The Role of Education in Overcoming Racial Barriers in the US
Name
Institution
Education is one of the most pools in transforming society. Depending on the nature of educational policy and its implementation, public education can play an equalizer in a number of aspects, including socioeconomic mobility, ethnic segregation, and racial inequalities. The American civil war was characterized by a collapse in the education system in most states. By 1872, African American children attended racially separated public schools (Walters, 2001). African Americans’ commitment to education led to many schools in the states that were formerly slaveholding havens. In former confederate states, African Americans used their coting and legislative power to establish a public education framework during the late 1860s and the early 1870s. With the hope of appealing to African American voters with high interests in education, Republicans in many states, including Maryland, passed laws that required an African-American public school to be established in every district (Walters, 2001). During reconstruction, the commitment of African Americans to education gained momentum and helped a number of them to achieve significant social mobility as well as overcome some of the social barriers erected by racial discrimination. This expository paper will explore whether education in America played a significant role as an equalizer in overcoming racial barriers in society from the civil war era to the time of the Second World War.
During the American civil war from 1861 to 1865, a conflict had ensued between the northern states that were inclined to the union and the southern states that had seceded to form the confederate. The war was sparked by strongly divergent views on the subject of enslaving African Americans. The states loyal to the union advocated for upholding the constitution, which outlawed slavery while the confederate states still embraced slavery (Fairclough, 2000). The African Americans characterized the Reconstruction Era in former confederate states embracing education as the door to prosperity, equality, and independence. Despite the hurdles of poverty and racial barriers, their persistent commitment to education had lasting impacts on their states. In Sharpsburg, Maryland, a church named Tolson’s Capel served both as a church and a school for blacks and their children to acquire education (Fairclough, 2000). African American’s continued to establish and sustain schools during the reconstruction era. During this period, Anglo-Americans were generally denied access to education by blacks to justify and maintain slavery. However, African Americans aggressively sought opportunities to acquire education as a symbol of other freedom from the former enslaving states (Fairclough, 2000). Most blacks were also hopeful that literacy could uplift them economically and protect them from being defrauded or exploited by Anglo American’s. Education was perceived as an important tool for taking part in civic life.
In their quest to establish schools and acquire education during the reconstruction era, blacks faced many challenges, including an acute shortage of teachers. Initially, local African Americans who were literate such as David B. Simons in Sharpsburg, Maryland, shared their skills with others (Walters, 2001). But the number of literate blacks capable of teaching was highly limited. Besides, most blacks who were struggling economically at the time could hardly afford to pay teacher’s salaries. Hoping to get financial support and qualified teachers, African Americans in many African American communities south help from the federal government’s Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Bureau was founded by Congress in 865 and was commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau (Walters, 2001). The Bureau had inadequate funds and staff to assign to building schools; hence it collaborated with Northern benevolent organizations as well as African American communities allocate Northern teachers to freed people’s schools within Southern and border states. In addition, Northern benevolent organizations, including the American Missionary Society as well as the American Freedmen’s Union Commission, hired and paid teachers. The Freedmen’s Bureau then allocated the teachers to schools and offered them transport services. The specific African American community provided room and boarding for the tutor as well as a structure to house the school (Walters, 2001). Acquiring a structure to use as a schoolhouse was time and again a challenge because only a handful of local whites were ready to sell or lease tier property to African Americans to usage as schools. Many communities found a short-term solution to this problem in local churches, which served as schools for African Americans. Since African American congregations owned the churches, they were often ready to support the schools, unlike most white landowners. For example, Ezra Johnson and John J. Carter conducted classes in Tolson’s Chapel, a church building erected by a black Methodist congregation in Sharpsburg, Maryland, in 1866(Walters, 2001). To modify the church building for use as a classroom, locals smeared liquid slate to the walls of the buildings to make chalkboards.
