Jarvis Givens reminds us that this very period, the 1920s and 30s, included the founding and development of Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History outside of established school bureaucracies. By 1928 the Association had close to 2,000 members in more than 40 states. Through independent journals, convenings, local state associations, textbook publishing, and other printed materials like posters and circulars, the Association intentionally countered the official curriculum of the American School with a curriculum that emphasized the dignity of Black life, both in its positive achievements and in its resistance to oppression. Givens describes the Association’s work as an extension of “fugitive pedagogy” in the sense that young people learned this counter-narrative in places and by methods largely hidden from official view, though often right within the very school buildings formally dedicated to the American Curriculum.
We should also note that Woodson himself left a position at Howard University and refused work there and at any other institution where White benefactors were likely to constrain his teaching. Nevertheless, his publications and ideas (including Negro History Week, which began in 1921) influenced the practical pedagogy of thousands of teachers within White-supported schools for Black children. Often, when his influence was discovered, teachers were disciplined or dismissed. Nevertheless, despite the relatively small numbers of African Americans with access to secondary and post-secondary education before World War II, this strand of Black self-teaching and educational self-determination was systemtically developed through efforts like Woodson’s and his thousands of followers.
The effect of World War II and its aftermath on education in the United States is impossible to overstate. I don’t know of any thorough treatment of this subject and won’t go into depth here, other than to list some important themes:
The military’s demand for personnel resulted in more than 1.5 million African Americans serving in the armed forces. This would have been impossible without the decision by President Franklin Roosevelt to end the practice of involuntary servitude through convict leasing and peonage. Bob Moses often cited Attorney General Francis Biddle’s Circular 3591, issued on Dec 12, 1941—only five days after Pearl Harbor—in which Biddle instructed U.S. attorneys to prosecute cases of involuntary servitude that had previously been allowed to go un-prosecuted. Biddle’s and Roosevelt’s principal motivation was the need for Black male bodies to throw into war, but another motivation was the propaganda liability of Black second-class citizenship in light of official claims that Germany and Japan promoted theories of racial superiority, not the United States.
The huge numbers of returning Black soldiers after the war resulted in an unforeseen political dynamic; many soldiers’ eyes were opened to the possibility of a life with dignity and self-respect, and many had learned and developed new skills that they were anxious to put to work in building their lives and their commuities’ lives. The dynamism of these returning soldiers can be found undergirding every aspect of the Civil Rights Movement through the 1950s and 60s, including demands for educational equality. For example, Oliver L. Brown of Kansas and Harry Briggs of South Carolina were both Black veterans whose children became plaintiffs in Brown v. Board, decided in 1954.
Largely through economic effects of labor shortages during the war and agricultural mechanization, the transition from rural to urban economies was vastly accelerated. The1940s and 50s saw the movement of almost 3 million Black people from the South to the North (compared with only 400,000 in the 1930s). Bob Moses begins Radical Equations with the invention of the first mechanical cotton picker in 1944—a development whose importance he likens to the invention of the programmable computer the year before.
For the purposes of this post’s telling of the story, I want to focus on the last item above. The movement of White people from rural into industrial urban economies began in the last half of the 19th century and accelerated in the first half of the 20th century. This transition spurred the development of the urban education systems, first in the North, then in the South so that by the 1940s attendance at high school (at least to 10th grade) was the norm for the White population. Part of the thinking behind the systematic institutionalization of secondary education was the need for greater literacy and numeracy in an industrial economy, but much of the motivation was simply the danger of large concentrations of idle adolescents with limited economic roles to play—in contrast to their former usefulness in agriculture (obviated by farm mechanization).
Large concentrations of idle Black adolescents in cities, however, was limited to a few parts of a few Northern cities until the 1950s and 60s. Before World War II, secondary education was not the norm for African Americans. It was only during the heyday of America’s urban industrial expansion in the 1950s and 60s that the White administrative hierarchy decided secondary education needed to become universal. But for the average Black person, this educational transition was already several decades too late.
Young Black people only began to get widespread access to the type of secondary education designed to integrate them into an industrial economy when that economy was on the verge of decline. Baltimore’s population, for example, was at it’s maximum in 1950. White families’ exodus to the suburbs led to shrinking economic resources for the growing, but poorer, Black population arriving in the city. By the 1970s economic recession had set in, and the peak of manufacturing employment in the U.S. was 1979. So it was really only one generation of Black people—those who went to high school in the late 50s and 60s--for whom the official structure of education was even potentially a fit for the economic roles that might lead them out of low-caste status. In fact, most still did not graduate from high school, and the work available to the majority of African Americans remained drudgery, underemployment, or no work at all.
When we think about the massive rise of Black incarceration in the period following—the 1980s and 90s—it is important to study the interlocking effects of education and employment patterns, as well as policing and judicial policies. To review:
Pre- Civil War: Enslaved labor needed no formal education at all.
