The History of African-American education deals with the public and private schools at all levels used by African Americans in the United States and for the related policies and debates. During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans in the former slave-holding states saw education as an important step towards achieving equality, independence, and prosperity. As a result, they found ways to learn despite the many obstacles that poverty and white people placed in their path. African Americans’ commitment to education had lasting effects on the former slave-holding states.
Before Emancipation, whites generally denied or restricted African Americans’ access to education in an effort to justify and maintain slavery. White people denied education for African Americans during slavery. That, however, did not stop enslaved African Americans from creating their own hidden education systems. For example, enslaved African Americans would form secret groups to teach each other how to read and write. These groups and systems would have to be hidden due to great risk associated (usually threat of physical violence). Anti-literacy laws for both free and enslaved black people had been in force in many southern states since the 1830s.
Learning to read therefore became a symbol of freedom for African Americans in the former slave-holding states. African Americans had other reasons for making literacy a priority after slavery ended. Many hoped that education would improve their economic circumstances and offer some protection from fraud and exploitation. They also saw education as important preparation for participating in civic life.
African American students in a classroom in 1902
Reconstruction Era: Building the Foundation
Legislatures of Republican freedmen and whites established public schools for the first time during the Reconstruction era. During the Reconstruction Era (1863-1876) hundreds of schools for blacks were created in the South by the government, by white religious groups, and by the blacks themselves. After the war, Northern missionaries founded numerous private academies and colleges for freedmen across the South. Most of the major Protestant bodies participated in establishing, staffing and funding the schools. The American Missionary Association was especially active. They provided funding into the 20th century. The Catholic Church also established a few black schools via using nuns, such as St. Frances Academy in Baltimore (1828) and St. The all-black African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) put a high premium on education. By 1880, AME operated over 2,000 schools, chiefly in the South, with 155,000 students.
Freedmen's Bureau Reconstruction | Daily Bellringer
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The African-American community engaged in a long-term struggle for quality public schools. Historian Hilary Green says it "was not merely a fight for access to literacy and education, but one for freedom, citizenship, and a new postwar social order." The black community and its white supporters in the North emphasized the critical role of education is the foundation for establishing equality in civil rights. The widespread illiteracy made it urgent that high on the African-American agenda was creating new schooling opportunities, including both private schools and public schools for black children funded by state taxes. The states did pass suitable laws during Reconstruction, but the implementation was weak in most rural areas, and with uneven results in urban areas.
The black community wanted black principals and teachers, or (in private schools) highly supportive whites sponsored by northern churches. Public schools were segregated throughout the South during Reconstruction and afterward into the 1950s.
In the era of Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau opened 1000 schools across the South for black children using federal funds. Enrollments were high and enthusiastic. Overall, the Bureau spent $5 million to set up schools for blacks and by the end of 1865, more than 90,000 Freedmen were enrolled as students in public schools. Many Freedman Bureau teachers were well-educated Yankee women motivated by religion and abolitionism. Half the teachers were southern whites; one-third were blacks, and one-sixth were northern whites. The salary was the strongest motivation except for the northerners, who were typically funded by northern organizations and had a humanitarian motivation.
Historian James D. Anderson argues that the freed slaves were the first Southerners "to campaign for universal, state-supported public education". Blacks in the Republican coalition played a critical role in establishing the principle in state constitutions for the first time during congressional Reconstruction. The Republicans created a system of public schools, which were segregated by race everywhere except New Orleans. The rural areas faced many difficulties opening and maintaining public schools. In the country, the public school was often a one-room affair that attracted about half the younger children. The teachers were poorly paid, and their pay was often in arrears.
Conservatives contended the rural schools were too expensive and unnecessary for a region where the vast majority of people were cotton or tobacco farmers. They had no expectation of better education for their residents.
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Monthly report for the Freedmen's School of Sharpsburg, MD in July 1869
According to Philip C. Kimball, under the leadership of Thomas Noble and the federal government's Freedmen's Bureau, a school system for Kentucky Blacks was created in the late 1860s. They persevered against the hostility of scattered white mobs, the inadequate training of some teachers, and minimal local or state tax support. With strong support from the black community and Northern churches, the new system grew rapidly in 1868 and 1869 to reach parity with the established white school system. The Republican governments in every state founded state colleges for freedmen, such as Alcorn State University in Mississippi. They were funded by the state governments, and were kept in operation by the states after the Republicans lost control of state governments in the 1872-1877 period.
