Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education

INTEGRATIONS

THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION SERIES

Edited by Randall Curren and Jonathan Zimmerman

Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice by James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters

Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice Is Really About by Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek

Patriotic Education in a Global Age by Randall Curren and Charles Dorn

The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice by Derrick Darby and John L. Rury

The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools by Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson

Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School by Benjamin Justice and Colin Macleod

Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation by Adam Laats and Harvey Siegel

INTEGRATIONS

The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education

Lawrence Blum and Zoë Burkholder

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78598-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78603-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78617-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226786179.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blum, Lawrence A., author. | Burkholder, Zoë, author.

Title: Integrations : the struggle for racial equality and civic renewal in public education / Lawrence Blum and Zoë Burkholder.

Other titles: History and philosophy of education.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: The history and philosophy of education series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020046182 | ISBN 9780226785981 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226786032 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226786179 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Educational equalization—United States. | Racism in education—United States. | Racism in education—United States—History. | Minorities—Education—United States—History. | School integration—United States. | Educational equalization—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC LC213.2 .B58 2021 | DDC 379.2/60973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046182

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Larry Blum dedicates this book to Judy Smith.

Zoë Burkholder dedicates this book to her parents, Christina Miesowitz Burkholder and Ervin Burkholder.

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1   Segregation

CHAPTER 2   Desegregation

CHAPTER 3   Equality

CHAPTER 4   Integrations: The Capital Argument

CHAPTER 5   Integrations: The Civic Argument

Conclusion: Egalitarian Civic Integrationist Pluralism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

THE FAULT LINE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

The promise of a free, high-quality public education from kindergarten through high school for all children regardless of race, socioeconomic standing, religion, geographic location, and even immigration status is an enduring component of the American creed.

Unfortunately, America’s public schools have been unable to keep this promise for all, and many of the students left behind are children of color. The US Department of Education recently concluded:

Our education system, legally desegregated more than a half century ago, is ever more segregated by wealth and income, and often again by race. Ten million students in America’s poorest communities—and millions more African American, Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native students who are not poor—are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students. These vestiges of segregation, discrimination, and inequality are unfinished business for our nation.¹

This book examines the enduring problem of racial inequality in American public schools through a historical and philosophical analysis. Our goal is to help readers better understand racial inequality in the American public education system in order to advocate for more equitable and just forms of schooling. To do so requires a meticulous consideration of school segregation and inequality and what has often been assumed to be its most obvious cure—integration.

Today, American public schools are noticeably segregated in terms of race and, since the late 1980s, have been resegregating—or becoming more racially segregated—so that today Black students are more likely to attend segregated schools than they were in 1970. A massive body of scholarship finds a direct link, though not always a causal one, between racial segregation and educational inequality. Legal historian James E. Ryan contends this boundary has been the fault line of public education for half a century, doing more than anything else to define and shape the educational opportunities of public school students. On one side stand predominantly white, middle-income, and relatively successful schools. On the other side stand predominantly minority, poor, and relatively unsuccessful schools.²

This fault line has a long and shameful history in America, one that is intertwined with restrictions in housing, employment, and generational wealth. As early as 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois pronounced, The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.³ For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and people of color could live—and where their kids were allowed go to school. Historian Richard Rothstein confirms, Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time.⁴

High levels of school segregation and inequality create a national achievement gap between white and Asian students on one side and Black, Latinx, and Native American on the other. The average Black eighth grader is performing at the nineteenth percentile of white students, and the average Latinx student is at the twenty-sixth percentile. Native Americans as a group lag behind all other students in both reading and math.⁵ Asian American students fall on both sides of the equation—many are within a subgroup that outperforms white students, but Asian American students from marginalized ethnic groups slip through the cracks.⁶ These racial achievement gaps are explained not by an individual student’s racial identity but by whether a student attended an under-resourced, majority-minority school or was subjected to racial discrimination in an integrated, well-resourced one.⁷ Despite the tremendous success of the civil rights movement and significant gains in educational equality, the color line in public education remains both durable and devastating.

Racial inequality in American public education is not permanent, natural, fixed, or unchangeable. In fact, we believe that the time is ripe to eradicate racial inequality in our public schools once and for all. A long history of successful reforms in American public schools prove that our current system can be improved. We believe that well-informed parents, students, teachers, administrators, and citizens can bring about revolutionary changes to the way we think about and run public schools in ways that will prioritize racial and social justice. Not only can we improve educational equality and dismantle institutionalized racism, but we can also strengthen the civic function of public education in a democracy.

