Abstract
Since the publication of C. Vann Woodward’s Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, historians continue to debate when, where, and how segregation was imposed and practiced in the post-Civil War South. 1 Against Woodward’s hypothesis of a long period of flexibility through the end of Reconstruction until the 1890s, scholars including Howard Rabinowitz countered by drawing attention to urban areas, in which new public services that emerged after the Civil War were segregated from the outset. 2 But rather than view these segregated institutions negatively through the lens of the Civil Rights-era struggle for desegregation, Rabinowitz stressed that segregated institutions in cities were defended and fought for by African Americans as the only viable alternative to exclusion from public services entirely. The particular geography and chronology of segregation and desegregation have such high stakes because the contours of politics in the past inform our understanding of political possibilities in the present. The three books under review provide fresh interpretations of the accomplishments of African-American communities since Reconstruction, as well as the setbacks they faced. Each productively uses urban schools as the primary site from which to examine the struggle for access to public services in the South and, together, suggest new directions for the urban history of race and inequality in the United States.
Even Woodward acknowledged that certain institutions were largely exempt from the fluidity of race relations he tracked. While white and black people mixed in residential neighborhoods, on railroads and streetcars, and in restaurants and saloons, they almost always attended separate churches and schools. 3 Hilary Green and Jay Winston Driskell Jr. both offer local case studies of the hard-fought battles of African Americans for the establishment of public schools in an environment hostile to black literacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rabinowitz’ thesis is taken for granted: the backdrop of these books is closer to Gunnar Myrdal’s observation in 1944: “The great wonder is that the principle of the Negroes’ right to public education was not renounced altogether. But it did not happen.” 4 These books demonstrate that black mobilization was necessary to win even segregated schools.
The primary subject of Hilary Green’s Educational Reconstruction is the growth of state-funded black schools in two cities—Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama—between 1870 and 1890. After the achievement of the Reconstruction-era Freedmen’s Bureau Schools between 1865 and 1870, subsequent educational development has often been cast as a forgone conclusion, quickly deteriorating toward the nadir of institutionalized white supremacy by the turn of the century. 5 Green argues that the twenty years after 1870 should instead be characterized as a crucial period for the expansion of public schools for urban African Americans, a process she terms Educational Reconstruction. Using newspapers, public school reports, association records, and personal papers, Green shows how black Richmonders and Mobilians built relationships with public officials prior to the departure of the Freedmen’s Bureau Schools, helped to ratify new state constitutions with strong provisions for black education, and transferred existing black schools into expanding public school systems.
Green also effectively contextualizes the expansion of public education after the Civil War within a broader landscape of private schools. Freedmen’s Schools, funded by both federal dollars and northern philanthropies, did not enter a vacuum but added to a network of privately-funded African American schools, most founded by antebellum urban free black communities. Green details the campaigns for increased state and local funding to provide school accommodations, resources, quality, and the hiring of black teachers. The last was particularly important, as teaching was one of the only professional employment opportunities available to African Americans. Green argues that the expansion of higher education for African Americans in the form of teacher-training normal schools was essential in building a new black urban middle class. Black activists in Richmond secured their greatest successes under the biracial Readjuster government in the 1880s, including the establishment of a state normal school, the employment of black teachers and principals in the city’s black schools, and school enrollment growth of the black school-age population from under 20 percent in 1870 to 50 percent by 1890 (pp. 114, 164).
Black Mobilians, by contrast, faced repeated arson attacks on black schools, less funding, and complicating status divisions between African Americans and lighter-skinned Creoles of color. Even in Mobile, however, black citizens achieved some successes, including a school board commitment to hire black teachers in 1878 and the opening of a new city public normal school staffed by black teachers in 1887 (pp. 148, 180). Green acknowledges the many obstacles, but her focus is the relentless fight of African Americans for quality black schools. While the author does not include many quantitative benchmarks to measure the success of these campaigns, Green shows how any public funding for black schools was only possible with sustained organizing and mobilization by African Americans.
By drawing attention to southern cities, Green demonstrates important local variation in the trajectory of African American education between 1870 and 1890. This focus, however, also seems to undercut her arguments for ending Educational Reconstruction in 1890. Green attributes this chronological choice to national events: the failure of the federal Blair Education Bill, which would have provided federal funds to black and white public schools throughout the South, and the embrace of Booker T. Washington’s industrial education model. As urban areas were exceptional—home to only 15 percent of the southern African American population as late as 1900, and far ahead of their rural counterparts in the expansion of public services—the effects of these national developments on cities would be worth examining in greater detail. 6 Furthermore, these educational developments are less compelling as causes of the end of “educational reconstruction” than as symptoms of broader political changes in the 1890s. At a time of rising populist insurgence, southern white elites used the expansion of public services, premised on the exclusion of African Americans, to appease lower-class whites. 7 It is difficult to imagine an educational strategy to combat these political circumstances. Recent scholarship has also reevaluated Washington’s “industrial” education model as a clear-eyed strategy for preserving black schools within a limited range of options, and examinations of the curricula practiced within “industrial” schools reveals considerable flexibility on the part of teachers. 8 While the turning point of 1890 may be overstated, Green’s book draws important attention to a neglected period in the study of African American education after Reconstruction.