Reconstruction: Recently liberated people sought education as a way of entering into full citizenship. Most Black people worked in agriculture and needed little beyond simple literacies for their employment. Even that was opposed by many Whites, who thought education should teach subservience, not skills or knowledge.
Jim Crow Era: The industrializing economy directed White people towards urban centers where high school became a norm. Black people received no more than primary education and remained mostly in agricultural or menial economic roles. Not all, but the majority of Black people were excluded from full employment in industry, professions or trade, and so were not thought to need secondary education let alone university.
Post World War II: Farm mechanization and urban-based war industries (including enlistment in the army during the Korean and Vietnam Wars) drove millions of Black Southerners towards Northern cities. Attendance for one or two years of high school became the norm for Black youth. But shrinking urban economies and deindustrialization set in by the 1970s, resulting in even more limited economic roles than had been available in war-time.
The 1980s and 90s presented a clear problem that still affects us today. The country had no plan at all for the economic roles of people who had previously been assigned to employment that required little to no education. Employment in that sector shrunk catastrophically: farm labor, factory labor, mine labor, porters, servants, and so on employ millions fewer people today than in 1940. High school attendance became compulsory not because there was a plan to incorporate Black youth into a post-industrial economy, but simply to keep Black youth off the streets. The rise of mass incarceration coincides with the elimination of viable economic roles for low-caste people in America because the country has refused to accept the fact that it must rethink the what economic roles are even possible in the 21st century. (Europe and East Asia took a somewhat different approach by seriously implementing educational tracks that led to skilled-labor roles in a changing economy. In Europe this effort was supported by much more prominent trade union movements than in the U.S. Nevertheless, a similar mismatch between economic roles and labor force has developed in Europe with rising rates of immigration.)
For higher-caste youth, there is a plan—not entirely viable, but at least it’s a plan. Stay in school, go to college, develop some capacities in a knowledge-based economy, and then see if you can adapt to the rapidly changing world of entrepreneurship, technology, and information-age employment. While you are developing those knowledge-based skills, your middle and upper class families will make sure that your material needs are met.
Lower-caste youth are told to follow the same plan, but the same plan has no chance of working for the vast majority of them because their families are not able to ensure that their material needs are met during the decade or more of adolescence and young adulthood in which they are supposed to develop their knowledge-based skills.
The key point is that young people become aware during middle and high school that the economic roles of their older brothers and sisters—and of their parents—do not jibe with what they are told about schooling. Many of their family members and neighbors have completed high school, some have completed one or two years of college, but the employment available even to those “successful” family members often remains poorly compensated, undignified, and unsatisfying. Not always but in general, what people around them learned in school has little or no bearing on their actual employment beyond some very basic literacy skills. The question of relevance in high school is not only, “Do curricular topics appeal to the interests of an adolescents?” but also, “Does the project of schooling seem relevant to the material and social demands of the world they are growing up into?” Generally speaking, school does not function to increase access to higher caste status. Young people realize, usually in high school, that school teaches you your caste status. Therefore, it is more rational to accept your caste status and get a job at McDonald’s to pick up some cash so you can pay for a phone, some clothes, and a prom ticket then to put time into studying almost any academic subject; the evidence of your own experience in your community proves that even those who studied in school still have trouble meeting their material needs after graduation.
Again, there is another stream of the story—the stream of self-determination in Black education where the promise of learning for excellence, dignity, and full participation in political and social life remains the explicit purpose. Thousands of wonderful teachers both in and out of schools advance this purpose every day. However, this work remains fugitive and subversive; the explicit goals of official education prioritize integration into the existing social structure, which insists on the unworthiness of large swathes of people. Our current social structure cannot do without a caste of largely excluded people who are ranked as relatively worthless in the intensely competitive 21st century, just as they were ranked as unthinking “property” in the agrarian economy, and as “menial” labor in the industrial economy. There is no need to educate that “worthless” caste beyond what is necessary for them to know their place.
In summary, the official education of Black people in America from colonial times to the present has been designed to help Black children grow up into the country they lived in. Slaves did not need to know how to read, so they were not taught. Newly freed men and women demanded access to literacy, but they did not need literacy to work as sharecroppers and servants, and if their children were allowed any schooling at all it was only a few years to quiet the demands of their families. Servants, porters, “menials,” on the outer edge of the growing industrial economy similarly needed little school learning to perform their roles, and in fact access to real industrial education put them into competition with White workers, so they were rarely allowed to proceed into high school as industrial economies took off in the beginning of the 20th century. It was only after World War II, when the majority of the population, White and Black, had migrated from farms to cities that high school became standard for Black people. But that was not—for the most part—to prepare them for productive economic roles; it was mostly to keep them off the city streets where it was feared they would cause trouble. And still today, the country has no clear picture of the economic role that the previously menial caste will play, so school almost overtly prepares most Black and working class young people for nothing at all.
Six years after graduation, young people in Baltimore who successfully complete a vocational course in high school earn a median of $13,000 a year, according to a recent study. School prepares them to work at a 7-Eleven for 25 hours a week. That’s where things stand. What will we do?