Broadening the Definition of the American High School: Rural Black Secondary Schools in North Carolina, 1925–1950

• In Event: Race, Place, and Genealogies of Empowerment

Abstract

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, officials at North Carolina’s Division of Negro Education waged a campaign to standardize and rapidly expand rural Black high schools. This paper focuses on the limits of that state campaign, and, in the process, provides a picture of the enduring diversity of the American high school in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the state’s best efforts, the forces of consolidation and standardization were often stymied by county-level school boards’ investment in white supremacy and, in this context, economic and geographical factors that influenced rural Black life. By centering the experiences of predominantly rural, Black institutions in the South, this paper broadens how historians typically portray the development of the American high school.

Authors

• Amato Nocera, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Kyle P. Steele, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh
  Presenting Author

• John Hensley, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author