An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North

by Zoë Burkholder

Overview

An African American Dilemma offers the first social history of northern Black debates over school integration versus separation from the 1840s to the present.

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 and community empowerment.

An African American Dilemma offers a social history of these debates within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. Drawing on sources including the Black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases, it reveals that northern Black communities, urban and suburban, vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. Yet, there was never a consensus. It also highlights the chorus of dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms.

A sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, this work complicates 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, a discussion that continues to be highly charged in present-day schooling choices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190605131
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/11/2021
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	1,104,529
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Zoë Burkholder is Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University. She is the author of Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954 (OUP, 2011) and the co-author of Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Caste Abolished: Integration for Freedom, 1840-1900
Chapter Two: The Education that Is Their Due: Separation for Racial Uplift, 1900-1940
Chapter Three: A Powerful Weapon: Integration for Equality, 1940-1965
Chapter Four: Conflict in the Community: Separation for Black Power, 1966-1974
Chapter Five: An Armageddon of Righteousness: Integration for Justice, 1974-present
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

06/14/2021

Montclair State University education professor Burkholder (Color in the Classroom) delivers an eye-opening history of school integration in the North from the 1840s to the present-day. Focusing on debates within the African American community over the benefits of integration versus separate, Black-controlled schools, Burkholder details how efforts by Blacks in the antebellum North to gain access to public schools “morphed into a state-sponsored system of racially segregated and unequal education,” leading Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists to view school integration as essential to their movement. However, amid rising racial tensions sparked by the influx of freed people to Northern cities after the Civil War, Black educational leaders including Cincinnati’s Peter H. Clark argued that integrated schools, which were typically controlled by white officials, lacked compassion for Black students and made it difficult for Black teachers to find work. Drawing sympathetic portraits of Black activists on both sides of the issue as it unfolded through the ensuing decades, Burkholder delves into the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, white flight, opposition to school busing, the introduction of Afrocentric curricula by “community control” activists in the 1960s, and the rise of charter schools. This fine-grained survey adds crucial perspective to a long-simmering social issue. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"An essential account of the complex and often troubling history of America's implementation of meaningful school integration strategies.... Particularly impressive is Burkholder's use of a broad...body of evidence....Here we see the activists who confronted established power firsthand. The many parental discussions, confrontations, frustrations, and disappointments give this book a very human face.... Burkholder does not shy from confronting the numerous obstacles still in the way of the ultimate goal of nondiscriminatory quality educational integration reform. The author also addresses new reform models that achieve less-than-perfect integration ends in the face of daunting geographical, social, and economic demographics." — Theodore W. Eversole, Journal of American History

"A much-needed comprehensive history of the North that covers the 1840s to the present, adding important periodization to this history.... This study is timely, extensive, and a major contribution to the history of African American education....Zoë Burkholder should be commended for writing such a superb book. An African American Dilemma has strong use of social science and legal research...Painstakingly researched, Burkholder seems to have left few stones unturned....She manages the varying viewpoints of white conservatives, moderates, and liberals as well as Black nationalists, integrationists, moderates, civil rights leaders, and Black power advocates. Burkholder also simplifies a complex history with excellent writing, representative vignettes, and amplified voices of scholars, leaders, teachers, parents, and students." — Dionne Danns, History of Education Quarterly

"From the first page...Zoë Burkholder challenges readers' assumptions about segregated Black schools in the United States.... Burkholder offers stories about critics, advocates, successes, and failures of both ideas, encouraging the reader to understand that different contexts and schooling experiences might lead people to different conclusions about what is the best to achieve quality education for Black children....I recommend An African American Dilemma to any reader who wants to nuance their understanding of the history of debates around integration beyond the most common narratives about the civil rights movement in the South. Burkholder writes with a pleasant narrative voice, peppering the chapters with strong imagery and diverse characters that make this book easy to read." — Alyssa Napier, Harvard Educational Review

"A very important history of the United States with schools-and ideas about schooling and democracy-at its center.... Burkholder analyzes more than one hundred and eighty years of debates about education with deep understanding and remarkable clarity of expression....I am...deeply impressed by Burkholder's argument that, in the end the fractious debate and determined activism over time have actually resulted in a stronger understanding of what education is, and the factors which facilitate its creation, transmission and retention.... All of us owe a debt not only to Zoë Burkholder for her excellent book, but to the educational activists who stayed with it-and have often succeeded." — Ben Keppel, Journal of Social History

