Equal Educational Opportunity and Its Critics in the Coleman Report and Black Power Eras

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

Abstract

Seven years after James S. Coleman published Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966) and eight years after President Lyndon Johnson called for not opportunity but “equality as a fact and equality as a result,” Black Panther leader and autobiographer Huey P. Newton criticized racist schools for preparing black youth “for the trash heap of society, where we would have to work long hours for low wages.” Politician and autobiographer Shirley Chisholm also described her limited labor market prospects. “I was black, and nobody needed to draw me a diagram,” she wrote on starting a teacher preparation program despite political ambitions. “No matter how well I prepared myself, society wasn’t going to give me a chance to do much of anything else.” This paper examines debates over the relationship between schooling and equality of opportunity—especially over how labor market discrimination affected ideas about schooling’s utility as a tool in the struggle for racial justice—among a divided interracial Left in the Great Society and Black Power eras. It is part of a larger history of competing twentieth century visions of the role schools can and should play in generating a fair social order, as well as the questions those discussions raised about how much and what types of equality are necessary in a just society.
Brining together American intellectual history, African American history, and the history of education, my work contributes to scholarship on American egalitarian thought; educationalization (tendencies to ask schools to address large scale social problems); critiques of American liberalism; and challenges associated with linking education, labor market, housing, and antipoverty policy. My sources include: monographs on racial injustice by African American liberals and radicals (including Urban League leader Whitney Young’s To Be Equal (1964), Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965), and Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967)); views of education’s egalitarian potential in over forty autobiographies published by African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s; and volumes on schooling and inequality by white liberals including James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966); James Conant’s Slums and Suburbs (1961), and Christopher Jencks’ Inequality (1972).
These thinkers disagreed, I conclude, on how much energy should be directed to reforming racist schools, promoting integration in schools and housing, expanding the social safety net, and bringing jobs to center cities. While some white radicals argued that schools were the wrong tool for equalizing social and economic status among adults, many African American leftists remained hopeful that the right type of antiracist schooling could provide the foundation for broader projects of racial equalization. Still, viewing the struggle for racial justice as a “war on many fronts,” many on the interracial left agreed with Whitney Young that attacking residential segregation, urban unemployment, and inadequate schooling concurrently was essential. Implementing programs based on such premises, however, proved more challenging than envisioning them.

Author

• Leah N. Gordon, Amherst College