"Integrated Out of Existence": Black Debates Over School Integration in New Jersey, 1941–1955

• In Event: 61.034 - Analyzing the Arc: What History Teaches Us About Civil Rights and Educational Justice

Abstract

Objectives
This is a social history of northern black debates over school integration through a case study of the Bordentown Manual and Industrial Training School for Colored Youth in New Jersey from 1941-1955.
Theoretical Framework
Racial integration in American schools remains an enigma. When placed into the typical timeframe of civil rights history—from Brown v Board of Education in 1954 to the Voting Rights Act in 1965—school integration provides a distinct story line with important lessons and a happy ending. According to the dominant narrative, while a handful of unscrupulous white politicians cultivated massive resistance to school desegregation, brave black school children triumphed and schools were desegregated. School integration after 1965, however, takes on more somber tones. Lingering images of violent white protests against “forced bussing” and the rapid re-segregation of American schools has led policymakers to conclude that we tried integration once, but that it did not work.
This narrative, while compelling, makes for poor history. It is overly simplistic and flattens out our ability to understand the complexities of school integration and its relationship to civil rights. “Integrated Out of Existence” builds on recent scholarship in civil rights and educational history to analyze the problem of school integration from a new perspective, that of African Americans in the North.
Methods and Data
This study analyzes primary historical texts including the black press, published and unpublished papers of black scholars, social science research on urban black communities, NAACP and Urban League Papers, New Jersey Commissioner of Education Papers including hearings over the closing of the Bordentown School, and the archival papers of the Bordentown School.
Results and Significance
According to Kevin Gaines, scholars must “comprehend the difference between integration as the demise of separate black institutions and desegregation, the overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation defined by the exclusion of black people to access to power, wealth, education, status and dignity.” The debate over Bordentown School within the black community helps us understand the complexities of school desegregation in the North. In 1941 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a school desegregation campaign throughout the North that included criticism of Bordentown School for its outdated curriculum of “manual and industrial” training. Supporters countered that Bordentown School served as a visionary nexus of racial uplift that offered practical training and community development. This debate raged until 1955 when Governor Meyner declared, “the institution is a segregated school,” and closed it in the wake of the Brown decision. Black leaders protested, “an institution with a tradition for service such as is true of Tuskegee could hardly be expected to be integrated out of existence,” but to little avail. The contours of this debate, as well as how it fits into the larger political and intellectual projects of racial justice, allow us to glean critical new insights into how African Americans have viewed public education as central to black freedom struggle and how school desegregation has played a distinct, but evolving, role in this effort.

Author

• Zoe Burkholder, Montclair State University