White Philanthropy Won’t Save Black Education: Tracing an “Ordinary” Segregated School’s Life in Delaware

This essay suggests examining “ordinary,” segregated Black schools from the past helps explain persistent issues in Black education at present. To demonstrate this point, the essay focuses on the shortcomings of philanthropy in education from the 1920s to the present day in Wilmington, Delaware. It asserts for Black education to thrive, a combination of adequate resources and Black control over those resources is necessary. Utilizing School No. 5, a school heretofore undocumented in scholarship, as one specific case, the authors show how this elementary school was initially overlooked by white philanthropy, only to be pervaded with it decades later. Centrally, the authors argue in both instances, whites’ actions, either by oversight or interference, hindered the holistic quality of Black children’s education; these persistent impediments to Black education, however, transpired alongside the valiant efforts and self-determination of Black educators and Wilmington’s Black community.

Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from an Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students

Most U.S. students attend racially segregated schools. To understand this pattern, I employ a survey experiment with New York City families actively choosing schools and investigate whether they express racialized school preferences. I find school racial composition heterogeneously affects white, black, Latinx, and Asian parents’ and students’ willingness to attend schools. Independent of characteristics potentially correlated with race, white and Asian families preferred white schools over black and Latinx schools, Latinx families preferred Latinx schools over black schools, and black families preferred black schools over white schools. Results, importantly, demonstrate that racial composition has larger effects on white and Latinx parents’ preferences compared with white and Latinx students and smaller effects on black parents compared with black students. To ensure results were not an artifact of experimental conditions, I validate findings using administrative data on New York City families’ actual school choices in 2013. Both analyses establish that families express heterogenous racialized school preferences.

“I Thanked God Right Then and There”

This chapter tells the stories of the Black parents and children who challenged school segregation in the five cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first case, chosen by Thurgood Marshall to show the unequal facilities for Black and White students, came from the small town of Summerton, South Carolina, in which Black children walked to schools in former sharecroppers’ cabins while White children rode buses to schools with four times the funding of Black schools. The next case, in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, began with a strike by Black high school students to protest conditions at their overcrowded schools, where classes were held in unheated tar-paper shacks. The third case challenged segregation in the nation’s capital, led by a Black parent whose daughter was turned away from the all-White junior high nearest her home and sent to an overcrowded all-Black school. The fourth case, from New Castle County, Delaware, began when two Black mothers each protested the inferior schools their children were forced to attend. The final, and most famous, case began in Topeka, Kansas, whose four elementary schools were the only ones segregated in the state, when a father tried to enroll his nine-year-old daughter in the all-White school nearest her home rather than the Black school, a long walk and bus ride away. A federal appeals court cited the Plessy case as binding precedent but almost invited the Supreme Court to overrule it.

Conflict in the Community

Chapter 4 charts the most contested phase of Black educational activism in the North as support for Black-controlled schools expanded alongside the Black Power movement, concurrent with the growth of court-ordered school desegregation across the urban North. “Community-control” activists, like those in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, saw separation as a rational response to what they viewed as the dismal failure of school integration. They called for community control over administration, curriculum, pedagogy, and hiring in majority Black schools and called for desegregation plans to be halted. Student activists demanded Black history courses, fairer discipline and dress code policies, and more respect for Black culture. Not everyone agreed with this renewed vision of autonomous Black institution-building, especially an older generation of civil rights warriors. Although briefly appealing, community control and Afrocentric curricula did not successfully equalize public education and receded in the early 1970s.

A Powerful Weapon

Chapter 3 highlights a resurgence of northern Black support for school integration alongside the expanding civil rights movement. The outbreak of World War II created economic opportunities that drew Black migrants North in a second wave and sparked more militant civil rights activism. NAACP leaders persuaded northern Black communities to reject school segregation. By citing anti-discrimination legislation and organizing petitions and boycotts, these activists won the formal desegregation of public schools in the North between 1940 and 1954. A potent combination of civil rights activism, the decline of scientific racism, and the emergence of the Cold War pushed school integration to the forefront of national politics. Following the Brown decision, northern Blacks demanded school integration. The process was contentious, especially when districts closed Black schools and fired Black teachers. By 1965, many Black northerners expressed frustration with school integration and what they viewed as its failure to improve the quality of education for Black youth.