Our study is distinctive in our interdisciplinary approach grounded in both history and philosophy. Through a historical lens in the first half of the book, we analyze how ideas about race influenced the creation and development of public schools from their formation in the mid-nineteenth century to the present; how educational discrimination played out very differently for African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American communities; and how educational activists in those communities sought educational equality, the in-school promotion of their distinctive cultures and heritages, self-determination, and—ambivalently and in different ways—school integration. Prominently featured in this social history are firsthand accounts of the courageous women, men, and students who fought against racial discrimination in public education and worked tirelessly to transform schools into institutions that came closer to the democratic ideal.

In the second philosophical half of the book, readers will grapple with what an equal education based on this history should and could look like. What is equal when education is equal? Is it opportunities to compete for unequal rewards in the job market? Or is it an array of intrinsic educational goods related to moral, personal, and civic growth?

How exactly does race interact with questions of educational equality? How does class-based injustice (for example, in housing, health, income, and wealth) inevitably play a part in racial injustice? What constitutes fair and appropriate reparations to communities who have suffered generations of discrimination in public (including educational) institutions?

We also tackle the most exalted and controversial ideal in the struggle for racial justice in education: school integration. Decades of civil rights activism focused specifically on this objective, although with significant variations among different communities. Yet when we look more closely, we see that disagreements over the desirability of integration were often caused by competing definitions—does integration simply mean students of different races attending schools together, or does it require that they be treated respectfully and equally inside the school? Does integration mean the eventual diminishing of racial and ethnic identities through assimilation, as the early twentieth-century form of schooling often encouraged? Or does integration allow, or even require, the affirming of students’ distinct racial and ethnic identities that minority educational activists sought?

In addition, many citizens have questioned whether integration (in any of its forms) is required—or even beneficial—to the larger struggle for racial justice. Throughout American history, some people of color have argued for self-determination in education, specifically the right to control school administration, teacher hiring, curriculum development, discipline policies, and educational objectives. These activists vehemently oppose state-sponsored school segregation but are cautious in their support of deliberate school integration policies and sometimes advocate separate, community-controlled schools as a vital alternative.

In this book, we propose a conception of integration closely tied to egalitarian, civic-minded schools committed to the training of future citizens for a pluralistic democracy. This conception draws inspiration from the visionary educational activism we have described.⁸ But ultimately, we argue that unless and until the larger structures of race and class injustice in society as a whole are dismantled, it will be impossible to achieve both the goal of educational equality and the civic equality for which civic education aims.

UNDERSTANDING RACE

A thorough reckoning of racial inequality in American public schools necessitates a shared vocabulary for speaking about racial diversity and inequality. Race has traditionally referred to an intergenerational human group that differed from other such groups in visible physical features, ancestral origins in particular continents or regions (sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, East Asia), and attributes of temperament, character, and intelligence seen as inherent in their nature and thus immutable. Generally, these differing characteristics cast some groups as superior to others, resulting in a hierarchy in which every group is posited on a scale above or below one another. These false ideas have been used historically to deny basic rights, civic standing, and decent treatment to the groups regarded as inferior.⁹

But scientists today, including geneticists and physical anthropologists, agree that there are no races in this sense and that there never were. Groups that roughly contrast in visible characteristics and ancestral origins do not sufficiently differ from one another genetically for the massive distinctions in human characteristics required by this traditional understanding of race to exist.¹⁰ The very long and continual history of human migration means that people have always been mixing up the gene pool, and even geographically isolated groups do not differ from one another genetically in substantial ways.

Many Americans at least consciously reject the idea of race and are somewhat aware that scientists have rejected it. Yet almost everyone, both believers and disbelievers in race, continues to use racial terminology such as Black, Latino, and Asian to refer to groups and individuals. Why is that? Shouldn’t we drop racial terminology entirely and refer to these groups and individuals in some other way—for example, as ethnic groups—African American, Mexican American, Korean American? Or perhaps we should just drop racial language entirely without putting anything else in its place. If race implies the possession of inherent psychological characteristics, but the groups we call races do not possess those characteristics, shouldn’t we stop using words that have that implication?

