The Ballot or the Book? Radical Black Abolitionists and the Battle for Northern School Integration

• In Event: 69.025 - "Caste Abolished": Competing Visions of Equal Educational Opportunities in the Long Struggle for Civil Rights

Abstract

Objective:
This paper investigates a network of radical black abolitionists who fought for school integration throughout the North from 1840 when blacks petitioned for school integration in Boston to 1900 when blacks in Jamaica, New York won their five year battle to integrate the public schools.
Theoretical Framework:
In 1859, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked which was more important to struggle for racial equality, the ballot or the book? His answer was the book. Douglass argued that equal, integrated access to newly formed public schools should take precedence over the struggle to secure black suffrage. He reasoned, “There are 13,675 colored men above 21 years of age in the State of New York, while there are 15,778 colored children of school-going age. Contact on equal terms is the best means to abolish caste: it is caste abolished.” Black abolitionists believed that integrated schools would reduce white prejudice and demonstrate black intellectual equality, while also equalizing educational opportunities. However, their efforts were imperiled not only by white segregationists who opposed “racial mixing,”, but also by black parents who preferred separate, black-controlled schools. Building on recent scholarship in the civil rights movement in the North, this study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between school integration, political power, and social justice in the long black freedom struggle.
Data and Methods:
This social history analyzes primary historical documents written by black parents, teachers, newspaper reporters, and civil rights activists in the North between 1840 and 1890. Of special importance is the black and abolitionist presses, school board reports, petitions from parents, and court cases. These documents are situated into the rich secondary scholarship on the history of black educational activism and school desegregation.
Results:
This study reveals that although there was a vigorous debate within the northern black community over school integration versus separation, the majority of northern blacks supported school integration during this era. Importantly, this support was fragile and tentative, and did not always survive in specific contexts where anti-black violence flared. As race relations deteriorated at the end of the 19th century, northern black support for separate, black-controlled schools grew and would come to dominate northern black political protest by the opening of the 20th century.
Scholarly Significance:
This study seeks to revitalize our historical understanding of school integration and enable scholars, activists, and community members to take an informed stance on political debates about school integration and black educational achievement in the present. Meaningful school integration requires a frank reckoning with how institutionalized racism has a long and disturbing history of harming the educational achievement of black students. Placing the debate over school integration into historical context in the North helps us to see how and why many black Americans have embraced school integration as a key strategy to advance educational equality, and also how and why many black activists have hesitated to send black youth into white-dominated institutions and advocated instead for separate, black-controlled schools.

Author

• Zoe Burkholder, Montclair State University