Race- and Ethnic-Based Schooling

Race has been a significant issue in American educational policy and practice. It has also been the grounding for significant educational reform, especially throughout the 20th century. During America's earliest beginnings, it was illegal to provide education for African Americans. By the mid-1800s, however, significant changes had begun to occur in the education of African American youth. For example, in 1837 the Institute for Colored Youth was founded by Richard Humphreys; later it became Cheney University. In 1854, Ashmun Institute in Pennsylvania was opened as the first school of higher learning for young Black men and was later renamed Lincoln University after President Abraham Lincoln. Wilberforce University, founded by the African American Episcopal Church in 1876, was the first university owned and operated by African Americans. Howard University housed the nation's first Black law school (1869), and Meharry Medical College (1876) was the first Black medical school, founded by the Freedman's Aid Society of the African American Episcopal Church. The first college for Black women, Spelman College, was founded in 1881 by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles. All of these institutions were founded for Black students and were segregated, and all were efforts to significantly reform the way in which African Americans could be educated in the United States.

After the Civil War and with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, educational institutions for Black Americans began to open up all over the country. The number of historically Black colleges and universities grew rapidly, most of them in the South, in an attempt to meet the thirst for knowledge that many persons of color had previously been denied. The reality was that schools, colleges, and universities were typically segregated, and the notion of separate but equal was codified in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court ruling, which gave full legal standing to the concept that separate education and other forms of color separation were legal. While separate facilities and opportunities existed, equality in the context of separation was never achieved. Almost 60 years later, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruled unanimously that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

The implementation of the process built in the caveat of using “all deliberate speed” and was used by those unwilling to move forward as a “political crutch” to impede the reform process. Social and political battles to desegregate schools both north and south began, and the resistance was significant and deep in most parts of the country. There were remedies imposed in the 1960s and 1970s, usually by court order, including “busing” programs (as opposed to transportation programs that many districts used), redistricting, magnet schools, and other devices designed to bring students together in the same physical facility or within the same school district. The efforts seemed to assume that [Page 752]desegregation would lead to integration and that all students would receive an equal educational opportunity in schools. There were also struggles over deciding whether segregation was de facto, meaning simply a result of where people “happened” to live, or de jure, which meant that it was imposed intentionally and legally by a local board or other agency able to make such a ruling.

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