An African American Dilemma

Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet school integration was not the only—or even always the dominant—civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. However, there was never a consensus, so the dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms are also highlighted here. Presenting a sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, the book broadens our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the Black civil rights movement. The book draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases.

Introduction

In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal famously identified the “American Dilemma,” an inherent tension between widespread faith in equal opportunity on one hand and discrimination against African Americans on the other. This book traces a similar phenomenon in northern public schools, which promised an equal education for all and then consigned Black children to second-class facilities. This paradox generated the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separate, Black-controlled schools in a legally desegregated system would more effectively advance the Black freedom struggle. This book offers a social history of northern Black debates over school integration in the North. It chronicles an extraordinary range of Black educational activism in the North stretching from the common school era to the present, and analyzes how this work—much of it carried out by women and youth—inspired the larger civil rights movement and created substantially more equal public schools.