The majority of white teachers who came from the North, such as Ezra Johnson, worked in African American schools for a short duration before leaving. As a result, there was a general decline in the number of white educators during the 1860s due to the waning of their enthusiasm for freed people’s education. Contrastingly, black educators from the North usually had a firm commitment to assisting their fellow African Americans to attain the objective of equality through education. As a result, most of them were ready to teach in states that were former slaveholding locations for longer periods of time. For example, John J. Carter worked as a teacher in an African American school within Virginia for almost two decades (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016). The Freedmen’s Bureau stopped its assistance for schools in 1870, as Sharpsburg occupants were writing to the Bureau to request for a third educator. While over one thousand Northerners went south to teach freed people, the majority of African American communities residing in former slaveholding territories received no teacher from the North. Those that did, such as Sharpsburg, had the teachers stay for just one or two terms before leaving (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016). Consequently, most teachers working in freed people’s schools were resident African Americans, but their work usually went unrecorded.
During the early 20th century, racial disparities in access to quality education persisted, with racially segregated schools being the norm rather than the exception. Although it was widely accepted that education was essential for economic prosperity, quality education for blacks in most southern states became in a number of aspects (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016). Besides the fact that blacks and whites attended different schools, schools for white children received more public funds compared to those serving black children. Also, due to higher poverty levels amongst the blacks, children were often recalled from school to work in the farms with their parents, resulting in low enrollment levels amongst black children (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016). In some instances, even when black children were not needed in the farms, white farm owners pulled the children out of school either to work or due to the view that children of blacks didn’t desert to be educated. Moreover, there were not adequate numbers of schools available for children of blacks. This is because if a town lacked adequate funds to build separate schools for whites and blacks, they opted to build schools for white children only (Bernardi & Ballarino, 2016). This was the scenario in most rural schools since cities collected more taxes and had more funds to allocate to schools. Most whites, on the other hand, lived within n major cities with well-funded schools.
The neglect black schools were subjected to could be apparent even to untrained eyes in the early 20th century. Many of them had leaking roofs, windows with shattered glass, floors that sagged, and filthy sanitation facilities. The schools lacked books and other essential resources, with the few books available being hand -me -downs obtained from white schools. Classes in schools for blacks were overcrowded, with high student-teacher ratios, with some having just a single teacher handling all levels of education up to 8th grade (Hallinan, 2001). Worse still, some schools for blacks had all grades pooled in one classroom and taught by a single teacher. Even desks were hardly enough in those overcrowded classrooms. Black teachers never had enough training comparable to their white counterparts and received much lower salaries. Besides, limits were set regarding what black children could be taught with white school principals restricting exposure of black children to ideas on freedom and equity (Hallinan, 2001). Carter G. Woodson narrated how some schools for blacks were not allowed to teach the declaration of independence or even the US constitution. The documents clearly stated that the state and the federal government gets its power from the electorate (Hallinan, 2001). On a positive note, a few schools for black children were constructed using funds sent by Northern foundations, which were predominantly white-owned. An example is The Rosenwald Foundation, which donated over four million dollars for constructing almost 5,000 black schools throughout the South. The schools were constructed with the children and teachers’ health and well-being in consideration, similar to mostly white schools.
The 1920s was characterized by the great migration of Black Americans residing in rural South towards urban North. The movement triggered an African American cultural regeneration named after Harlem, a New York neighborhood though it was widespread and involved most cities all over the North and West. The Black Renaissance, also named the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance, was the first instance mainstream publishers and critics paid significant attention to African American music, literature, politics, and art (Hallinan, 2001). Blues singer Bessie Smith, bandleader Louis Armstrong, dancer Josephine Baker a swell, as actor Paul Robeson were some of the leading entertainment icons during the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes were among its most persuasive writers (Hallinan, 2001). However, emergent Black writers depended heavily on white-owned publishers. In Harlem’s popular cabaret, the Cotton Club, Black entertainers played to entirely white audiences. In the mid-1920s, a contentious bestseller on Harlem life authored by Carl von Vechten, a white novelist, demonstrated the attitude of most white urban trendsetters, who perceived Black culture as a path into an overly “primitive” and “vital” lifestyle (Hallinan, 2001). Du Bois condemned Van Vechten’s novel and disapproved works by Black writers, including McKay’s novel Home to Harlem that supported undesirable stereotypes of Blacks. When the Great Depression began, a number of organizations, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, shifted the focus to challenges of economic and political nature facing Black Americans (Hallinan, 2001). The Harlem Renaissance has come to an end, but its influence had spread around the globe, opening the stage of mainstream culture to many Black artists as well as writers.
