desegregation orders. (p. 4)

They concluded that the combined impact of persistent concentrated poverty, rampant residential segregation, and an inability of state and national leaders to recognize segregation as failed educational policy are the primary reasons for the percentage of African Americans attending schools with Whites reaching its lowest levels since 1968. In effect, the nation’s schools were as segregated in 2004 as they were 14 years after the Brown decision.

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POST-RACIAL? THE PERSISTENCE OF RACISM AND SEGREGATION IN AMERICA TODAY

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in its first major school desegrega- tion decision since 1995. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Se- attle School District No. 1 et al. (PICS), the Court determined that race could not be used to effectively remedy past wrongs caused by racism. Although Brown said it was illegal and unconstitutional to use race to intentionally harm students in school placements, it did allow for race to be considered and used for school placements (i.e., desegregation) if it was applied as a remedy to the harms caused by past discriminatory practices. PICS, however, determined that under no circumstances could race to be used in public school assignments because the nation no lon- ger legally practices racial segregation, and state and federal courts no longer recognize the vestiges of racism and intentional segregation as relevant factors in the placement and success of public school students. As Brown replaced Plessy, PICS replaced Brown as the law of the land, and it followed the strict language, interpretation, and parameters es- tablished in Milliken.

The Court determined that the Seattle school district did not prove that intentional discrimination still existed and, by default, impacted its ability to meet its demographic and desegregation goals. As Chief Jus- tice John Roberts surmised, “the school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen—discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments” (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al.). Essentially the Court ruled that no school district could point to past discriminatory practices and develop school assign- ment plans that denied students access to the school of their choice, even if the school assignment plan sought to ensure that students from under- represented backgrounds (African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina/os) and Whites attended school together in the name of diversity. Diversity was not a compelling enough interest, and if school districts argued that the ill effects of discrimination persisted and wanted to use race as a factor in school assignment plans, they would have to prove the existence and extent of these harms in a court of law. The Court fundamentally concluded that intentional discrimination, in public schools or otherwise, was an issue of the past; it concluded that America had moved past race being a factor of opportunity or as a de- terminant of advantage or disadvantage in the lives of everyday people; it resolved that race was no longer relevant in America. The assumption

A History of the Impact of Slavery, Segregation, and Racism on the Education of African Americans 69

was that if individuals stopped using race as a classification to determine access and opportunities, then all issues related to race, and its troubling legacy, would cease to exist.

Minimizing or denying race as an existing construct or classification will not erase or upend the long-term cumulative intergeneration struc- tural institutionalized realities caused by race and racism. It will not remove or minimize the hyperresidential and educational segregation that still exists and is expanding, or remedy the contrasting achievement scores of students in impoverished or affluent schools, or the wealth gaps that continue to widen between Whites and African Americans, or the growing divide between the poverty-stricken and wealthy. These realities, and countless others, were caused because some—over the long history of the United States—were intentionally advantaged or disadvantaged because of some prescribed racial or ethnic classification.

As President Obama completes his second term in office, the fact is that the disparities separating African Americans and Whites remain as wide today as they did 50 years ago, primarily because of the structural and institutionalized developments caused by race and intentional dis- crimination. In 1963, African American “families earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by whites. In 2011, blacks earned only eleven cents more on the dollar” (Fletcher, 2013). In 2012, the jobless rate for African Americans with some college, 12.1%, was higher than the jobless rates for Whites who did not complete high school, 11.4% (Fletcher, 2013). In 2012, White households’ median wealth, according to economist Thomas Shapiro, was $265,000, “compared to $28,500 for black families, nearly a 10-to-1 gap” (Fletcher, 2013; Shapiro, 2004; Shapiro, Meschede, & Osoro, 2013). African American children remain far more likely to live in concentrated poverty than whites, and the nation’s schools are as racially segregated today as they were in 1968 (Orfield & Lee, 2007; Rothstein, 2013). Without simply blaming the individual, how does one explain these gaps if everything is equal, or if race, racism, and segrega- tion are remnants of a distant past?

It is hoped that this article has demonstrated that these gaps are not about individual achievement (or lack thereof) as much as they are about being intentionally denied opportunities (Carter & Welner, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2006). Every generation of African Americans in the history of this nation has been systemically and intentionally denied the opportunity to learn on an equal basis, to be seen as an equal in society, to be respected as a fellow citizen, and to be free to be himself or herself and advance beyond the expectations, imag- inations, and fears of Whites. During the 250 years that slavery existed in the United States, African Americans were denied the opportunity

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to acquire literacy and attend school without restrictions. Following the abolition of slavery, they were denied opportunities to attend school without discrimination or on an equal basis, and they were segregated into inferior schools. Following the Plessy and Cummings decisions, they were further denied equal protections under the law, denied secondary schooling opportunities that subsequently eliminated their chances of completing high school or attending college, were forced into segregat- ed and inferior housing and schools, and were denied the opportunity to live and enjoy life as full-fledged citizens. Following the Brown deci- sion, these deprivations continued, and African Americans were denied access to schools equal to Whites’; they were denied the right to attend school where they pleased and were forced to take on the heavy burden and costs of proving in a court of law that they had lived in neighbor- hoods and attended schools that intentionally harmed them. The accu- mulated compounded debt incurred by African Americans from these forms of intentional institutionalized mistreatment is incalculable and continues to haunt our troubled society.

Today, they live and attend school in virtually the same communes that, a generation ago, intentionally denied them the chance to succeed; yet they are told that all things are equal and that the harms that forced them into these communities and shaped their life opportunities and outcomes no longer exist or impact them in any significant way. When they fail to succeed in school or life, they are told it is because of their individual devaluing of school, or lack of effort, or inabilities, or poor choices, not because they are the present-day inhabitants of communi- ties that are still systemically plagued by centuries of denied opportuni- ties and purposeful neglect.

The gaps identified today are not gaps of achievement or success, but of opportunity. Who knows what the outcomes of generations of African Americans would have been if they had been afforded even a semblance of freedom, equality, quality schooling, and equal protection under the law. The “gaps” experts identify today were defined and determined by the intentional harms caused by race, and they are as old as the nation itself. They are the accumulated and compounded debt of the histor- ic and present-day wrongs of slavery, segregation, and racism; they are the vestiges and continuation of centuries of purposeful neglect and disregard. These gaps can be remedied, but only, as President Johnson alluded to 50 years ago, if this nation is willing to address them in a thoughtful, selfless, and comprehensive manner. As the historian Diane Ravitch (2014) wrote, “As a society, we must establish goals, strategies, and programs to reduce poverty and racial segregation. Only by elimi- nating opportunity gaps can we eliminate achievement gaps” (p. 8). If

A History of the Impact of Slavery, Segregation, and Racism on the Education of African Americans 71

reconciliation, social equality, and living in a post-racial society are truly the aspirations, they might be possible if this nation teaches, learns, and unconditionally acknowledges its history and establishes long-term in- tergenerational comprehensive compensatory plans to halt and remedy the harms caused by centuries of purposeful mistreatment, neglect, and denial. Until this cultural shift and these compensatory developments happen in a meaningful way, this nation will forever (and unfortunately) be defined and determined by race.

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CHRISTOPHER M. SPAN is the associate dean for academic programs and an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Or- ganization and Leadership (EPOL) in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a historian of education who researches the African American educational experience in the 19th and 20th centuries.