RESEARCH General Education

HISTORY OF EDUCATION
Civil rights in schools more about equality than integration

Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

9/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the 1930s, many, if not most, African Americans in the South had no high school to attend, separate or otherwise. Only one in five was even enrolled. By the 1950s, fewer than one in five were receiving a diploma.

Today, 86 percent of African Americans graduate from high school.
It’s an academic success story that has not been adequately told, says James Anderson, a University of Illinois education professor. And it demonstrates, he says, the central importance of educational opportunity – far beyond integration for its own sake – in the campaign to end segregated education.

Anderson, an educational historian, appears throughout the four-hour documentary "School: The Story of American Public Education," being broadcast Sept. 3-4 on most Public Broadcasting Service stations. He also is cited throughout the companion book of the same title and is the author of the book "The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935."

In looking back on the system of segregated schools, Anderson said, "The 'separate' part is what people really focus on … that the wrong was that people were separated because of race." It was the emphasis of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education, he said. "But within the context of the African-American community, as well as in the context of the leadership in the civil rights struggle, what they focused on was the unequal side of that coin, not the separate side."

In the Brown case and elsewhere, "they always placed academic excellence at the forefront of their demands," Anderson said. "We've forgotten that. We seem to think that they were just about trying to get black kids to go to school with white kids, and somehow that was the essence of it. That was not the essence of it."

One key concern, Anderson said, was that high school, over the first third of the century, had gone from being an elite institution to one attended by more than half of potential students. "By mid-century, it was clear that high school had become a much more significant social institution, and that it was becoming the gateway to better jobs, to success, to higher income."

But as of 1930, "most of the counties in the South where there was a significant African-American population did not have a public high school available," Anderson said. Even when black high schools were established, often only in cities, other barriers made enrollment difficult or impossible.

"America in 1950 was a fundamentally different nation, one that is increasingly difficult to comprehend and appreciate from our contemporary angle of vision," Anderson wrote in an essay for the "School" book. In the wake of political struggles since then over integration and school reform, Americans have forgotten or "disremembered" important aspects of that time and the history since.

African Americans, Anderson wrote, "were demanding excellence in education long before the Reagan White House used it as a political campaign in the 1980s."