Several African Americans were willing to fight during the Second World War due to what the president then, Franklin Roosevelt termed as the “Four Freedoms,” which included freedom of worship, speech, as well as from want and fear, although they themselves did not have those freedoms at home. Over 33 million Black American residents enlisted for service during the period, with about 500,000 participating at war-fronts overseas (Carter et al., 2017). According to information from War Department policy, enrolled Black and white soldiers were pooled into distinct units. Discouraged Black servicemen were compelled to fight racism besides tier efforts to further U.S. war objectives in what was known as the “Double V” strategy, to indicate the two victories they were to win (Carter et al., 2017). The war’s hero, who was of African American background, became evident during the Pearl Harbor attack when Dorie Miller, who was a young Navy steward, carried injured crew members to their safety. He also operated a machine-gun post, blowing up several Japanese planes. In 1943, graduates of the first exclusively Black military aviation program, established at the Tuskegee Institute earlier in 1941, moved to North Africa as part of the 99th Pursuit Squadron (Carter et al., 2017). Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr, who was heir commander, later ascended ranks to become the first African American general. The Tuskegee soldiers engineered combat against German as well as Italian troops, flying for 3,000 missions. This served as a source of prestige for several Black Americans. However, maintaining elevated morale among black soldiers was challenging due to the sustained discrimination they faced. In mid-1948, President Harry Truman eventually combined the U.S. Armed Forces through an executive order stating that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” (Carter et al., 2017).
In conclusion, while education has contributed significantly in uplifting blacks and other minority groups from poverty, it does not remove wealth divides and racial disparities in terms of savings and assets that have persisted despite black workers earning more. The average black family with an income in the mid-fifth of all income earners has less accumulated riches than the median white family with incomes in the bottommost of one-fifth of income earners(Carter et al., 2017). Rising income inequality correlated with racial differences in the United States continues to receive more attention in the years following e the Great Recession. The overall gap between whites and blacks in terms of wealth can be associated with the overwhelming white majority at the pinnacle of the economy. Notably, getting a good education fails to equalize wealth, which reveals a lot about how we view class. The class has been previously perceived from an incomplete perspective in terms of income, education, and occupation, but the most all-inclusive indicator of the class is actually wealth. This is because wealth equips one with resources for an upcoming opportunity for one’s children. It is the crux of ways of accessing opportunity. However, racial disparities in access to education as well as employment remain great drivers of inequity.
References
Bernardi, F., & Ballarino, G. (2016). Education as the great equalizer: a theoretical framework. In Education, Occupation and Social Origin. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Carter, P. L., Skiba, R., Arredondo, M. I., & Pollock, M. (2017). You can’t fix what you don’t look at: Acknowledging race in addressing racial discipline disparities. Urban education, 52(2), 207-235.
Fairclough, A. (2000). “Beine in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro… Seems… Tragic”: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South. The Journal of American History, 87(1), 65-91.
Hallinan, M. T. (2001). Sociological perspectives on Black-White inequalities in American schooling. Sociology of Education, 50-70.
Walters, P. B. (2001). Educational access and the state: Historical continuities and discontinuities in racial inequality in American education. Sociology of Education, 35-49.
Walters, P. B. (2001). Educational access and the state: Historical continuities and discontinuities in racial inequality in American education. Sociology of Education, 35-49.