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Abstract
This paper examines the impact of war on African-American education. This question is considered in three different periods: the eras of the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Second World War. Large-scale conflict, such as these instances of total war, can afford historical moments when oppressed groups are able take steps to improve their social status, challenging the forms of domination that have subjugated them in the past and demanding rights and liberties long denied them. This is an especially noteworthy case because of the highly developed system of racial oppression that African Americans became subjected to historically. In each of these cases, disruptions of existing patterns of social and political inequity provided openings for African Americans to realise new opportunities for education and social advancement. Implications of these historical patterns are discussed in the conclusion.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
The authors have benefited from helpful feedback offered by the journal’s editors and anonymous readers, and conferees at the 2014 ISCHE meeting. Their research was generously supported by the Spencer Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Ch. 14.
2 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
3 Through much US history, this was accomplished by the establishment of inferior and unequal schooling for blacks, which had the pernicious effect of reinforcing the ideology of white intellectual superiority. For discussion of this see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), Introduction.
4 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery under a Different Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War Two (New York: Anchor, 2008); Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (New York: Basic Books, 2013), Ch. 4.
5 Our focus is the experience of what has been described as “Total War”, which required far-reaching mobilisation of people and resources for purposes of organised conflict. On this point, see Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 2–12.
6 Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Study of Britain, France, Russia and the United States (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1974), Ch. 2.
7 For a critique of this perspective, see the essays in Harold L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986).
8 Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1991). Marwick’s response can be found the Preface, “War and Social Change in Twentieth Century England”. Quotes are taken from pages 18 and 19 respectively.
9 Hew Strachan, “Total War in the Twentieth Century,” in Total War and Historical Change: Europe, 1914–1945, ed. Arthur Marwick, Clive Emsley and Wendy Simpson (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 272–73.
10 Robert P. Saldin, War, The American State, and Politics Since 1898 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Chs 3 and 4.
11 Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518. Bell was quite clear, however, that enhanced opportunities for African Americans would likely end with divergence of interests between blacks and whites.
12 Robert J. Swan, “John Teasman: African-American Educator and the Emergence of Community in Early Black New York City, 1787–1815,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 3 (Autumn, 1992): 331–56; Paul J. Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 229–58.
13 The questions were raised in Strachan, “Total War in the Twentieth Century,” 265.
14 Matthew C. Ward, “American Militias: ‘The Garnish of a Table’?,” inWar in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forester (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 175.
15 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750– 1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), Part II; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Ch. 2.
16 On this point, see Jorg Nagler, “Achilles’ Heel: Slavery and War in Revolutionary America,” in Chickering and Forster, War in an Age of Revolution, 285–97.
17 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 4; Jones, A Dreadful Deceit, Ch. 4.
18 Nagler, “Achilles’ Heel,” 289–93.
19 Cassandra Pybus, “From Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty,” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (Winter, 2006): 114–30; Woody Holton, “‘Rebel against Rebel’: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 157–92; Sylvia R. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” Journal of Southern History , 49, no. 3 (Aug., 1983): 375–98.
20 On the end of slavery in the North and transitions thereafter, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of the Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Arthur Zilversmith, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), Chs 1 and 2; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), Ch. 5; David Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2006), Ch. 8. Also see author reference and W. B. Hartgrove, “The Negro Soldier in the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 1, no. 2 (April 1916): 110–31.
21 The classic text on this is Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Part VI.
22 Joyce Appleby, “Liberalism and the American Revolution,” New England Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March 1976): 3–26.
23 Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 517–27; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of the Revolution, Ch. 4.
24 Kirt Von Daack, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 3.
25 Zilversmith, The First Emancipation, Ch. 1.
26 Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860. (Boston: Hill & Wang, 1983), 38; John L. Rury, “Philanthropy, Self Help and Social Control: The New York Manumission Society and Free Blacks, 1785–1810,” Phylon 46, no. 3 (September 1985): 231–41; Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation,” 229–58.
