Barriers to Equal Integrated Education

Yet as they launched the equal rights movement northern blacks confronted formidable obstacles to the realization of their dream of equal educational opportunities. Racial segregation within, or exclusion from, public schools was the norm in nearly all northern states at the end of the war. Most whites—especially Democrats but also many Republicans—strongly supported these discriminatory laws, for they were convinced that African Americans were inferior and therefore that education could do little, if anything, to elevate them. These whites believed that the races should be separated wherever possible, particularly in the public schools, where they felt their children’s welfare was most at stake.5

In 1865, Indiana stood at the opposite end of the public school policy spectrum from Wisconsin, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. While all public schools in Wisconsin and these New England states were racially integrated, no African American children in Indiana were allowed to attend the state’s public schools. Because Indiana’s school laws expressly stated that the public schools were open to whites only—even if blacks offered to pay their own tuition—they were forced to rely entirely on private schools.6

In most other northern states a complex mosaic of segregation, exclusion, and, occasionally, integration existed. There were no discernible patterns that set one particular region of the North apart from another. Nevada’s arrangement largely resembled Indiana’s in that there was only one school for blacks in the entire state. Nevada did permit a black school to be established if at least ten African American school-age children lived in a district, but where the quota was met local officials invariably chose not to create a separate public school. California had the same numerical requirement. Yet most black communities in the state did not meet the ten-student threshold. Another problem for black Californians was that, while local school boards could, under state law, allow black children to attend school with whites if a majority of white parents in the district did not object, such consent was never given. Pennsylvania’s school laws were more exclusionary than those of Nevada or California. Black Pennsylvanians enjoyed access to the Public School Fund, but at least twenty school-age African American children were required to live in a district for a separate public school to be established. This meant that many black children in the state received no public school education.7

The public school policy in Illinois was even more complicated. Unlike the situation in Pennsylvania, school taxes paid by African Americans were not returned to them in districts where no public school was available to their children. A school district could admit black students if it was willing to incur the expense, but most communities, especially in the southern part of the state, did not do so. Consequently, in 1866 Newton Bateman, state superintendent of public instruction, estimated that one half of the six thousand black children in the state between the ages of 6 and 21 had no access to public education. However, in a few northern Illinois communities where whites did not object, they were admitted to the white schools. The most important example is Chicago, where, following black protests against the segregated schools in 1864 and the advent of Republican control in the state legislature and the City Council, its schools were desegregated.8

Much as in Illinois, most of Ohio’s blacks lived in small communities in the southern areas of the state, thus making it difficult to provide separate public schools for their children. White resistance to education for blacks exacerbated this problem. Consequently, at the end of the Civil War only a fifth of all school districts in the state had separate black public schools. Yet in Cleveland and much of the rest of the Western Reserve area, where abolitionism and black protest against racial discrimination had taken deep root during the antebellum era, schools were generally integrated, and black teachers were employed in some racially mixed schools in Cleveland.9

The patterns that existed in southern and northern areas of Illinois and Ohio, respectively, were generally reversed in New Jersey: Most public schools in the southern part of the state were racially segregated, while integrated schools were more common in the northern areas. It is not clear why this was the case, especially since the Democratic Party, which almost invariably rejected school integration, was strong in many parts of northern New Jersey; whereas Republicans, who were more likely to support racially mixed schools, were the dominant political force in southern New Jersey. It appears that the large postwar migration by southern blacks into southern New Jersey created powerful anti-integration sentiment among Democrats and many Republicans. At the same time, the large-scale movement of European immigrants into the northern areas of the state, combined with the presence of a relatively small black population, may well have so increased ethnic diversity in the schools that racially mixed schools seemed less threatening to the white power structure.10

Still another permutation along the integration-segregation continuum existed in Michigan, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, where segregated public schools were found especially in the large cities, such as Detroit and Jackson; New Haven and Hartford; and Providence, Bristol, and Newport, respectively. Perhaps the most complex realities confronted African Americans in New York. Although state officials called for equal funding for black and white schools in 1864, relatively few schools acted on this directive. Moreover, larger school systems, such as those in New York City, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, maintained segregated schools, while many smaller communities integrated their schools primarily for economic reasons.11

The Ambiguities of Desegregation

All northern blacks vigorously condemned the exclusion of African American children from the public schools. But no consensus existed on whether school desegregation was a desirable objective. Many blacks were ambivalent about racially mixed schools; during the antebellum years and throughout the Reconstruction era, a vocal minority of African Americans argued the case for separate schools as a means of retaining a measure of control over their children’s education, thereby providing for their academic, social, and psychological needs.12

Northern African Americans who opposed school desegregation during the postwar years were, like their antebellum predecessors, motivated by both ideological and practical considerations. Cultural nationalism clearly shaped their thinking on this matter. A group in Brooklyn, for example, accused black integrationists of being “ashamed or afraid of being known as colored persons” and charged that, by supporting black churches and fraternal organizations while opposing racially separate schools, the proponents of public school desegregation were inconsistent and deceitful.