We think not. Racial terminology is still useful and even essential because the groups we call races were historically viewed and treated as if they did possess those characteristics. That treatment—in the case of Blacks, enslavement, segregation, and racial discrimination; of Mexicans, territorial annexation, segregation, and discrimination; of Native Americans, displacement, genocide, forced assimilation, and discrimination—was guided by a racial ideology that said these groups deserved inferior and harmful treatment because they were inferior to whites. These were false ideologies and ideas, but they had real influence on the historical experiences of Black, Mexican, Native American, Asian American, and white people. These groups were racialized by being treated as if they were races, and so we can call them not races but racialized groups. Therefore, we can think of Black, white, and Native American as referring to racialized groups, even though they once referred to groups thought of as actual races.¹¹

People of color’s historical experiences with racialization are largely negative, characterized by oppression and discrimination. But racialized experiences have not been solely negative. They have also encompassed resistance to unjust treatment and the development of alternative ideologies committed to liberation and justice. Thus, political struggle against racial mistreatment also forms a part of racialized experience; slave rebellions, anticolonial struggles, and equal rights movements for racially subordinated peoples, as well as intellectual and artistic challenges to racist ideas and representations, all contribute to the foundation of a positive sense of peoplehood within a racialized group. If the meaning of race were confined to associations of superior and inferior racial groups, it would be incomprehensible why so many people conventionally understood as black identify with the (now-preferred) racial term Black, take pride in being Black, and cherish Black identity and solidarity. This usage instead expresses a positive vision of shared identity among a group understood as racialized while rejecting the negative associations that accompany conceiving of Blacks as an actual race.¹² Similarly, white can name a group that, while not viewed as inherently superior, is understood as benefiting in the present from the creation of an international historical racial order, rationalized by racial ideology. This hierarchy created a sense of racial solidarity for many white citizens and mobilized them to take action to protect their privilege. Understanding racial inequality in the long history of American public schools requires us to acknowledge these racialized identities and processes.

The challenge is to think of, and talk about, Black, white, Asian American, Latinx, and Native American people in ways that avoid attributing inherent characteristics to these identities, especially any that imply inherent superiority and inferiority, while recognizing that these groups have distinctive social and historical experiences. We have to acknowledge those historical and social differences and simultaneously wholly reject the racial ideology that informed them. It is true that retaining racial language, such as Black, white, Native American, and so forth, to name racialized groups has an unfortunate potentiality for reinforcing racial and racist ideas, even when the speaker disavows those conceptions. This is why scare quotes are sometimes used for terms like Black or white as a way of indicating that racialization rather than race is intended. But many people find that usage annoying and clumsy, and we will stick with the familiar terminology, reminding the reader that we use it to refer to racialized groups, not actual races.

For our book, we investigate the question of racial equality in public schools by focusing on four racialized minority groups: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. Of course, white people play a prominent role in this history. We will use the term white, not Caucasian, to describe people of European descent, as the latter term, while more technical sounding, is a sinister holdover from the era of scientific racism. Everyone who does not identify as white will be described by the generic term people of color, which is distinct from the dated term colored people. Americans of African descent are described as Black or African American, and we often use these terms interchangeably, except when highlighting a more recent American Black ethnic group, such as Haitians or Cape Verdeans. The term Latinx recognizes a preferred gender-neutral form embraced by many younger Americans who are either from, or who have ancestry from, Latin America. Whenever relevant, we employ more specific ethnic identities such as Puerto Rican or Mexican American. Indigenous people in the United States often refer to themselves as American Indians or Indigenous Americans, but here we use the term Native American. These terms are all contemporary, but at times we will cite historical documents that use other words to describe racial difference in America. Some of these terms, such as Negro or colored, were once the terms of choice for African Americans but are no longer appropriate today. Other terms of reference, needless to say, were deliberately demeaning or intended to shore up white supremacy.¹³

