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SEGREGATION IN THE SCHOOLS

Segregation

Segregation in education meant separating black and white schoolchildren from one another, forcing them to attend black-or white-only schools. A national issue, segregation was most prominent in the South, where it was enforced by law and where it fit into a broader pattern of social segregation and political oppression of African Americans known as Jim Crow. The Jim Crow school system was patently unfair to the educational aspirations of millions of southern blacks. In many cases no institution of high training would accept black students; at the primary and secondary levels, white school boards badly underfunded black-only schools, failing to provide adequate facilities, textbooks and instructional materials, or qualified teachers. In 1949, for example, Clarendon County, South Carolina, spent $179 on each white child enrolled in school but only $43 on each black student. While public education was generally in dismal condition throughout the Deep South, the conditions in black schools were often appalling. Black students generally had to make do with used textbooks and broken school furniture, hand-me-downs from better-funded white schools. Black classes were often held in dilapidated, aged buildings, with inadequate heat and light. In 1947 students at the all-black R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, took their instruction, with winter coats on for lack of heat, in overflowing class-rooms made of tar paper and plywood. Black teachers were poorly paid and often acted as teacher, principal, building janitor, and bus driver. These conditions were illegal, violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in such a way that so long as school boards maintained the pretense of providing black students an education equal to that of white students, segregation was legal in the South. By the 1940s it was an established southern custom, enforced by law, public opinion, and political compromise.

The NAACP Challenge

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization, was determined to improve the school environment of southern black children. Under the leadership of a brilliant legal scholar, Charles Houston, the NAACP organized a team of lawyers to combat Jim Crow in every part of southern life but especially in education. The NAACP reasoned that if they defeated Jim Crow in the schools, they could defeat Jim Crow in the courthouse, department store, hiring office, and voting booth. Toward this end the NAACP began a series of legal challenges to Jim Crow in the 1930s, the most important of which was Missouri ex. rei. Gaines v. Canada (1938), which forced the creation of a black law school in the state of Missouri. They would continue such suits in the 1940s.

Advances

In the 1940s many Americans began to embrace the cause of racial equality, in part because the war against the Nazis invalidated in the minds of many the doctrines of white supremacy and racial superiority. The NAACP and other civil rights leaders scored major victories with the desegregation of the defense industries (1941) and with Smith v. Allwright (1944), which abolished southern laws that excluded blacks from voting. In 1946 President Truman established a civil rights commission to investigate Jim Crow; in 1948 he desegregated the military. That same year, African Americans filed suit in Virginia, Louisiana, and Oklahoma for equalized school facilities and equal teacher pay. In 1947, following the leadership of Father Joseph E. Ritter of Saint Louis, Catholic schools in the United States desegregated. New Jersey desegregated its schools in 1948. That same year, African Americans were admitted for the first time to graduate school at the Universities of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Arkansas. In 1949 the National Interfraternity Council voted to admit blacks to college fraternities, as did the American Association of University Women. The Universities of Texas and Kentucky admitted African Americans for the first time, and Wesley A. Brown became the first black graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy to receive a commission. Although the goal of school integration still remained elusive, with southern representatives blocking a 1949 attempt to desegregate the schools of Washington, D.C., Jim Crow would, clearly, soon fall in southern schools.

Resistance and Precedent

Jim Crow politicians and educators responded to the civil rights developments of 1948 by offering African Americans half a loaf: segregated educational facilities that they promised to bring to par with those of white schools. Since many of the civil rights suits demanded access for blacks to white graduate and professional schools (as there were no comparable black institutions), in 1948 fourteen southern governors met in Savannah, Georgia, to form a nonprofit group known as the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education, The board's goal was to establish separate but equal black educational facilities wherever possible. The impossibility as well as the absurdity of this goal were soon apparent. In 1949 the board revealed that to bring southern black schools up to white standards would require $545 million—and that was for facilities alone. They furthermore went to extraordinary lengths simply to avoid black students taking classes with whites. In 1948, when Ada Lois Sipuel applied for admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School, the university responded by creating a segregated law school—at enormous expense—for her and two other blacks. A similar situation occurred that same year when Oklahoma accepted an African American candidate, G. W. McLaurin, for a doctorate of education. Rather than create a separate school for McLaurin, they allowed him to attend classes at the white university but in empty rooms adjoining the main class or behind a sheet hung to segregate him from the white students. He filed suit to end the practice. His case, decided in 1950, as well as Sweatt v. Painter (1949) set the important legal precedent that segregated education, even when equal, conferred a psychological or professional stigma of inferiority upon the student* Substantially, this was the reasoning behind the case which finally overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which stated unequivocally that "separate education is inherently unequal."