In a similar vein, groups of black parents in Delaware, Ohio, and Detroit circulated petitions that called for keeping the separate schools open. These schools, proclaimed the Delaware group, were “the bulwark of the liberties of the colored people, and must be guarded with unflagging vigilance.” Others, such as a correspondent to the Daily Ohio State Journal, chose to emphasize the positive academic consequences of all-black institutions, arguing that intellectual growth came from within, being “the result of exercise, and not contact merely.” Thus, he concluded that, at least for the foreseeable future, schools and other institutions based on language or color would produce better results than “mixed organizations.”13

Even many African Americans who favored public school integration were rather ambivalent on the issue. They were justifiably concerned that white students would mistreat and humiliate their black classmates in racially mixed schools. Indeed, the evidence points to a toxic environment in many such schools, with black children routinely being subjected to racist taunts, harassment, and violence.14 They were also worried about how their children would be treated by white teachers and whether African American men and women would be hired to teach in racially integrated schools. They realized that their racially separate schools—whether public or private—and the black women and men who taught their children served as a focus of community organization and activity, especially for those who lived in scattered pockets in both rural and urban areas. Blacks in numerous northern communities insisted that, so long as segregated public schools existed, only black teachers should be hired.15 In Poughkeepsie, a broad cross section of the black community demanded that the school board not appoint white teachers to their schools, while blacks in New York City strenuously objected to the superintendent’s plan in 1865 to replace black teachers of superior ability with less capable whites.16

These protests were often lodged in response to the reality that in many black communities—even in Philadelphia, which had the largest African American population of any city in the North—a majority of teachers in the black schools were white. Blacks were especially fearful that white teachers would bring their racial prejudices into the classroom. As the Elevator warned, white teachers were unfortunately inclined to stereotype black pupils as inferior. Such concerns were often grounded in the assumption that black teachers better understood the intellectual, cultural, and emotional needs of African American students than did white instructors. For example, a group of Detroit parents asserted in a petition to the school board in 1865 that a black teacher could best understand and convey proper “deportment and principles for survival” in a hostile environment.17

Although most northern blacks favored the proposition that African American teachers were more effective than whites as role models for black pupils, this issue also often proved divisive. Perhaps the most acrimonious debate on who should teach their children erupted at the first annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League in 1865. Angered by the Philadelphia Board of Education’s treatment of blacks—especially its failure to hire African American teachers in the city’s black schools over the years—the convention’s Business Committee resolved that, because “experimental knowledge” indicated that black children made greater progress under the direction of African American than white teachers, they considered it their duty, “as lovers of the advancement of our race,” to ensure that their schools were guided by black teachers. Some delegates angrily charged that the resolution was “ill advised and injurious in its operations” in that it appeared to make distinctions based on color, which equal rights activists had long denounced. But an amendment urging that no discrimination on account of color be employed in the appointment of teachers in the black schools was defeated.18

Following a prolonged and heated debate, Octavius Catto, a Philadelphia activist who taught at the privately-run Institute for Colored Youth—the only school in Pennsylvania where blacks could gain a teaching credential—offered a compromise resolution. Citing the 1854 state law that established separate schools for African Americans as well as the Philadelphia Board of Education’s 1864 ruling that barred black teachers from instructing white students, Catto argued creatively that, because white teachers in the black schools were “inferior” in skills and experience, preference in appointments to those schools should be given to qualified African Americans based on education and custom. In addition, his proposal stipulated that, since the Philadelphia Normal School did not admit blacks as candidates for teacher certification, all teachers in the black schools must graduate from the Institute for Colored Youth.19

Catto, who endorsed the spirit of the original resolution but questioned its wording, believed that no white teacher could instruct a black child as satisfactorily as could an African American, not because of different intellectual abilities but because the black teacher would have the welfare of the students more at heart. Thus, he resolved that where black and white candidates for teaching positions were equally qualified, African Americans should be selected because they were better qualified by “conventional circumstances outside the schoolhouse.”20 In unanimously supporting Catto’s resolution, the delegates—a number of whom had taught alongside him at the Institute—wished to make it abundantly clear that they deeply resented the practice of hiring unqualified white teachers, who frequently had been rejected for appointment in the white schools, to teach in the black schools. They also underscored their conviction that the shared experience and cultural values that bound black students, teachers, and the larger African American community were absolutely essential for black self-esteem, autonomy, and upward mobility in a hostile society.21

Black teachers in the racially separate schools, along with administrators and other personnel, were likely to be long-term residents of the communities they served. Unlike white teachers in either the black or racially mixed schools, they were generally involved in black community life, including the churches and fraternal organizations. White teachers not only frequently refused to recognize or acknowledge their African American students outside the school but also, at times, intimidated and ridiculed them in the classroom. For instance, white school officials sometimes placed black pupils in separate classrooms in mixed schools and, to avoid conflict between white and black students, seated African Americans apart from whites in the same room. Such demeaning treatment, as well as the ridicule poor black students experienced because of their shabby clothes, contributed to a high dropout rate among black children.22