To educate elementary school teachers the states and cities also created "normal schools" as part of the new high schools. They produced generations of teachers who were integral to the education of African American children under the segregated system. In the late 19th century, the federal government established land grant legislation to provide funding for higher education across the United States. Learning that Blacks were excluded from land grant colleges in the South, in 1890 the federal government insisted that Southern states establish Black state institutions as land grant colleges to provide for Black higher education, in order to continue to receive funds for their already established White schools. Some states classified their Black state colleges as land grant institutions. According to a 2020 study by economist Trevon Logan, increases in Black politicians led to greater tax revenue, which was put towards public education spending (and land tenancy reforms).
At the beginning of the Reconstruction era, teachers in integrated schools were predominantly white. Across the entire South Virtually all public and private schools had either an all-white or an all-black student body in the 19th century and down to the 1950s. Berea College was the major exception, but a state law in Kentucky forced it to stop enrolling blacks in 1904.
Challenges of Segregation and the Jim Crow Era
After the white Democrats regained power in Southern states in the 1870s, during the next two decades they imposed Jim Crow laws mandating segregation. They disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through poll taxes and literacy tests. Services for black schools (and any black institution) routinely received far less financial support than white schools. In addition, the South was extremely poor for years in the aftermath of the war, its infrastructure destroyed, and dependent on an agricultural economy despite falling cotton prices.
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The Tilden-Hayes compromise was enacted in 1877 between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford Hayes, which mainly meant a final withdrawal of the federal troops from the disputed southern states. The Virginia Constitution of 1870 mandated a system of public education for the first time, but the newly established schools were operated on a segregated basis. In these early schools, which were mostly rural, as was characteristic of the South, classes were most often taught by a single teacher, who taught all subjects, ages, and grades.
Chronic underfunding led to constantly over-populated schools, despite the relatively low percentage of African-American students in schools overall. In 1900, the average black school in Virginia had 37 percent more pupils in attendance than the average white school. Continuing to see education as the primary route of advancement and critical for the race, many talented blacks went into teaching, which had high respect as a profession. Segregated schools for blacks were underfunded in the South and ran on shortened schedules in rural areas. Despite segregation, in Washington, DC by contrast, as Federal employees, black and white teachers were paid on the same scale. Education was one of the major achievements of the black community in the 19th century.
Blacks in Reconstruction governments had supported the establishment of public education in every Southern state. Despite the difficulties, with the enormous eagerness of freedmen for education, by 1900 the African-American community had trained and put to work 30,000 African-American teachers in the South. In addition, a majority of the black population had achieved literacy. Northern alliances had helped fund normal schools and colleges to teach African-American teachers, as well as create other professional classes. The American Missionary Association, supported largely by the Congregational and Presbyterian churches, had helped fund and staff numerous private schools and colleges in the South, who collaborated with black communities to train generations of teachers and other leaders.
In 1862, the Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established federal funding of a land grant college in each state, but 17 states refused to admit black students to their land grant colleges. In response, Congress enacted the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states that excluded blacks from their existing land grant colleges to open separate institutions and to equitably divide the funds between the schools. The colleges founded in response to the second Morill Act became today's public historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and, together with the private HBCUs and the unsegregated colleges in the North and West, provided higher educational opportunities to African Americans.
In the 19th century, blacks formed fraternal organizations across the South and the North, including an increasing number of women's clubs. They created and supported institutions that increased education, health and welfare for black communities. After the turn of the 20th century, black men and women also began to found their own college fraternities and sororities to create additional networks for lifelong service and collaboration. Julius Rosenwald was a philanthropist who owned Sears, Roebuck, and Company. He was responsible for establishing the Rosenwald Fund.
Freedmen's Bureau Reconstruction | Daily Bellringer
A black school in South Boston, Virginia, in the 1920s or 1930s
Legal Challenges and the Civil Rights Movement
The case of Sarah Roberts vs the City of Boston is a case about a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts and her parents, who tried to send her to a nearby, predominantly white school during the Jim Crow era of segregation in the United States. She was denied admission, however, based on her race as an African American girl, marking an early effort to challenge racial segregation through the education system. The Sarah vs City of Boston case likewise laid the groundwork for many future racial challenges for equal opportunity, especially in education. Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled against the Roberts family, the hearing ultimately highlighted the injustice of segregation in the United States Education System. Additionally, the ideas from this challenge were known to herald the well-known 1954 Brown vs.
In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a national campaign to achieve equal schools within the "separate but equal" framework of the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. White hostility towards this campaign kept black schools from necessary resources. According to Rethinking Schools magazine, "Over the first three decades of the 20th century, the funding gap between black and white schools in the South increasingly widened.
Septima Clark was an American educator, civil rights activist, and the creator of citizenship schools in 1957. Clark's project initially developed from secret literacy courses she held for African American adults in the Deep South. Citizenship schools helped black southerners push for the right to vote, as well as create activists and leaders for the Civil Rights Movement, using a curriculum that instilled self-pride, cultural pride, literacy, and a sense of one's citizenship rights. An activist of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964, Charles Cobb, proposed that the organization sponsor a network of Freedom Schools. Originally, Freedom Schools were organized to achieve social, political, and economic equalit...