27 This was because black families often relied upon children for financial support, or perhaps they did not altogether trust white philanthropists. See Rury, “Philanthropy, Self Help and Social Control,” 233–35.
28 Oscar Reiss, Blacks in Colonial America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 139; Swan, “John Teasman,” 331–50; on the early black schools in Boston, see Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), Ch. 5. In the Boston case it is noteworthy that city authorities turned down black requests for a separate school in 1798, worrying that it might be seen as special treatment and lead other groups to make similar requests; Schultz, The Culture Factory, 160.
29 Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 38; Swan, “John Teasman.”
30 Gary B. Nash, “African Americans in the Early Republic,” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 2, “The Early Republic” (Winter 2000): 12–16; Rury, “Philanthropy, Self Help and Social Control,” 237–40.
31 Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection. AFS Biographies. New York Historical Society. https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/bios/ (retrieved 12 June 2015); Schultz, The Culture Factory, Ch. 6.
32 John L. Rury, “The New York African Free School, 1827–1836: Conflict over Community Control of Black Education, 1827–1836,” Phylon, 44, 3 (September 1983), 187–197; idem, “Race and Common School Reform: The Strange Career of the NYSPECC, 1847–1860,” Urban Education 20, no. 4 (January 1986): 473–92; Schultz, The Culture Factory, Chs 5& 6.
33 Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), Ch. 5; Hillary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Ch. 1.
34 Report to the Primary School Committee on the Abolition of the Schools for Colored Children, with the City Solicitor’s Opinion (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, Printer, 1846), 7. Also cited in Schultz, The Culture Factory, 192. Tellingly, this reasoning was not employed in 1798, when authorities denied black requests for a separate school.
35 Moss, Schooling Citizens, Ch. 6.
36 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), Chs 11 and 12.
37 Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 29–33; Strachan, “Total War in the Twentieth Century,” 265.
38 The literature on these points is voluminous; see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press), 2003. For recent overviews of the slave system, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), Ch. 4; and Davis, Inhuman Bondage, Chs 6, 7, 9 and 10.
39 James Brewer Steward, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (Boston: Hill & Wang, 1997), Ch. 7.
40 Foner, Reconstruction, Chs 7 and 8; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Chs 6–8; W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction; An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), Ch. XV.
41 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, Ch. 1; Ronald E. Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Robert C. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Christopher M. Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
42 Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 99 and 114. Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Appendix B.
43 Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, Chs 1, 2 and 3; Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse, Chs 1 and 2.
44 The quotes are from Captain E. W. Hooper and O. Brown respectively, in Facts Concerning the Freedmen: Their Capacity and Their Destiny, Collected and Published by the Emancipation League (Boston: Press of Commercial Printing House, 1863), 4, 6.
45 Quoted in Williams, Self-Taught, 140.
46 Ibid., Ch. 8; Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, Chs 1 and 2.
47 Foner: Reconstruction, Chs 7, 8 and 9; DuBois, Black Reconstruction, Chs XV and XVI. Black leaders helped form new, liberalised state governments. Education provisions were written into constitutional documents, and additional support for public schools was legislated. These measures were expected for readmission to the union. On attacks against schools and teachers, see Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, Ch. 6.
48 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Part 2; C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Chs 3 and 4; Edward E. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Ch. 6. Presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South to ensure his election.
49 Theodore R. Mitchell, Political Education in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, 1887–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
50 Philip Dray, At the Hands of Person Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), Chs 1, 2 and 3; Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 198–200.
51 Biennial Report of the Department of Education of the State of Alabama for the Scholastic Year Ending, September 30, 1899 and 1900 (Montgomery: State Printing office, 1900), 57–58.
52 For discussion of how white philanthropists and other figures limited African-American education during these years, see William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), Chs 5, 6 and 7.
53 John J. Donohue III, James J. Heckman and Petra Todd, “The Schooling of Southern Blacks: The Roles of Legal Activism and Private Philanthropy, 1910–1960,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 1 (Feb. 2002): 225–68. Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Ch. 2.