RACE AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

Our analysis of racial equality in public schools focuses on the experiences and activism of people of color, specifically in African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American communities. It is worth noting, however, that some children from groups now thought of as white have also suffered racial discrimination in American schools. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American teachers viewed many European immigrants, including Jewish students, as racially distinct from the native, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock. These educators also frequently complained about the racial traits of immigrant children from Russia, Greece, Italy, and other European countries that Americans would now consider white. One New Jersey school administrator wrote in 1916, The influx of foreigners, with their divergent personal ideals and antagonistic racial traits, imposes upon the schools an infinitely difficult problem.¹⁴ And yet, even though certain white ethnic and religious groups faced discrimination based on perceived racial differences, they were nevertheless regarded officially as white under the 1790 naturalization law confining citizenship to free white persons.¹⁵ Although some educators may have viewed European immigrant students as racially distinct, they were still understood to be white and eligible for American citizenship—and the full benefits of a public education.¹⁶

Despite the hardships experienced by some white racialized minorities, people classified as nonwhite or colored suffered more severe exclusion, segregation, and deliberate and sustained educational discrimination. But which students qualified as colored? Although we might imagine the color line in education to be fairly obvious, with white people of European descent on one side and everyone else on the other colored side, the truth is more complex when examining American history. In order to separate students based on race—either by law, as was the case in the Jim Crow South, or through social pressure, as was the case in many other parts of the country—someone was required to do the dirty work of figuring out school assignments. Some schools in California, for example, decided to segregate Chinese American students from white students, while Japanese Americans attended the white schools.¹⁷ Whites in Mississippi classified Chinese Americans as colored and sent them to school with Black children, when just across the river in neighboring Arkansas, school administrators considered Chinese American students as white and segregated them from Black students.¹⁸ In Virginia, precious resources were wasted to establish separate schools for white, Black, and Native American children—but administrators refused to allow Monacan Indians to attend any of these schools, as the racially mixed Monacans did not fit neatly into any category.¹⁹ The city of Houston, Texas, operated separate schools for white, Black, and Mexican American students well into the modern civil rights era.²⁰ As this book will show, the color line in public education, while formidable, was also contradictory, ambiguous, illogical, and changed over time and across arbitrary borders. This inherent racial instability made public schools vulnerable, and educational activists used school boycotts, diplomatic pressure, petitions, and lawsuits to challenge unjust and discriminatory school segregation.²¹

Whites responded in kind, eager to maintain control over these venerable citizenship-training institutions as minority educational activism expanded in the early twentieth century. Public schools erupted as the sites of fierce culture wars over not only school segregation but also control of curriculum and pedagogy. From the common school era of the 1820s through the civil rights era of the 1960s, whites believed that proper education required the destruction of minority cultures, whether they were European, Native American, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Japanese, or African American. Schools were not apologetic in their aggressive assimilation of children; to the contrary, Americans expected public schools to forge a common culture out of a polyglot citizenry. Teachers understood it as their professional duty to weld the many peoples of any community into one body politic and create throughout the nation the unity and power that come from common ideals, a common language, and a uniform interpretation of citizenship.²² When teachers floundered, lawmakers stepped in to help. For instance, southwestern states outlawed the use of any non-English language in public schools in an effort to force Mexican American students to assimilate. More tragically, official US policy required Native Americans to surrender their children to government-run boarding schools for the explicit purpose of what amounts to cultural genocide.²³

Although whites had the power to determine educational policies and curricula, students of color did not function as blank slates, passively receiving whatever education was doled out by school authorities. Students, parents, and community leaders developed formidable responses to educational racism and fought to remake schools to suit their own purposes. Black educators quietly explained that white claims of racial superiority were false and taught Black children that the American dream was their birthright as well. America means opportunity for the ambitious man to develop his power to the fullest extent, insisted a southern Black teacher during the height of Jim Crow.²⁴

When the Black civil rights movement erupted during World War II, grassroots coalitions of Black students, parents, teachers, and leaders organized to challenge racial injustice in schools and the larger society. The time to sing the blues and play Uncle Tom is passed, wrote an impassioned Black teacher in 1944. Negroes, like all other real men, must win by their STRENGTH, rather than their WEAKNESS.²⁵ Although there were far fewer Latinx, Native American, and Asian American public school teachers during the era of school segregation, educational activists from these communities also worked to resist white oppression and remodel public education. The history of American education, therefore, reveals both how whites instituted racist practices in public schools and how people of color subverted these efforts and transformed local schools into institutions that reflected their own hopes and dreams for democratic public education.²⁶

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education begins with a historical analysis of racialized minorities in American public schools and then turns to philosophical considerations of equality, civic purpose, racial justice, and integration.

