Memories of Schools as Sites of Promise, Pain and Protest: African American Education During the Civil Rights and Desegregation Era, 1954-1990

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel examines how African American schools are important sites of memory in the ongoing civil rights struggle. Black educational institutions are remembered and contested in multiple ways since Reconstruction. The desegregation of elementary, secondary and postsecondary schools elicited tremendous pain as mandates for “integration” tore down institutions long embedded in the black community. At the same time, the Civil Rights and Desegregation Era promised more students academic success and access. This panel addresses the themes as promise, pain, and protest across the nation by examining sites of educational discord at secondary and postsecondary institutions, in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, and among students and administrators. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of scope, magnitude and impact that shape the memories of the struggle for a quality education. The first paper examines how young people in high school chose to strengthen all-black schools as opposed to desegregating schools in the 1950s and 1960s throughout the South. The second paper examines how chancellors and presidents responded to the influence of the southern civil rights movement on collegiate campuses in the Midwest and Northeast during the early 1960s, often by ignoring local racial concerns by discussing racism as a southern issue. The third and final paper examines the multitude of experiences with desegregation during the late 1980s among students in Chicago as desegregation gave some students better options as it perpetuated inequality for others.

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Derrick P. Alridge, University of Virginia

Individual Presentations

• The Limits of School Choice in Desegregated Chicago High Schools - Dionne Danns, University of Indiana

• The Chancellors’ Response: Northern Higher Education and Race in the 1960s - Eddie Cole, College of William and Mary

• Learning to Protest: The High School Education of the Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1965 - Jon Hale, College of Charleston

Commentator

• ASALH Audience, .