"In this sweeping history, Professor Burkholder synthesises many local studies to give a national view of the struggles surrounding integration versus separation among Black educational activists.... Through this exhaustively researched and beautifully written book we learn that public schools have been 'spectacular and important sites of northern civil rights activism'...and that white communities consistently opposed Black educational equality, in the northern as well as the southern United States. Burkholder shows definitively that integration was not the only goal for African American educational activists and concludes that education reform must draw on notions of both integration and separate, Black-controlled schools. In taking this position...this book offers both lessons and caveats for those looking towards the future." — Christine Woyshner, History of Education

"With stunning precision, Zoë Burkholder portrays the long struggle of African Americans for equal education in the northern states—from their fight against systemic racial disparities in the 1840s to the racial disparities in public schools in the twenty-first century. Her impressive research reveals equality to mean far more than the Janus-faced goal of integrated schools versus separate, black-controlled schools. Burkholder situates the promise and pitfalls of each within the complex and changing contexts of specific urban school systems, judicial decisions, as well as ideological and policy debates at various critical moments. Her brilliant insights into public education's unfolding, yet still unresolved dilemma for African Americans make this book an especially cogent read for our present time." — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Harvard University

"A much needed, sweeping new history of the high-stakes, fiercely fought debates that have informed African American attempts to dismantle unequal and segregated schools. Burkholder brings our understanding of the many, disparate attempts to attain educational justice—across time and in a vast range of locales in the North—into a coherent narrative. Black leaders and parents fought relentlessly against educational injustice and amongst themselves over the question of whether Black controlled 'separate' or desegregated schools were the answer to endemic racism in education. Often they tacked between two, creatively responding to ever shifting political winds. An African American Dilemma keeps the urgent question of education itself and the lived experience of those who were too often denied it at its center. An impressive achievement." — Rachel Devlin, author of A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools

"In her important new book Zoë Burkholder follows the fierce debates over school segregation that have long cut through northern African-American communities. She takes us into Boston's antebellum battles over its Common Schools, Philadelphia's early twentieth century descent into segregation, New Rochelle's transformation into 'The Little Rock of the North,' the bitter clash between Newark's nascent Black political class and its largely-white teachers' union, and Hartford's extensive efforts to lure white suburbanites back to its schools. An African-American Dilemma is a thorough, thoughtful history of one of the American dilemma's most enduring issues." — Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age

'Burkholder delivers an eye-opening history of school integration in the North from the 1840s to the present-day...This fine-grained survey adds crucial perspective to a long-simmering social issue." —Publishers Weekly

"Zoe Burkholder has produced a book that should be widely read, discussed, and considered by educationalists who often live in the moment without regard to the legacy of historical struggle African Americans, and other people of color, have endured." —Teachers College Record

"Burkholder has made a riveting contribution to the literature on Black education, civil rights and Jim Crow's geography. It offers a deep assessment of past reform efforts while also contextualising today's ongoing racial landscapes of public education. In doing so, Burkholder challenges triumphalist narratives of the civil rights movement and illustrates the need for interrogating and rethinking markers of the movement's beginning and its end." — Francis V. Gourrier, Jr., English Historical Review

"A masterful study of school integration and Civil Rights in the North which breaks new ground on a very challenging topic in American life and culture...Burkholder's work...offer[s] a very unique argument that does something rare in scholarship on school desegregation, which is to discuss it as a dilemma between the presumed ideals of larger societal integration, and the somewhat lesser known ideal of racial separation...One begins to understand by reading this incredibly well-researched study, the true nature of some of the many major barriers to school desegregation in the North...The author carries that forward into the 1990s and early 2000s...offering a model for school districts...still sorely in need of paradigms for successful examples of school integration." — Zebulon Vance Miletsky, History: Reviews of New Books

"Burkholder joins emerging scholarship that complicates the long-reigning integrationist framework in civil rights history. The author demonstrates that the road to Brown and the ongoing battles over segregation did not follow a linear path. African Americans remained divided over routes to achieve educational equality...An important book...[that] will provide scholars and readers with new ways to think about civil rights and Black educational history. Relying on geographically diverse sources that reflect over two centuries of debate, it is exhaustive in its approach." — Tikia K. Hamilton, American Historical Review

"Burkholder's text does crucial work in making clear that school integration was not a universal goal in the long Black Freedom Struggle in the North. Black advocates of separate schools were both responding to the reality of White hostility in the United States and building cultural and social landmarks in the Black community. The book is also a cautionary tale about the elusive nature of racial equity in American education." — Anthony C. Siracusa, Journal of African American History

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