Jay Driskell Jr.’s Schooling Jim Crow picks up where Green leaves off, focusing on the continued accomplishments of urban African Americans through the depths of Jim Crow. The culminating event of this book is the success of black Atlantans in securing a new public high school by mobilizing black turnout in four municipal bond referenda between 1918 and 1921. In explaining this victory, Driskell offers an impressively broad analysis of the evolution of Atlanta’s racial, class, and gender politics. Rather than a framework of Southern regionalism, Driskell explores the politics of Jim Crow exclusion from the perspective of Progressive Era state expansion occurring across the country. 9 In the urban South, black citizens faced the dilemma of seeking to enlist the state as an ally at the same time that the state was inscribing their second-class status into law (p. 5).
Fundamental to confronting this dilemma was a shift in political ideology among African Americans from an accommodationist politics of respectability in 1890 to political protest in 1919. The new black middle class that arose in the post-Reconstruction period described by Green forms the African American elite with which Driskell begins. Borrowing the concept of “respectability politics” from historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Driskell argues that this black elite embraced a form of paternalism based on strategic alliances with whites that granted suffrage rights for the “respectable” among them. 10 By Driskell’s reading, the difference between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois is exaggerated, as both men in this period pursued varieties of respectability politics premised on sharp class and status distinctions (pp. 31-33, 209). Rather than a shift from Washington to Du Bois, Driskell attributes the shift from accommodation to political protest to the organizing efforts of black women. One of the most impressive aspects of Driskell’s study is his gender analysis of the politics of white supremacy, using a range of local newspapers, speeches, and letters. The disenfranchisement of black men by the turn of the century exposed the frailty of respectability politics based on black leaders’ careful cultivation of white allies. The 1906 Atlanta race riot, detailed in a vivid and devastating chapter, marked a turning point in Atlanta politics by eliminating the viability of even “respectable” African Americans’ claims to manhood suffrage. The terrain of black political power shifted to the social activities of black women in churches, schools, and philanthropies. Driskell focuses on the Neighborhood Union, a social settlement founded in 1908 and led by black middle-class women who embraced respectability politics as a form of uplift. Instead of manhood suffrage rights, however, the basis of respectability was redefined as access to public services as citizens, and this shift opened up a new space for cross-class racial solidarity. The organizing model of the Neighborhood Union was based on reaching out to “key” working-class women trusted within each neighborhood, allowing the Neighborhood Union to contact forty-two thousand of sixty-two thousand black Atlantans in a matter of days by 1919 (pp. 127-130, 208). While class and status tensions remained, Driskell argues that the organizing achievements of the Neighborhood Union helped change respectability from a “stratifying discourse” to a “unifying discourse” that proved essential in subsequent black political victories (pp. 138-139).
One such victory was the Booker T. Washington High School. When Atlanta faced a post-World War I financial crunch, white city leaders sought to raise city funds through municipal bond and tax referenda. Disenfranchisement had reduced African Americans to only 5 percent of registered voters by 1919, but they were still influential at the margins, and World War I had emboldened the political demands of black veterans. Based on the little acknowledged work of female organizers, black Atlantans working with the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) carried out the most successful black voter registration drive since Reconstruction to vote against the municipal bond three separate times, effectively holding the city hostage until their demands were met (pp. 196-226). In a fourth vote on May 8, 1921, voters overwhelmingly approved four separate bond issues totaling $8 million, with $1.5 million devoted to black schools. In 1924, Booker T. Washington High School opened its doors (pp. 229-33).
How should we interpret this victory? Like Green, Driskell’s main goal is to demonstrate that African Americans did mobilize political power and to explain how they did so, less to evaluate the strength of this power. Driskell briefly mentions the passage of women’s suffrage that doubled the voting bloc in time for the 1921 vote but does not explore its role in the politics of expanding white public services. Scholars have pointed to the ways in which female suffrage disproportionately helped spur public expenditure for white-only schools, exacerbating racial educational inequality between 1920 and 1940. 11 Scholars have also put forward a range of explanations, besides African American mobilization, as to why Southern whites tolerated minimal amounts of public expenditure for black schools after World War I: the desire for an educated workforce in industrializing southern cities, the desire to stem the northern migration of black laborers, and shifting power from local to state officials. 12 While our understanding of this victory would be strengthened by contextualizing it within the politics of white public services and a changing postwar economy, Driskell makes a compelling case that, ideologically, this success in Atlanta helped shape the future political strategy of African American activists in the first half of the twentieth century (p. 239).