Such pervasive racism among white teachers and students was deeply disturbing, even to those African Americans who espoused school integration. The Elevator, for example, editorialized in 1870 that, because black students seldom received the same advantages as white children in racially mixed schools, “as long as the prejudice exists which forces us into the negro pews in churches and the backseat in school houses, so long will we need colored churches and separate schools.” This grievance was echoed by a group of Illinois blacks in the same year. According to Newton Bateman, superintendent of public instruction for the state, these African Americans informed him that they preferred racially separate schools because they did not desire, and would not permit, their children to attend schools where they would be exposed to “unfeeling taunts and insults.” Conversely, northern blacks who questioned the wisdom of school desegregation pointed out that the self-image of students who were taught by African Americans in all-black schools was not damaged, for they were the leaders and active participants in every phase of school life; therefore, the sense of inferiority and unjust treatment or neglect were seldom present.23 Moreover, when black schools were closed in communities where integration occurred, African Americans were left with no schools they could call their own and with little or no voice in shaping the policies that affected their children’s education. Consequently, black parents often confronted a difficult dilemma: either lose what little control they had over their schools (and possibly jeopardize their children’s emotional well-being) or send their children to higher-quality, racially mixed schools.24

Many northern blacks were also troubled by the fact that, when the public schools were desegregated, black teachers invariably lost their jobs. Indeed, white-controlled school boards frequently warned African American teachers that they would be retained only if the schools remained segregated. These discriminatory policies sparked vigorous protest in Brooklyn, New York City, and Albany, New York; Keokuk, Iowa; and other northern communities, with black women often leading the way. Such policies posed an especially serious threat to black women’s professional opportunities, for in many communities they outnumbered black men in the teaching ranks. School desegregation proved to be a double-edged sword for black women: it enabled a growing number to achieve a higher level of education and, with it, access to the teaching profession, but the closing of black schools also threatened to eliminate one of the few professional opportunities available to them.25

Black Teachers, Black Schools

Because teaching was probably the highest paid and most prestigious profession available to educated African Americans, it is not surprising that some blacks who were instructors in racially separate public schools, or were related to them, at times spoke out against integration.26 Although Henry Highland Garnet generally favored integration, that his wife served as principal of one of three remaining black schools in New York City in the late 1870s appears to have motivated him, at least in part, to urge that, since the school board had decreed that African Americans could not teach or be administrators in racially mixed schools, these schools should be kept open as long as the number of students in attendance justified their continuation.27

Perhaps no one sparked more heated debate on this matter than Solomon Day, a black teacher in Dayton, Ohio. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Ohio State Journal in 1878, Day warned that desegregation of the public schools in the state would have a devastating effect on black teachers and students alike. While he agreed with the principle that all children should attend school together, he predicted ominously that the closing of black schools in Ohio would cost more than five hundred African American teachers their jobs, thereby either reducing them to “penury or want” or forcing them to seek employment in the South, where they would become victims of “Southern cruelty and barbarism.”28

Black advocates of school integration condemned Day’s arguments as self-serving and injurious to African American children. Rev. James Poindexter, a black Columbus activist who played a prominent role in the Ohio Equal Rights League, presented the most sweeping criticism of Day’s position, claiming that many black teachers were not as well qualified as white teachers and that only a few blacks would lose their jobs as a result of desegregation. More important, according to Poindexter, because white children in a segregated educational setting adopted the false idea that their skin color made them superior to black children, the loss of black teachers’ jobs would be far less destructive than the continuation of inferior black schools. Another critic went so far as to accuse Day of allowing his selfishness to prejudice him against the potential benefits of school integration. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Ohio State Journal, he stated contemptuously that Day and other like-minded black teachers simply would not deign to perform “honest” manual labor.29

Yet, unlike Day and Garnet, some African Americans who did not depend on separate public schools for their livelihood also wondered whether integration was worth the loss of black employment in the school systems. Philip Bell cautioned in 1865 that school desegregation might well mean that someday there would be no incentives for black men and women to enter the teaching profession; consequently, no such role models or sources of pride would exist for African American adults and children alike. Only when black men of piety, learning, judgment, and ability were admitted to the teaching and other professions because of their merit, he stated, would black schools, churches, and newspapers cease to exist.30

For African Americans who took pride in all-black institutions and were, at the very least, ambivalent about the consequences of school desegregation, the black school system in Cincinnati stood forth as a symbol of black identity and aspirations. Prior to the Civil War, Cincinnati blacks, who had long been excluded from, or suffered systematic discrimination within, white-dominated institutions, created their own churches, fraternal and sororal lodges, mutual benefit societies, an antislavery society, literary societies, and private schools. Following years of lobbying by black Cincinnatians, the Ohio legislature passed a law in 1856 that applied only to that city. This law, which gave a significant degree of control to the black community over the management of its schools, was highly unusual in the North. Even in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which had relatively large black populations, whites controlled the school boards and served as superintendents, while African American teachers and principals in the black schools were powerless to shape policy.31

White authorities in Cincinnati continued to determine the appropriation of taxes for all of the city’s schools. But blacks oversaw the operation of their four district schools, an intermediate school, a high school, a normal school, a night school, and two colony schools. In addition, they not only served as superintendent of the system and principal of the high school; at a time when few northern blacks could vote, an elected black school board established policy for the system. Moreover, Cincinnati blacks played an important political role in patronage matters related to the educational system.32