Chapter 1, Segregation, investigates the histories of African American, Native American, Mexican American, Chinese American, and Japanese American students from the earliest public schools through the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. It demonstrates that white officials intentionally discriminated against students of color first by excluding them from early public schools, then by segregating them as access to public education expanded, and finally by attempting to limit the curriculum for students of color to manual training and industrial work. It also highlights how minority educational activists fought back through both direct legal and political attacks on segregated schools as well as more subtle forms of accommodation and resistance. A key finding is that while it was clear to all that segregated facilities engendered unequal opportunities, many activists nevertheless questioned integration as a solution, and some saw enormous value in schools led by Black, Mexican American, or indigenous educators. World War II and the rising postwar civil rights movements centered new attention on segregated schools as a tool of white supremacy that must be abolished.

Chapter 2, Desegregation, opens in 1954 as the nation’s highest court proclaimed, In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.²⁷ Although Brown is rightly celebrated as an epic civil rights milestone, its lasting influence on educational equality is less clear. Where school integration worked, especially in the South, educational inequality was significantly reduced, and the degree of positive interracial contact between students increased. But over time these gains were reversed, and many students of color never experienced the benefits of integrated schools. This chapter explores African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American struggles for more equitable and integrated schools after 1954. It also considers how and why people of color sometimes pursued alternatives to integration, such as community control, in hopes of attaining both educational equality as well as other goals like self-determination and community empowerment. We emphasize the tremendous educational victories in the post-Brown era while acknowledging that school desegregation did not achieve the intent of equalizing educational opportunities for all students of color. Chapter 2 emphasizes three key findings: first, that white citizens, often unapologetically, opposed school integration and equalization measures from 1954 to the present; second, that improvements in public education were a direct result of sustained educational activism by communities of color; and third, that over time educational activists developed multiple nuanced conceptions of school integration as one possible tactic, among many, to equalize public education. This long history of educational activism and the multiple visions of school integration that came out of it, we argue, provide crucial lessons for how to revive public education today.

Chapter 3, Equality, examines the ideal of equal education that rests at the center of racial justice in education. US citizens often see the idea of opportunity as the content of this ideal, but we argue that the American ideal of equality of opportunity is focused too narrowly on marketable skills and competition for rewards, omitting the distinctly educational value of what is learned in school. It also fails to provide students with the critical perspective, and the corresponding intellectual capabilities, to recognize injustice in society and form life goals without being beholden to current cultural structures and dominant values. We argue for a conception of educational goods (including the development of moral and civic capacities) that are valuable in their own right, as well as to society, and that should and can be provided to every child through schooling.

We also argue that schools by themselves cannot create educational justice. Genuine educational equality can be only partially realized in a society as unjust and unequal as ours. Educational justice must ally with class- and race-focused initiatives and activism for economic, health, and housing justice. These initiatives must lift up families and students at the low end of the economic spectrum, curb the ability of advantaged families to hoard opportunities for themselves, and correct for a history of specifically racial injustices against students of color.

We ask what are the responsibilities of different constituencies—parents, students, teachers, citizens—to ensure that our public schools deliver on the promise of educational equality to all. And, finally, we confront some of the pedagogical challenges of teaching diverse students about struggles for historical and contemporary justice.

Chapters 4 and 5, Integrations: The Capital Argument and Integrations: The Civic Argument, explore the ideal of school integration as it relates to educational equality and racial justice. We suggest that integration should be thought of in the plural—as integrations—so that we can better evaluate its various forms. Does integration involve students of different racial identities learning together in the same schools, or does it require a more ideal definition that requires respect, welcoming, and concern across these racial divides? Various arguments have been given for integration in one or another of its forms. We will look in detail at a prominent contemporary argument—that disadvantaged students benefit from being in schools with advantaged students (the advantages in question can be either racial or class-based) because the latter possess more social, financial, and cultural capital. We find not only very little merit in this argument but also serious drawbacks. However, if a school takes a social justice perspective on society and education itself, capital benefits can be embraced without shaming disadvantaged families or encouraging a morally damaging sense of entitlement in advantaged families.