Green and Driskell offer celebratory accounts of the educational gains made by African Americans in the periods they examine; Ansley Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis introduces education as a more complicated good. Erickson’s study traces the history of desegregation in metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County in Tennessee from 1945 to 1990. Erickson impressively integrates many facets of urban development: school and urban politics, black and white schools, poor urban districts and wealthy suburbs, and municipal policies and state and federal interventions. Among the three books, Erickson also highlights urban geography as a driver of historical change, and the maps based on historical census data reproduced in this book helpfully illustrate spatial trends. While Green and Driskell offer histories of African American political movements, Erickson’s narrative primarily follows the officials who orchestrated urban policy. This focus reflects the central thrust of this book: that educational inequality was not the spontaneous result of “de facto” segregation or white backlash, as other scholars and public narratives have suggested, but was consciously made and remade by design. 13
The first half of Erickson’s study traces the “making of inequality” between 1945 and 1968, focusing on innovations specific to the post-World War II period that reinforced inequality between white and black schools. Central were new urban renewal and development projects. In the neighborhoods of East Nashville and Edgehill, Erickson details how urban planners and city officials strategically placed public housing and school facilities to reinforce patterns of racial segregation (pp. 43-49, 133-137). The idealization of suburban landscapes as school settings also translated into urban development that privileged wealthy white suburbanites. In the rural area of Hillwood, for example, real-estate developers donated land to the city for new schools, and then used these schools in their marketing and advertising efforts, encouraging the creation of a new white suburb (pp. 122-32). In these chapters, Erickson builds her case for another major argument: that schools were not independent public amenities but were an outgrowth of state power used by policy makers to shape unequal housing markets and increase residential segregation. Erickson compellingly argues that, although overlooked in urban histories, schools critically shaped the structure of the unequal metropolis.
The second half of Making the Unequal Metropolis examines the experiment of desegregation between 1968 and 1998. After a 1970 court ruling mandated that Nashville develop a new plan to desegregate schools, the city began what was in many ways a success story of “statistical” desegregation. While nationally in 1990, one third of black students attended schools comprising more than 90 percent black students, by this year, almost all Nashville schools had at least a 10 percent minority presence, black or white (p. 2). During the same period, the mean test scores among Nashville’s black students rose, test-score gaps dropped by half, and a greater proportion of white students remained within the consolidated metropolis of Nashville-Davidson County than in many other American municipalities (pp. 3-5, 283).
Erickson effectively challenges assumptions about the progress of statistical desegregation, however, by showing how inequality was remade in this period. Desegregation was mostly achieved by busing black students in urban districts to white suburban schools to meet the required ratio, placing the overwhelming burden onto black students (p. 199). This process also left predominantly black schools in central districts empty, which then became an excuse used by school officials to close urban schools and reduce resources for black communities. Segregation was also reproduced anew within schools via gendered and racialized vocational curricular tracking (pp. 227-36). In addition to her meticulous policy reconstruction, Erickson uses dozens of oral histories, yearbooks, school records, and photographs to bring to life the experience of students, teachers, and residents. Erickson’s remarkably multifaceted analysis weaves together many moving parts into a persuasive narrative. Of all three books, Making an Unequal Metropolis is most ambivalent about the changes it documents. Erickson claims she does not want to draw the simplistic conclusion that desegregation was a failed experiment, but rather, if we define desegregation as a “robust commitment to equality of educational opportunity,” it was never tried (p. 305).
Placing Erickson’s analysis within the longer history of African American struggle for education offers a useful perspective to evaluate gains and losses, and consider fruitful avenues of further research. One is the ambivalence of black-only schools. Erickson describes the conflicts within the black community around desegregation when historically black institutions, including Nashville’s Pearl High School, were threatened with closure (pp. 245-49, 258-67). Critics of desegregation forged unusual alliances, such as white and black defenders of neighborhood schools in the early 1980s (p. 263). A long history of African American education must make room for these multiple, occasionally conflicting strategies.
Another topic is vocational education, which in Erickson’s account became a central component of a new form of inequality forged in the 1960s. Erickson acknowledges that despite the repeated futility of supply-side approaches to employment opportunity throughout the twentieth century, vocational reforms were repeated because they were more politically palatable than assertive interventions into the labor market (pp. 99-112). Erickson is critical of the economic interests behind vocational education and, in her conclusion, suggests that we “marshal state tools” not “in the name of growth and profit” but for “robust citizenship” (p. 315).
While both the ineffectiveness and discriminatory effects of vocational education are undeniable, the issue of vocational preparation as a function of public schools merits further exploration, especially for our understanding of the history of African American education. As Green and Driskell highlight, black schools provided crucial employment opportunities for black teachers, and this vocational role was central to the school battles fought by African Americans since Reconstruction. Furthermore, certain political economies and labor markets were more favorable to the expansion of black education. While southern planters sought to keep African Americans illiterate, northern capitalists and southern proponents of industrialization were more amenable to an educated black workforce. 14 Further study of these economic dimensions of education will add to our understanding of the operation of schools in the making of racial inequality. Making the Unequal Metropolis points future scholars in the right direction, as an outstanding model of how to integrate the history of schooling within urban history, carefully tracking whose interests were served and whose were sacrificed.
These three works demonstrate the centrality of schools—as a means of racial uplift, a public service for citizens, and an attraction to urban developers and residents—to the evolution of urban politics and inequality. They also challenge easy chronologies of progress and decline by highlighting the ways in which African Americans have fought for educational equality even in the face of repeated setbacks and structural racism reinforced by policy makers. Scholarship that builds on these studies by integrating education into narratives of urban development will add to our understanding of the long struggle for racial equality and the complex institutional configurations through which that struggle continues.