Cincinnati’s black school system remained a source of pride among the city’s African American residents until whites seeking to curtail the role of blacks in the city’s politics resumed control in 1873, for they considered these schools vehicles for social and economic mobility, equality, and assimilation into the larger society. Black teachers and administrators, unlike those in most other northern cities, earned salaries comparable to those of whites, thus helping to establish an economically viable group within the black community. These men and women also either headed or influenced a broad range of voluntary organizations that strengthened the fabric of black Cincinnati. Equally important, the system provided employment for carpenters, janitors, and others who maintained the school buildings and sent teachers into other northern communities and the South. Finally, graduates of the intermediary and high schools dominated the professions in Cincinnati’s black community. Indeed, the city’s white schools were in fact less successful in creating such opportunities for poor and working-class whites.33

Under the leadership of men like William Parham, who served as superintendent of the black public school system for a decade, and Peter H. Clark, the principal of Gaines High School for two decades, the system was managed efficiently and professionally. These and other black educators showed a genuine concern for the students, regularly visiting them in their homes, seeking to determine why attendance was often low, and training and mentoring those who decided to enter the teaching profession. They and the members of the school board also tried their best to provide schools that were conveniently located for students and to develop curricula comparable to those for white pupils.34

Cincinnati’s black public school system served as such a potent model of efficiency and relative autonomy that other northern African Americans sought to emulate it. In the late 1860s, black equal rights leaders in Columbus urged the Ohio legislature to amend the special law for Cincinnati so as to include their own racially separate schools.35 Likewise, in Indiana, which excluded blacks from the public schools until the late 1860s, an appeal by the Indiana Convention of Colored Men called on the legislature to establish schools that would function under the supervision of a board elected by African American males.36 Though unsuccessful, these efforts indicate that many blacks yearned for a greater degree of control over the schools in their communities.

Yet it is instructive that Peter Clark, the longtime principal of the black high school in Cincinnati and at times an outspoken defender of all-black public schools, was painfully aware that, because the white power structure established funding levels for the black system, their schools, like nearly all other separate black schools across the North, were inferior to the white schools in nearly every respect. Even though the physical plant and equipment in the black system were often antiquated and inadequate, the white city council routinely denied funds for improving the existing structures or building new schools in the inner city. In some districts, the older black schools were replaced by abandoned white schools, which then stood as symbols of inferior black education. Moreover, notwithstanding the efforts by black education officials to locate schools near the black neighborhoods that were found in ten of the city’s twenty-five wards, inadequate funding severely limited the number of black public schools. Indeed, a primary school as well as both the intermediate and high schools were housed in one building. Consequently, class sizes tended to be high; overcrowding was a constant problem.37

A significant disparity also existed between the curricula at Gaines High School and the white high schools in Cincinnati. While Gaines offered a three-year course of study, the white high schools provided four years. In addition, a number of courses were not taught at Gaines, in part because blacks were not trained to teach them. Not surprisingly, inferior facilities, equipment, libraries, and curricula meant that black students lagged behind their white counterparts academically, and far more whites than African Americans were found in the higher grades.38

These harsh realities forced Clark to confront a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, he was concerned about the potentially negative impact of school integration on the black community, especially on black children who might well be subjected to white prejudice in racially mixed schools, and he fully understood that desegregation would cost him and his black colleagues their careers as educators. On the other hand, he acknowledged that, notwithstanding the herculean efforts of black educators, Gaines High School could not begin to compare, either quantitatively or qualitatively, with the white high schools in the city. In the end, he was prepared to sacrifice his position for the advantages that racially mixed schools offered and was confident that most African Americans in Ohio favored school integration.39

Strategies to Achieve Equality

In their assault on racially segregated public schools (and, in some states, exclusion from the public schools), Clark and other equal rights activists developed a multifaceted and sophisticated set of arguments, which they hoped would persuade white public officials and voters to end discriminatory policies. Much as they did in their campaign for suffrage rights, they appealed to whites in the name of patriotism, republican principles, morality, and basic fairness. But on the school issue, they also emphasized a number of practical considerations in a calculated effort to convince whites that public school integration would benefit both races.

Perhaps the most sweeping assertion of equal educational rights was grounded in the conviction that the public schools existed for the benefit of all Americans, without artificial barriers or agendas. The Christian Recorder emphatically declared in 1870: “We want no colored schools. . . . Our country must be homogeneous. No schools for race or sect ought to be tolerated much less provided for. Let the nation be the instructor of all her children.” Racially separate schools, the editor concluded, were “inspired by the stupid devilish monster prejudice—a monster who has neither eyes, nor ears, nor taste, nor feeling.”40 Others focused on more specific benefits that would accrue from school desegregation. A contributor to the Pacific Appeal asserted that, while “class schools” always provided a defective education, a concerted effort to mingle the races would make the schools “really efficient” and create a productive spirit of competition. The Christian Recorder went even further in extolling the virtues of “common” schools, arguing that black and white children would come to know better the character of the other group.41

In their campaign against what they termed “caste schools,” northern black activists looked back—much as they did in their quest for suffrage rights—to the Revolutionary era for inspiration and guidance. The Pacific Appeal spoke for many proponents of school integration when it charged that segregated public schools for blacks were contrary to the principles of democracy, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For states or communities to provide an inferior education, or no education at all, based on color, condition, or nationality, they reasoned, not only created an ignorant, and therefore dangerous, element that would prove detrimental to the interests of all Americans; by distributing public benefits unequally in society, such a system also violated the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government.42

