Blacks was a racist response to the freed Black population created by the emancipation of slaves. While there are many reasons why Reconstruction as a political project in pursuit of equality for Blacks failed, Fredrickson points to a fundamental ideological rupture, “emancipation could not be carried to completion because it exceeded the capacity of White Americans – in the North as well as the South – to think of Blacks as genuine equals” (Fredrickson 2002:81).
Once slavery ended and White Southerners lost their right to the automatic control of Black slaves, the size of the population of free Blacks relative to the White population became a problem. The Black population that White slave owners bred for profit now needed to be controlled. Horton argues that the question “How do we continue to maintain control over this large and increasing population?” has plagued Whites since emancipation (1998:11). The answer, he argues, has been to “utilize a racist system of oppression to eliminate Blacks as serious competitors in every aspect of American life” (Horton 1998:11).
Education, Separate and Unequal
Once Blacks were disenfranchised and Whites controlled local school boards, the state subsidy of Black education was drastically decreased while funding of White schools steadily increased. Historian Horace Mann Bond, in The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, notes: “With the passage of legislation giving each county some option in the allocation of funds to the schools of each group, for each dollar spent on Black children the discrepancy moved from $1.18 for each White in 1890 to $5.83 per White child in 1909” (Bond 1934:113).
Within a 20-year period, Whites were able to use their political power to institutionalize their political preference for unequal school funding and regain their advantage; however, they made additional changes to the Black education system during this time, all in keeping with the overriding goal of maintaining White advantage.
Recall that Black and White school terms were approximately equal during the Reconstruction era. Once Whites took control of the school boards, the average school term for Blacks was shortened so that it was “only 80 percent as long as Whites around 1910” (Lieberson 1980:141). The consequence of this shortened school year for Blacks meant that “the average Negro pupil in the South must spend 9.2 years to complete 8 elementary grades with the same amount of schooling afforded for the average White pupil in 8 years” (Wilkerson 1939:12–13). Although the systematic means through which Blacks were disadvantaged in the educational system were seen through school funding and term length, a product of de facto segregation (socially enforced everyday practices), further changes were made that created an educational system for Blacks that was significantly inferior to that provided for Whites (Donato and Hanson 2012).
Teachers of Black students were substantially less qualified than teachers of White students. Lieberson notes that, as of 1940, only 29 percent of Black teachers had at least four years of college education, compared with 53 percent of White teachers (1980:142). Thus, Black students were disadvantaged not only by the shorter length of time they spent in the classroom, but also by the lower quality of education they received due to their teachers’ lack of training. Aiding this differential in teacher qualifications was the difference in teacher pay. Recall that, during the Reconstruction era, pay for teachers of Black and White children was fairly equal. However, by 1910, teachers of Black children made only 54 percent of the salary of teachers of White children (Lieberson 1980:143).
Moreover, Black schools were characterized by high studentteacher ratios, and funding for their buildings and equipment was only 20 to 25 percent of that available to White students (Lieberson 1980:145). But the greatest inequality, by far, was withholding access to a high school education from Black children. Although White high school education in the South lagged behind the North, by 1934 “the percentage of Southern White high school aged children enrolled in public schools was close to the national average.” For Blacks, “their rate was only a third of the national average” (Lieberson 1980:146).
One could argue that Blacks’ inadequate elementary education and supposed propensity to work due to their impoverished status provides an explanation. However, educator and advocate Doxey A. Wilkerson argues that the problem was at its root a structural one. There was an “absence of secondary schools available to Blacks.” Despite the growing availability of secondary education in the United States since the late nineteenth century, it “did not begin significantly to affect Negroes in the Southern states until about 1920” (Wilkerson 1939:51). Wilkerson documented that:
In 1930, there were still some 230 southern counties, with populations that were at least 12.5% Black, that offered no public high schools for members of this group. These counties included 160,000 Blacks of high school age. Another 195 counties in the South failed to provide four-year high schools, and this affected nearly 200,000 more Black children of high school age. Thus, 30 percent of the counties in 15 southern states failed to provide four-year high schools for Blacks in 1930. (data reported in Wilkerson 1939:40–1, cited in Lieberson 1980:146–7)
Gaining access to high school for Blacks was a feat, receiving high school work was a rarity. Sociologists W. E. B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill, in The Common School and the Negro American, found that, despite the categorization of public schools as “high schools,” the coursework offered was at the grade school level. They note that “Georgia, for instance, is credited with eleven public high schools for Negroes. As a matter of fact there is not in the whole state a single public high school for Negroes with a four years’ course above the eighth grade” (1911:129).
The restriction of Black access to education was cumulative and led to compounded disadvantage that prevented Blacks from taking full advantage of their access to post-secondary education. The majority of Blacks in post-secondary institutions were taking primary and secondary school remedial courses. Lieberson concludes that, “compared with the immigrant groups in the North, literally generations of Blacks were prevented from using education as a stepping stone for upward mobility” (1980:147).
Mobility Denied: Education as a Racial Privilege
Education is widely recognized as a means to upward mobility. Slave owners were adamant that slaves should not read, because literacy was perceived as a threat to the institution of slavery. Population control in the postbellum South took the form of restricting the former slave populations’ access to quality education. The purpose of classical education was preparation for good citizenship; however, Lieberson argues, this goal was incompatible with the economic and social structure of the South where Blacks were disenfranchised (1980:135). Instead, “special education” was devised for Blacks, notes sociologist Henry Allen Bullock, “that would prepare Negroes for the caste position prescribed for them by White Southerners” (Bullock 1967:89). Access to a higher-quality education by Whites during the post-Reconstruction era in the South was gained by racial privilege. It was a direct result of the disenfranchisement of Blacks, which allowed Whites to institutionalize their political power, exert their economic privilege, and confer educational advantage.
Even in the North, Landry (2000:52) notes, Blacks were “denied access to the educational establishment” and, when they were granted access, obtaining an education did not translate into mobility. In reviewing the occupational distribution of Black women in 1900, Landry finds little difference between their overrepresentation in domestic service and laundress roles in Southern versus Northern cities. He remarks: “In spite of their educational parity with the daughters of immigrant and native-born White working class families, the daughters of Black migrants were generally excluded from clerical and sales employment in all but the small Black enterprises of the growing northern ghettoes” (Landry 2000:48–9). Contrary to the classical goals of education, the express purpose of Black education was to hinder any change in the status of Blacks, in order to restrict their occupational choices to service and laboring roles that did not conflict with the scripted notions of their “proper place.”