Ultimately, the strongest argument that we find for integration is civic in character, breathing renewed life into what has until recently been a central purpose of public education. Bringing diverse students into the same classes (which requires avoiding academic tracking) is the most secure foundation for developing students’ civic knowledge and capability, which will enable them to work together to enhance and promote justice within the multiracial democracy they share. At the same time, integrated schools must be able to protect and affirm the plurality of students’ racial and ethnic identities, not adopt a color-blind (much less assimilationist) form of integration. This egalitarian civic integrationist pluralism provides the strongest foundation for pursuing racial equality in American public schools, but it requires a substantial reduction of overall inequality and correcting for historical racial injustice outside the school.

CHAPTER 1

SEGREGATION

Established in the four decades preceding the Civil War, America’s first free, tax-supported common schools taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and a little bit of geography and history, as well as Protestant morality, a sturdy work ethic, mastery of the English language, and patriotism. The purpose of common schools was to prepare young people to be active and engaged democratic citizens. As reformer Horace Mann wrote in 1846, the United States must provide a free education to all, sufficient to qualify each citizen for the civil and social duties he will be called to discharge. Rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, boy and girl—the public schools promised to forge a nation of immigrants into a united citizenry.¹

This expansive undertaking, however, contained a major loophole. If public schools were designed to prepare democratic citizens, how would they treat people who didn’t qualify for US citizenship? In the common school era, this included large numbers of African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans, as well as others understood to be nonwhite according to racial ideologies of the day. As historian James D. Anderson argues, Americans were virtually obsessed with the ways in which race affected fundamental questions of citizenship, civil equality, and political power. By the time the question of citizenship for people of African, indigenous, Latin American, and Asian descent was mostly settled, public schools discriminated on the basis of race.²

It is worth noting that racial ideologies of the common school era also labeled many white ethnics as racially distinct from the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. Although some European immigrant students faced educational discrimination, they never experienced the deliberate, state-sponsored racism suffered by African American, Asian American, Native American, or Latin American students. As one teacher put it, students who were not of European ancestry failed the obvious test of color and should be treated accordingly.³

A growing body of scholarship investigates the dynamic educational histories of African American, American Indian, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, Chinese American, Japanese American, and Mexican-origin communities. Thanks to this painstaking research we know more about both the tremendously varied and complex experiences of students of color in American public schools as well as the rich and nuanced forms of indigenous knowledge production and cultural transmission that took place outside of these institutions. We know less, however, about how racial ideologies functioned more broadly in educational history, how whites wielded state-sponsored racial discrimination as a form of power, and how people of color developed expansive, and at times contested, strategies to achieve counterhegemonic objectives that went well beyond securing equal educational opportunities.⁴

This chapter analyzes educational racism and struggles for racial equality in the histories of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese and Japanese Americans. It considers a small sample of the tremendously diverse experiences of students of color in the period leading up to Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed (but did not end) racial segregation in the public schools. All history is contextually specific, and these few examples are not meant to depict the full range of historical encounters with education racism in the United States. We have selected a few compelling examples to illustrate the evolution of American educational racism while also emphasizing people of color as active agents of resistance and change.⁵

We argue that Americans built and reinforced state-sponsored educational racism through a three-part process involving the exclusion, segregation, and differentiation of resources and curriculum. Segregation, or dividing students on the basis of their racial identity, was essential to creating and maintaining inequality in public education. In his famous study of American race relations in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed, One deep idea behind segregation is that of quarantining what is evil, shameful, and feared in society. In this sense, school segregation was a form of violence perpetrated by whites against students of color. Segregation is quite distinct from the project of separation, which was a voluntary strategy by people of color to establish and attend institutions dedicated to racial uplift and the affirmation of Black and indigenous identities. For instance, many African American and Native American educational activists have historically supported the option of separate, Black- and indigenous-led schools.⁶

All people of color committed to educational reform abhorred state-sponsored school segregation, however, debates over integration as a strategy for reform were persistent. The very meaning of school integration shifted depending on context—sometimes activists wanted to end the isolation of all students in a single classroom at a racially mixed school, while other times they were satisfied if a handful of Black children attended a white school.⁷ In the Jim Crow South, integration posed a direct threat to Black teachers, which gave activists pause, while in other examples the preservation of teaching jobs was not a major concern. Some activists, moreover, did not target school segregation as problematic but instead attempted to manipulate the system by classifying their children as white in order to access better-resourced schools.

In other words, the ways that people of color understood the relationship between educational inequality and school segregation varied significantly based on specific barriers to equality and how they envisioned public schools as sites of community empowerment,