“I Wanted Diversity, But Not So Much”: Middle-Class White Parents, School Choice, and the Persistence of Anti-Black Stereotypes

This interview study examines the school choices of white middle class parents who live in a large Northeastern city. Interviewees identify as progressive urbanites and express an appreciation for racial diversity. Simultaneously, interviewees draw on anti-Black stereotypes when evaluating school options and avoiding majority Black schools. While previous studies suggest that diversity-seeking whites are well intentioned and inadvertently reproduce racism through school choice, my analysis allows for greater consideration of white parents’ investment in the reproduction of white racial dominance.

Whiteness Interrupted

In Whiteness Interrupted Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority-black schools in which he examines the limitations of understandings of how white racial identity is formed. Through in-depth interviews with dozens of white teachers from a racially segregated, urban school district in Upstate New York, Bell outlines how whiteness is constructed based on localized interactions and takes a different form in predominantly black spaces. He finds that in response to racial stress in a difficult teaching environment, white teachers conceptualized whiteness as a stigmatized category predicated on white victimization. When discussing race outside majority-black spaces, Bell's subjects characterized American society as postracial, in which race seldom affects outcomes. Conversely, in discussing their experiences within predominantly black spaces, they rejected the idea of white privilege, often angrily, and instead focused on what they saw as the racial privilege of blackness. Throughout, Bell underscores the significance of white victimization narratives in black spaces and their repercussions as the United States becomes a majority-minority society.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875–d. 1935) was born in New Orleans and raised there by her mother, Patricia Moore, a freedwoman of African American and Native American descent. She attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, earned a teaching degree at Straight (now Dillard) University, and taught in New Orleans’s black schools from 1892 to 1896. During those same years Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) became active in the black women’s club movement, both locally and nationally, and began publishing in black periodicals. At twenty she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of stories, sketches, poems, and essays that brought her local celebrity. Leaving the city in 1896, Dunbar-Nelson continued to dedicate herself to teaching, activism, and writing—three areas of passionate commitment that shaped the rest of her life. She taught in Boston, then in Brooklyn where she also helped the writer and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women, while finishing her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then at the height of his success. Their union advanced Alice’s literary career: she published Goodness with his press, Dodd, Mead and Company, and enjoyed positive reviews. But his fame also overshadowed her accomplishments; after her death she was remembered primarily as his wife until scholars R. Ora Williams and Akasha Hull recovered her from obscurity. Paul and Alice separated in 1902, partly because of his abuse. Nevertheless, she kept his name and, following his 1906 death, promoted his legacy with projects like her anthology, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). For the next thirty years Dunbar-Nelson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, teaching for eighteen of them at Howard High School. During this period she was briefly married to another teacher, Arthur Callis, and romantically involved with Edwina Kruse, an educator about whom she wrote an unpublished novel titled The Lofty Oak. She worked as a paid and unpaid organizer, writer, and speaker for myriad causes, including suffrage, the war effort, the peace movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), anti-lynching legislation, education reform, and electoral politics. Although she never published another book of her own work, Dunbar-Nelson was a recognized Harlem Renaissance writer whose poems, stories, plays, essays, and reviews appeared in Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, and she wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columns. In 1932 Dunbar-Nelson moved with third husband Robert Nelson to Philadelphia, where she died of heart disease in 1935.

Teachers at the Center: Place and Education Displacement in Southwest Atlanta

In Southwest Atlanta, urban education reform and gentrification have intersected to create the perfect collision of housing and educational displacement of Black students, Black families, and Black teachers. While Black communities are dealing with the impacts of gentrification, Black schools are simultaneously witnessing shifts that uproot students and their teachers. As a teacher participatory action research (PAR) collective, we share our personal experiences of housing displacement and how it has impacted our students, our communities, and our ability to maintain our positions as community-centered teachers. In this article, we acclimate readers to Atlanta, Georgia, and the Southwest Atlanta region in which we serve. We also illustrate how we have confronted the displacement of our students and ourselves. Finally, we highlight the significance of community-centered teachers operating within a Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom praxis in the struggle against systemic inequities that persistently plague our students and communities.