African Americans consciously connected this guarantee to the Revolutionary principle of “no taxation without representation.” A speaker at a convention held in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1866 proclaimed that taxation without representation was contrary to republican institutions. This assertion resonated with many northern blacks not only because it reflected their steadfast attachment to liberty and equal rights but also because it related, in fundamental ways, to their hopes and aspirations for themselves and their children. Much as in Cincinnati, white officials in many northern states and communities systematically underfunded the black schools, even though African Americans paid the same taxes as whites. It was an especially emotional issue for a large number of blacks in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and Nevada, where they paid school taxes yet were excluded from the public schools because an insufficient number of school-age black children resided in a particular district.43 As the Pacific Appeal pointedly reminded the California legislature in 1871, state authorities had forgotten that “the Public Schools are public institutions, and that all citizens are taxed in common to support them as public institutions”44

In Nevada and Indiana, African Americans were either completely or generally barred from the public schools. At the end of the Civil War, black Nevadans complained bitterly that, although they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes each year on real and personal property, they enjoyed no access to public school funds. A black Nevada meeting asked in 1866 whether African Americans should be compelled to pay taxes for the education of whites when their own children were doomed to grow up in ignorance.45 In Indiana, by contrast, property owned by African Americans was exempt from taxes levied for education, but they were also denied access to the public schools. In a memorial to the legislature in 1866, the Indiana Convention of Colored Men pointed out that three thousand five hundred blacks in the state owned real estate and personal property worth millions of dollars. This property, if taxed for the support of black education, they asserted, would significantly enhance the school fund. Thus, the delegates petitioned the legislature to tax blacks at the same rates as other citizens for the purpose of educating their own children. A year later the Indiana Colored Equal Rights League convention reiterated this request and condemned the state for its “indifferent and unjust” refusal to devote a proportional amount of the public school fund to the education of African American children.46 Determined to show that they were willing to pay taxes in support of public education as well as embarrass the legislature for refusing to act on this matter, Indiana equal rights activists agreed to levy a voluntary tax of twenty-five cents on every one hundred dollars worth of property owned by blacks in order to create a school fund that would be utilized in each county where it was collected.47

Northern black advocates of school desegregation also employed the taxation issue to appeal to the economic self-interest of white taxpayers. They did so by warning that uneducated or undereducated African Americans were more likely than those with an adequate education to end up in the criminal courts, state prisons, industrial schools, and almshouses, thus becoming a financial burden on society. Above all, they reminded whites of the costs associated with maintaining dual public school systems, asking whether it was practical to force taxpayers, both black and white, to educate relatively few black children in separate public schools when they could more economically be taught in racially mixed schools in their own neighborhoods. To continue such discriminatory practices, the Pacific Appeal declared, was to incur a “double expense in order to gratify prejudice.” Peter Anderson specifically pointed to the situation in San Francisco, where taxpayers were forced to pay for the education of fifty black students in separate schools when there were nearly fifty white schools these children could be assigned to in their own neighborhoods.48

Newton Bateman, Illinois’s superintendent of public instruction who championed education for blacks but also favored segregated public schools, concurred with Anderson on this matter. He noted that where few African American students were enrolled in a district, the cost per black pupil was five to ten times greater than that for white children. Thus, he hoped that racist policies designed to separate black and white students in districts with fewer than ten school-age black children would soon be repealed. If this were not done by white school authorities, Bateman stated in his 1874 annual report, African Americans should sue.49

African Americans similarly coupled practical considerations with principle in asserting that racial segregation forced their children to walk great distances to school. This problem was especially acute in rural areas of the North, where black students were often forced to walk several miles past one or more white schools on their way to the only available black public school. But this was also a common occurrence in Detroit, San Francisco, Columbus, and other cities, for concentrated African American populations had not yet developed in much of the urban North. Except in the largest cities, there generally were, at most, only a few black schools. Families who lived outside the older established sections of a city, where no designated schools existed, were the most adversely affected.50 These realities imposed serious hardships on black students and their families. Such logistical problems, as well as the need for many children to work at an early age in order to assist their families financially, go far to explain why many children were either unable to attend school or were frequently absent. These difficulties were compounded by the taunts and threats they faced as they passed white schools en route to their segregated public schools.51