Supreme Court ruling from Brown v. Board of Education, which finally struck down racial segregation in schools and effectively ended the “separate but equal doctrine” of the Jim Crow era. After her parents tried to enroll her into Sumner Elementary School and were denied admission, her family joined 13 other families in a class action lawsuit brought to the court by the NAACP. The rest is history!
Bluford is a retired astronaut and was the first African American to travel into space in 1979. He later served as a member of the Board of Visitors for the United States Air Force Academy, advocating for more diversity and inclusion in the military and higher education. “I felt an awesome responsibility, and I took the responsibility very seriously, of being a role model and opening another door to Black Americans, but the important thing is not that I am Black, but that I did a good job as a scientist and an astronaut. There will be Black astronauts flying in later missions … and they, too, will be people who excel, not simply who are Black . . . Astronaut Guion S.
Futrell is a former educator and union leader who served as the president of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the United States. During her tenure, she worked to promote equal educational opportunities for all students and address discrimination and inequality issues in the education system, particularly for women and students of color. “You stay positive by believing in yourself. You don’t let somebody tell you that you can’t learn and that you should stay back just because of your situation. You can change your situation, and I think our children need more encouragement. They need more inspiration. They need to believe in themselves and to value themselves.
When our founders were developing the OneGoal classroom model, they took inspiration from the legacy left by the College Preparation & Placement Program at Ada S. McKinley Community Center, pioneered by the late Silas Purnell. For 35 years, students came by word of mouth to his office in the Dearborn Homes housing development basement in Chicago, looking for a better future. Silas convinced college administrators to grant scholarships to promising young people who didn’t quite fit the standard college admissions profile. Silas and his supporters would string together funds to help students purchase books, clothes, plane tickets - whatever was needed to eliminate the financial barriers of college enrollment. This grassroots effort is believed to have been the largest college placement program in the US at points during Salis’ tenure. The spirit of this early college access program is part of the OneGoal DNA.
The Rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
Before the Civil War, when the majority of African Americans in the United States were enslaved, educational opportunities for African Americans in the South were virtually non-existent, particularly for higher education. Those like Frederick Douglass who did pursue an education in spite of it being illegal for him to do so --were forced to study informally and often on their own. In 1837, a group of Philadelphia Quakers concerned that African Americans in the North were having a difficult time competing for jobs against the influx of immigrants, created the Institute for Colored Youth. It was the first institution of higher learning for African Americans.
The next crucial moment for African American higher education came in the years between the Civil War and World War I when the nation made a commitment to university studies across the country, predominately due to the government’s “land-grants” to help states form colleges and universities. This left the African American community to spearhead their own movement toward higher education. With the support of the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Bureau, seven black colleges had been founded by 1870. Over the past 150 years, there have been many notable moments in the evolution of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
On one side was Booker T. Washington, a freed slave from Virginia who had taken the helm of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, now Tuskegee University. Farther north, W.E.B. DuBois had a very different view. DuBois was raised in Massachusetts and wasn’t exposed to segregation until he was an undergraduate at Fisk University in Nashville. He believed African Americans needed to look beyond vocational training.
By 1943 the struggle for funding led Dr. Fredrick D. Patterson, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to publish an open letter to the presidents of other black colleges and universities. He urged them to pool their resources and fundraising abilities and work together to help all black colleges and universities prosper. Just one year later, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) was created to solicit donations for black colleges nationwide.
Throughout the ups and downs of HBCUs, the students who have attended these institutions have thrived and gone on to influence many important fields. Thurgood Marshall, Rev. Still today, HBCUs are standouts for student achievement. While representing just three percent of the nation’s institutions of higher learning, they graduate nearly 20 percent of African Americans.
HBCUs no longer exclusively serve African Americans. Today’s institutions have a significant percentage of non-African American students, including Asian, Latino, white American and students from many foreign countries. Students attending HBCUs are immersed in a nurturing and intellectually stimulating environment that connects them with African-American history and inspires them to carry the indefatigable African American spirit forward. When African American students have many options for higher learning, HBCUs are still in high demand because of their unique educational environment and their proven record of helping African Americans achieve success.
| Institution Type | Percentage of Total US Institutions | Percentage of African American Graduates |
|---|---|---|
| HBCUs | 3% | 20% |
The first Black American student graduated from Bowdoin College in 1890. At this time, more blacks began to attend predominately white institutions at an increasing rate. Many believe that the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. of black studies programs.
