"Intruders Within the Sacred Portals of Knowledge": Northern Racism During the Common School Era

• In Event: Politics, Ideology, and the Creation of School Systems in the 19th Century

Abstract

This paper interrogates the centrality of racism in developing common schools, arguing the pervasiveness of race and racism was embedded in the foundations of mass public education. Moreover, the pervasiveness of racism demonstrated how Black struggles for educational access in the North defined a major feature about common, public education: that it was raced white. White hostility and opposition to Black education that permeated debates on mass public education in the North, demonstrating that anti-Black sentiment was not proprietary to the South. As such, this paper challenges narratives of Southern exceptionalism that positioned Northern states as separate from the institution of slavery and white opposition to and hostility toward Black education as a southern phenomenon.

Author

• Tonya Kneff-Chang, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor