Resolution
1954 Decision |
Illinois Commission on the 50th Anniversary The Social Landscape/Context of the Brown v. Board Decision: In Pursuit of Equality |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The social landscape from which the Brown v. Board decision emerged was defined during the antebellum period in American history. This fact is based on the sociological premise that the conditions of arrival determine the trajectory of a racial or ethnic groups transition into and experiences in a given society [Blauner, 1972]. Specifically, these theories identify the profound impact of a non-native groups’ status upon arrival into a country, on the possibilities for mobility and future changes in status. In this paradigm, arrival as an enslaved person imposes a distinctly different set of possibilities compared to arrival as a immigrant. Africans arrived on American shores enslaved as chattel. This period of chattel slavery, imposed by the British, defined chattel as “living beings that are considered property [Farley and Allen, 1987].” This status of humans as property implicitly defined the American social landscape as a closed society, one wherein status is only accessible by birth with no possibility of movement up or down regardless to life achievements [Kornblum, 1991]. Since the initial nature and quality of relationships between the enslaved Africans and whites defined status as a function of physiognomy or physical characteristics, the lines that clarified the entitlements of each individual were clearly drawn. Thus, even in the period following emancipation, black status remained the lowest in the social hierarchy. The period following the Civil War and emancipation, referred to as the postbellum period, did little more than eliminate the legal underpinnings of the chattel slave system. However, the customs, values and beliefs of more than two centuries of black enslavement and presumed inferiority were already deeply and irrevocably entrenched in the American psyche and moral code. The tradition of struggle and fighting for freedom through insurrection, protest and escape that characterized black activity throughout the period of enslavement continued after emancipation [Aptheker, 1943]. However, in the period following emancipation, the struggle became one of blacks fighting for the rights that theoretically accompany citizenship. Thus, a primary goal of blacks struggle for freedom, now a struggle for full citizenship, became the infiltration of systems - social, educational, political, etc. The privilege and respect that blacks afforded the most articulate members of their enslaved and free communities, was an early indicator of the value that blacks placed on education. Still another indicator of that value was the proliferation and success of black colleges and universities most of which were located in the former slave states, the southeastern agricultural region, wherein many of the newly freed men and women were still located. Although many black colleges were initiated with private support from northern white liberals, northern mission society support, and the Freedman’s Bureau, it was blacks immediate demand for education, at emancipation, that facilitated the success that these institutions realized [ Anderson , 1988]. Indeed, the enrollment and graduation rates from these segregated learning environments was an exceptional indicator in the belief among blacks that education would be the true key to freedom in America. Ironically, “in 1863, the enslaved Americans were emancipated … at the very moment that public educational systems were being developed into their modern form. For a brief period during the 1860s and 1870s, as free laborers citizens, and voters, the ex-slaves entered into a new social system of capitalism, Republican government and wage labor. Their campaign for first class citizenship, however, was successfully undermined by federal and state governments and by extralegal organizations and tactics. Soon after the 1870’s blacks were ruthlessly disenfranchised; their civil and political subordination was fixed in southern law, and they were trapped by statutes and social customs in an agricultural economy that rested heavily on coercive control and allocation of labor. From the end of reconstruction until the late 1960’s, black southerners existed in a social system that virtually denied them citizenship, the right to vote, and the voluntary control of their labor power. They remained an oppressed people. Black education developed within this context of political and economic oppression. Hence, although black southerners were formally free during the time when American popular education was transformed into a highly formal and critical social institution, their schooling took a different path [ Anderson , 1988].” Although tax-supported compulsory public education for children began in 1827 and spread throughout the northeast and old northwest during the 1830’s, education was racially segregated between 1820 and 1860. During the 1850’s there were a few integrated public schools such as some in Cleveland, Ohio, but the trend suggests that as soon as twenty or more African American children appeared in a district, white parents demanded that black children attend separate schools. White parents advanced the notions that black children “lacked mental capacity and lowered the quality of education.” In addition, they feared that allowing black children to attend would encourage more black people to live in the district [Hine, et.al, 2003]. Thus, African American leaders and white abolitionists began to establish private schools for black children. These include: the African Free Schools begun in 1787 by the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and in 1798 the African School established by Prince Hall in Boston [Hine, et.al. 2003 and Anderson , 1988]. Throughout the nineteenth century – the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Plessy vs. Ferguson - the black presence loomed large on the American political, social and economic landscape. From slavery as the cause of the Civil War [Hine, et.al], through black emancipation as a primary cause for secession, through the upheaval created by the radical Republican imposition of policies during Reconstruction that “brought black men into the political system as voters and office holders [Hine, 277],” through to the Jim Crow era that reinforced white power and domination after the period of enslavement, all the way through to 1891 and the Plessy vs. Ferguson case that upheld a “separate but equal,” doctrine. Each of these major national events that occurred during the nineteenth century had race, more specifically the relationship between blacks and whites in America , at their core. This tumultuous period laid the political, legal, social and economic groundwork for the Brown v. Board of Education, eighty none years after the emancipation proclamation and sixty three years after Plessy. Within this time frame, the American psyche on race was firmly established and the schism between blacks and whites was writ indelibly on the minds and hearts.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Illinois Commission on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education Contact: Executive Director Ollie McLemore |