Northern blacks were especially angered by the inferior quality of the public schools their children were compelled to attend. Their indictment of these schools as inherently inferior to the white schools presaged, in many ways, the arguments presented by black educators such as Horace Mann Bond in the 1930s and by Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in the 1950s.52 Much like the twentieth-century civil rights activists, the Reconstruction-era proponents of public school desegregation condemned numerous deficiencies in their schools, including inferior facilities, inadequate supplies, and shoddy equipment. In many communities, students were crowded into one- or two-room buildings that were cheaply constructed, unsanitary, and poorly maintained. With such limited space, a graded system according to age or ability was often impossible. In addition, meager funding frequently translated into an abbreviated school year. For example, Ohio’s black schools in the late 1860s were, on average, in session one month less each year than their white counterparts. Inadequate funding also meant extremely large classes, and the lack of janitorial services often forced students to clean their own classrooms.53 The narrow range of courses available to black students was equally insulting to many African Americans. At the Wilberforce School in Albany, students were limited to the study of the alphabet, reading, spelling, arithmetic, geography, needlework, and singing, because courses in algebra, geometry, bookkeeping, and classical subjects were not offered. Consequently, African American students were often unable to pass the annual exams required for entrance to the Free Academy—the city’s high school.54 In many other northern communities, blacks were barred altogether from gaining a high school or normal school education. In some states, such as California, African American students could not even move beyond the elementary level. These restrictions were generally grounded in the assumptions on the part of white educators and political officials that black pupils lacked the intellectual capacity for advanced studies. Even in places where African American students enjoyed access to advanced instruction, it was frequently offered either in a small room attached to a black school or at allotted times or in separate areas in a white school.55

In their attempt to bring their arguments before the public and to pressure state and local officials to act on behalf of equal access to the public schools, African Americans employed a broad array of tactics. In doing so, they drew from a common reservoir of methods utilized by the antebellum protest movement and those they used in the postwar campaign for male suffrage rights. Because public education was considered a state matter, they made little effort to coordinate their cause across state lines prior to the 1870s. There is no evidence that the National Equal Rights League, even when it was most active between 1864 and 1868, sought to orchestrate the education campaign, though individual delegates to its annual meetings did mention the issue. The evidence indicates that the state equal rights leagues and their local auxiliaries were heavily involved in this endeavor; in some states they cooperated with allied organizations such as the Illinois School Fund Association. The local equal rights auxiliaries often helped to coordinate the solicitation of signatures on petitions to be presented to state and local officials. These petitions, which circulated largely within the black communities, proved an effective means of mobilizing grassroots support on the school issue. Many of them articulated grievances that were germane to a particular community or state, while others expressed a generic desire to end segregation in, or exclusion from, public schools. For example, groups of black parents in Detroit and New Brunswick, New Jersey, petitioned their local school boards for admission to the high schools, while petitioners in California and Illinois demanded access to the public schools for children who were excluded by numerical requirements from establishing schools for African Americans.56 Likewise, northern black men and women held numerous public meetings in their communities to discuss educational issues, formulate resolutions, compose memorials, and generate support for their cause. Most of these meetings were advertised and reported in the black press and in sympathetic white newspapers and were announced in the black churches. Much like the grassroots meetings convened to advance the cause of black male suffrage, these assemblages were generally dominated by middle-class professionals but also included cartmen, dyers, school janitors, and other working-class blacks.57

When white resistance to school integration and inclusion persisted in the face of this agitation, African Americans at times adopted more militant forms of protest. On occasion, this entailed a symbolic shift in rhetoric, such as the announcement during a Detroit public meeting in 1869 that it was now time to substitute the word demand for claim in their manifestos. On a more substantive level, they also resorted to nonviolent direct action—much like that employed so effectively by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s—to press their case. While local equal rights organizations may well have assisted in coordinating these actions, they often appear to have been planned and carried out by groups of black parents who believed it was necessary to physically confront public officials in their particular school districts. In an effort to close black public schools they considered inferior in quality to the white schools, men—and especially women, who viewed their work on behalf of their children’s education as a critical component of reforms that addressed the needs of the black community—in numerous towns and cities withdrew their children from the black schools. In addition, mothers and fathers of black students marched into the offices of school superintendents and mayors to demand a hearing. Still others took their children into the white schools and insisted on a hearing, which they then occasionally used as the basis for lawsuits against white officials.58 When their petitions, public meetings, and nonviolent direct action failed to produce the desired results, they at times mounted legal challenges to the denial of equal educational opportunities.

In the Courts and the Workman Case

Local and state courts served as important vehicles for attacking segregation and exclusion. Northern blacks turned to the courts for a number of reasons, including the desire to counter claims by opponents of black suffrage rights that African Americans lacked the requisite educational fitness to enjoy the franchise; their limited success in persuading state legislatures, local school boards, and city councils to repeal discriminatory policies; and the hope that Republican judges would recognize the inherent injustice of such laws and customs. During the mid- to late 1860s, northern black education activists achieved a degree of success in lawsuits filed in Iowa and Michigan on the grounds that, in denying African American children access to public schools in the districts where they lived, school boards and other local government officials were violating state laws and constitutions.59 The first occurred in Iowa, where Alexander Clark, a prominent black leader and political activist in Muscatine, attempted to enroll his daughter in an all-white grammar school. When she was refused admission, Clark successfully petitioned a local Republican judge for a writ of mandamus ordering the school board to admit her. At the appellate level, the court ruled that, because the Iowa constitution required the state to provide an education for all children, school officials must justify, on a statutory level, any denial of equal access to the schools.60

In its Clark v. Board of Directors decision in 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court essentially agreed with the appellate court in holding that, since the Iowa legislature had not restricted admission to the public schools to whites after 1858, local school boards could not determine who could attend their schools. However, in ruling that the plaintiff’s daughter must be admitted to her neighborhood school on the basis of legislative sovereignty—which the legislature could, if it wished, take away—rather than as an inherent right, the court provided little support for school desegregation on the broad principles of equal rights, due process, or justice.61

Unlike the Clark ruling, the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision in The People ex rel. Joseph Workman v. The Board of Education of Detroit was affirmatively grounded in state law, not the absence of denial of access to all-white schools by African Americans. The developments in Detroit and at the state level that both preceded and followed this ruling in 1869 not only shed valuable light on the tactics employed by blacks to achieve racial integration in the public schools but also underscore the formidable obstacles that racist white politicians and education officials placed in the path of African Americans.