54 Ian F. W. Beckett, “Total War,” in Arthur Marwick, Clive Emsley and Wendy Simpson, eds., Total War and Historical Change: Europe, 1914–1945 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001), 28–32.
55 Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (New York: Lippincott, 1972), Chs 4 and 5.
56 Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Chs 1, 2 and 3. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975), Chs 10, 11 and 26.
57 Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), Chs 7 and 8.
58 Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chs 2, 3 and 4.
59 Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), Chs 8 and 9.
60 Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), Chs 7 and 8.
61 Polenberg, War and Society, Ch. 4; Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of World War Two (New York: Little Brown, 2000), Chs 2 and 3; Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Ch. 6.
62 Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (Boston: Hill & Wang, 1993), Chs 1, 2 and 3.
63 Takaki, Double Victory, Ch. 2.
64 Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (New York: New Press 1997), 11–13.
65 On this point, see Saldin, War, the American State and Politics since 1898, p. 110; more than three-quarters of white troops reported favourable impressions of African Americans after serving with them, and none reported more negative feeling. More than 80% gave black troops the highest combat rating. Also see Takaki, Double Victory, 35–37. In one celebrated instance, black tankers in the 761st Armored Battalion and white paratroopers in the 17th Airborne Division fought together in retaking the French town of Tillet during the Battle of the Bulge, prevailing after five days of combat. The famous Tuskegee Airmen, a black fighter squadron, became known for never losing any of the bombers they escorted, and white pilots frequently requested their assistance. Women of the all-black Central Postal Delivery Battalion made as many as 30,000 address changes a day, earning the gratitude of soldiers across the European theatre who received letters and packages from home.
66 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Part II; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Chs 4 and 5.
67 Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma,” 524–25.
68 Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938 (New York: Viking, 1980), Ch. 3.
69 Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, Conclusion.
70 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011), Part 4; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), 16.
71 An important precedent was set in 1947, when Mexican Americans successfully challenged Southern California’s segregated school policies in Mendez v. Westminster, decided by a federal district court. At about the same time, NAACP lawyers began attacking similar policies requiring racially separate schools. See Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, Ch. 7; Gilbert G. Gonzales, Chicano Education in The Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990), Chapter 7.
72 John L. Rury and Shirley A. Hill, The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling: 1940–1980: Closing the Graduation Gap (New York: Teachers College Press, 2012), Ch. 2.
73 Charles C. Bolton, “Mississippi’s School Equalization Program, 1945–1954: ‘A Last Gasp to Try to Maintain a Segregated Educational System’,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 4 (November 2000): 781–814. Robert A. Margo and T. Aldrich Finegan, “The Decline in Black Teenage Labor-Force Participation in the South, 1900–1970: The Role of Schooling,” American Economic Review 83, no. 1 (March 1993): 234–47.
74 Kluger, Simple Justice, Chs 26 and 27; Klarman, Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, Ch. 4.
75 United States Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), Opinion.
76 According to polls conducted after the Brown decision, American public opinion was evenly divided between those who favoured school integration and those who were opposed. If most blacks favoured integration, this suggests that a third of whites also supported it, and about 57% opposed it. The rest were undecided. Polls were conducted by the National Public Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in 1956. Accessed on iPoll Database, 22 June 2015.
77 J. Harvie Wilkerson, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), Part II. Klarman, Brown v Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, Chs 5, 6 and 7.
78 Rury and Hill, The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling, Ch. 5.
79 Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
80 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chs 2, 3 and 4.
81 This is amply documented in Richard Kluger’s magisterial Simple Justice.
82 The most comprehensive single work demonstrating this is Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South.
83 On this point, see Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (Boston: New Press, 1977), Introduction; and Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), Chs 3, 4 and 5.
84 See Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), Ch. 8; and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Chs 2, 3 and 4.
85 Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Tro Duster, David Oppenheimer, Marjorie Schultz and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Ch. 3; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), Chs 4 and 5.