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Desegregation and the Quality of Education
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19059 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,805 Words |
| Author
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John Sibley Butler
John Sibley Butler holds the Dllas TACA Centennial
Professorship in Liberal Arts (Sociology) at the University of
Texas at Austin. He is the author of the forthcoming book
Entrepreneurship and Self-Help Among Black Americans (State
University of New York Press, 1991). |
At this time there is a school desegregation case before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the desegregation of public schools in Oklahoma City. This serves notice that the subject of education and race is still an open book.
Even before the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka court battle of 1954, blacks had begun a legal battle to end school segregation in America and reverse the "separate but equal" statute established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. A walk through any legal library reminds us that the fight for integration, especially in education, has taken a tremendous amount of time; at times, it has dominated the legal system.
As the Supreme Court contemplates the desegregation decision for Oklahoma City, it is a good time to reflect on, and raise questions about, the relationship between desegregation and quality education in America. This means looking at the evolution of values put on education by race and region. It also means looking past all of the stereotypes about race and education that have developed over the years and instead concentrating on actual data. Finally, it means examining the options that some black Americans have taken over the years to ensure the education of their children. When we begin to raise these issues, we can have a more realistic picture of the procedures to concentrate on if black Americans are to continue their movement toward educational excellence.
Thomas Jefferson was the first American leader to appreciate the relationship between popular education and a free society. Jefferson believed that the prosperity and general future of the state of Virginia was dependent upon a well-informed segment of the population. But conversely, Jefferson also believed that the prosperity of the state depended on withholding knowledge from the slaves of Virginia. By 1835, southern states had adopted this platform, making it a crime to teach enslaved children.
Given the great effort by states to restrict slaves' education, perhaps it is not surprising that at the dawn of freedom blacks' first request was to satisfy their thirst for knowledge, with an emphasis on literature and culture for their children.
As noted by James D. Anderson in The Education of Blacks in the South: 1860-1935, a slave said that "there is one sin that slavery committed against me which I will never forgive. It robbed me of my education." Anderson also stated that ex-slaves "rushed not to the grog-shop but to
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