As early as January 1865, a black convention condemned segregated education in Michigan, especially Detroit. Of the many disabilities African Americans experienced, the delegates complained, “there is none more grievous to be borne than the imperfect and unjust system of public school education.” While a good education was “one of the most desirable of all attainments,” they asserted, in Michigan it was virtually impossible for blacks to obtain, even though they paid taxes earmarked for education at a rate equal to that paid by whites. At an annual celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation held two years later, Michigan blacks once again condemned the limited education offered to African American children as “an act of injustice and oppression.”62

At approximately the same time, a series of events precipitated an intense struggle between the opponents and proponents of school desegregation in Michigan. This dispute, which extended over five years, pitted Republican state judicial and legislative authorities as well as Detroit’s black community against the Detroit Board of Education and most whites in the city. In response to a court battle generated by a Jackson, Michigan, parent’s attempt to force that city to admit his child to an all-white school in his district, the Republican-dominated Michigan legislature amended the state’s general school law in 1867 to guarantee that all residents of a school district “shall have an equal right to attend any school therein.” Passage of this law spurred black parents in Detroit to petition the Board of Education for their children’s admission to schools in their districts.63

The Detroit Board’s Committee on Schools subsequently urged the full board to defy the state law, insisting that the great majority of the city’s residents believed the “distinctive feature” of separate schools ought to be retained. While acknowledging that the new state law intended to desegregate the state’s schools and that the city’s black schools “should be made equal to any in point of efficiency and adequacy of accommodation,” the committee—and the larger board—claimed that because the Detroit Board of Education was the creature of a special legislative act, residents of the city should be allowed to deal with the matter as they wished.64

The board’s members were motivated to defy state law in large part by their assumptions regarding white racial prejudice and black inferiority. Most whites in Detroit, they insisted, harbored “a strong prejudice and animosity” toward blacks; because this was frequently transmitted to children in the schools, it would inevitably engender conflict if black children were admitted to the white schools. At the same time, in remarking that most citizens must “move in humble circles” and accept “humble employments,” its members appeared to contradict their stated objective of equal education by implying that all blacks could and should not try to compete with white students in racially mixed schools.65

In clear defiance of the recently enacted state law, the Detroit Board of Education continued to maintain a few black schools in the lower grades, which forced African Americans who lived in the more remote areas of the city to choose whether to attend those schools or go without an education. Consequently, in early 1868 Joseph Workman, a black laborer, applied for his child’s admission to a white school and was refused. He then took his case before a local court, where a Democratic judge ruled for the Board of Education, even though the city’s attorney upheld Workman’s claim that, under the 1867 state law, black children in the state had a right to attend schools within their district.66

In early 1869, Detroit’s black community rallied behind Workman by holding a mass meeting that included most of the city’s African American men, women, and children. At this meeting, in which attendees vigorously condemned the discriminatory policies of the board, a female student recounted that she was not allowed to enroll in the high school, and several children bitterly complained that, when they were permitted to attend a racially mixed school, they were placed in separate rooms or classes. Such policies that forced African American students into “a nigger pen,” the participants resolved, were the product of “an oppressive and uncalled for prejudice.” Those who spoke at the meeting overwhelmingly agreed that Workman’s suit must go forward, for the racial distinctions advanced by the board were clearly intended to show black children that “there is an inborn inferiority in the colored race.” In its resolutions, the meeting angrily charged that the Detroit Board of Education had consciously sought to obstruct the execution of the law.67

A committee formed at the public meeting soon presented a petition to the board requesting that African American children be admitted to schools within their own districts and charging that the black schools were decidedly inferior in quality to those for whites. The board’s Committee on Schools, however, rejected the petition on the grounds that the city’s schools were now filled to capacity and that, indeed, hundreds of white children were also denied admission for lack of space. Thus, the committee resorted to a carrot-and-stick policy: it warned that if the black schools were abandoned, African Americans would receive no education whatsoever and asserted that the board had as much right to separate blacks and whites as it did to establish separate schools for boys and girls; at the same time, it urged that a new separate school for African Americans be opened in a church whenever a teacher could be hired.68

The Michigan Supreme Court was not prepared to accept the board’s calculated moves. In his majority opinion in the Workman case, Chief Justice Thomas Cooley, a noted jurist, spoke for his two Republican colleagues. Cooley stated emphatically that, while local school boards were invested with broad authority, the school law passed by the legislature in 1867 in no way gave such boards the power to exclude residents from any of its schools because of race, color, religion, or “personal peculiarities.” There was no doubt, he found, that the legislature had intended to give all students an equal right to attend the public schools in their districts. Thus, the court rejected the Detroit School Board’s contention that it was exempt from the state law.69

Yet, notwithstanding the unequivocal language contained in the court’s ruling, the Detroit Board of Education continued to thwart the desires of the city’s black community and the will of the Michigan legislature and supreme court. While it affirmed the court’s decision and the president of the board, a Republican, warned white teachers that to refuse admission to African American students probably would result in additional lawsuits and fines, Democratic members of the board used procedural tactics to prevent it from acting on the court’s decision. Indeed, the board claimed that, because proportionately more black than white children were provided seats in the city’s schools, it was not in violation of the court’s order. Convinced that ambitious and naive Republicans in the legislature were determined to use black children as pawns in this power struggle, the Democratic majority on the board ultimately gave in and declared themselves willing to submit to the law, even as they condemned it as “ill-advised and injurious to the system of education.”70

The Detroit School Board remained intransigent into the early 1870s, during which time it developed ingenious methods that, on the surface, signaled compliance with the court’s ruling but, in reality, eviscerated its intent. Workman’s child was admitted to a white school, but, soon thereafter, two other black students were denied entrance. In addition, when a black school was closed, the pupils were placed in a new racially mixed school, where two rooms were set aside for them. In a similar attempt to maintain patterns of segregation within individual schools while claiming that the system as a whole was now racially integrated, the board spent sparse funds to purchase single seats for the classrooms in the schools that were racially mixed so that no white pupil would have to sit with an African American child.71

The board’s obstructionist tactics forced Detroit’s black community to take its case back to the legislature, which responded by passing additional legislation in 1871 that unequivocally barred school segregation throughout the state. African American petitioners also continued to condemn the board’s practice of assigning less qualified white teachers to the black schools than were hired in the white schools. In addition, like many other African Americans across the North, they insisted that only black teachers could instruct their children “in such deportment and principles as may best fit them for usefulness in life.”72

Segregation is the Norm

The experience of black proponents of equal educational privileges in Detroit underscores the enormous problems northern blacks encountered in their quest for meaningful school integration, even where a sympathetic state legislature and supreme court sided with them. Black activists succeeded in desegregating some or all of the public schools in a few northern states during the mid- to late 1860s. They accomplished their objective in Rhode Island by the mid-1860s and, with the end of school segregation in Hartford and New Haven, in Connecticut in 1869. Perhaps the most striking achievement occurred in Minnesota, which had a tiny African American population. In 1869, the Republican legislature enacted a law that banned school segregation and required that state educational funds be withheld from school districts that failed to comply.73

In most northern states, however, either segregation or exclusion remained the norm in 1870. For example, in Iowa, where the Clark decision outlawed segregated schools, communities such as Dubuque and Keokuk continued to operate racially separate public schools. The situation in Keokuk, which had the state’s largest black community, shows that continuity could at times prevail over change. When the Keokuk Board of Education announced plans in 1869 to replace the black staff of the African School with a white principal and white teachers, local African Americans vigorously protested the plan and threatened to send their children to the all-white public school if their teachers were replaced. The black community ultimately prevailed. But, despite having a new school and capable teachers, segregation continued to deprive black students of a high school education and force them to walk a considerable distance to grade school. Likewise, although the Indiana legislature ended the state’s longstanding policy of excluding all black residents from the public schools in 1869, in many smaller towns, where too few African Americans lived to justify separate schools, black school-age children continued to be denied an opportunity to receive a public education. A similar situation existed in California and Illinois, where many black children resided in districts where their numbers did not meet the minimum requirement for establishing a separate black public school. The situation in Pennsylvania perhaps best illustrates the persistence of school segregation outside of New England. Although a few local victories emboldened black equal rights activists to hope that “a mighty change” in public sentiment might move the school integration cause forward, the Republican-dominated legislature, fearful of a white backlash, refused to repeal the law that mandated segregated public schools in the state. Indeed, by consolidating the Pittsburgh school system in 1869 the legislature rendered it even more racially segregated than it had been.74

As the fierce and prolonged resistance to school integration in Detroit vividly illustrates, northern black activists could count on virtually no support from Democratic public officials during the years immediately following the Civil War. Thus, much as in their struggle to achieve male suffrage rights, African Americans made very little effort to convert Democrats to their cause.75 Republicans, on the other hand, were often deeply divided on the school issue. A growing number of northern white Republicans—especially the Radicals—vigorously espoused school desegregation, in part because they believed that the party must stand by its stated commitment to racial justice and equal protection of the law. Indeed, in nearly every instance where school integration was enacted by legislative action or court decree, the Republicans were responsible for it. Yet, in a number of northern states, including Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada, many Republican politicians and education officials who were philosophically opposed to school integration or fearful of offending their constituents on this controversial issue joined with the Democrats in resisting integration or only tepidly supported it.76

Once the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, however, many black proponents of school integration and inclusion expressed the hope that, especially where competitive political races would enable black voters to hold the balance of power between the parties, they could effectively pressure Republicans to endorse their cause. Moreover, now that the black male suffrage issue had finally been laid to rest, they were prepared to devote most of their energies to the school issue at both the state and national levels.