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Culminating Assignment with correct link - Amanda Chhour

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Racial inequality is when one race has political, economic, and social advantages over another or other races. Racial inequality infiltrates every aspect of American life, and the education system reflects this. Minorities, especially black Americans, continue to face systemic racism in schools and universities.

Racial equity is the process of eliminating obstacles and undoing the damage that policies in the past have caused. The process is meant to help people of color achieve equality by changing policies, readjusting structures, and being more inclusive in practices.

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"Racial equity is about applying justice and a little bit of common sense to a system that's been out of balance. When a system is out of balance, people of color feel the impacts most acutely, but to be clear, an imbalanced system makes all of us pay."

~ Glenn Harris, President, Race Forward and Publisher, Colorlines

Learn about racial equity, other race-related terms and concepts, and how they relate and differ to one another with the following definitions, comparisons, and examples provided in this primer. For a deeper understanding and to learn how to apply this knowledge, attend one of our trainings.
Key Terms and Concepts:
What is the difference between Racial Equity and Racial Justice?

Racial Justice is a vision and transformation of society to eliminate racial hierarchies and advance collective liberation, where Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, in particular, have the dignity, resources, power, and self-determination to fully thrive.

Racial equity is a process of eliminating racial disparities and improving outcomes for everyone. It is the intentional and continual practice of changing policies, practices, systems, and structures by prioritizing measurable change in the lives of people of color.

Distinction between Racial Equity and Racial Justice: Racial equity is the process for moving towards the vision of racial justice. Racial equity seeks measurable milestones and outcomes that can be achieved on the road to racial justice. Racial equity is necessary, but not sufficient, for racial justice.

The chart below provides definitions and distinctions between other key terms and concepts related to Race.

Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity

Inclusion

Equity and Equality

Equity

Equality

Racial Bias

Individual Racial Bias

Institutional Racial Bias

Debiasing Strategies

What are the Different Levels of Racism?

The "Different Levels of Racism" Framework is an analytical tool for unpacking different types of racism that are often interacting and operating simultaneously. It is helpful to distinguish between individual and systemic racism in order to focus needed and distinct attention, analysis, and strategies on institutional and structural racism. It points toward needed systemic change-focused strategies which address root causes and can result in more transformative and lasting change. We need to invest more in institutional and structural change strategies to get to racial justice. Strategies to address individual racism are not sufficient for dismantling structural racism.
Imagine two neighborhoods.
In one neighborhood is a family of four, the Smiths. The Smiths' neighborhood is stagnating, with abandoned homes, poor schools, and over-policing. Most of their neighbors, including themselves, are people of color.

In the adjoining neighborhood is another family of four, the Jones. The Jones' neighborhood has plenty of fresh food markets, a robust bus system, parks, health centers and good schools. Families flock there because all these services translate to economic opportunity and good health. Most of the families who live in this neighborhood, including the Jones, are White.

The racial composition of their neighborhoods did not just happen on their own. Who lives in which neighborhood and whether that neighborhood has decent housing, good schools, and well-paying jobs is determined by multiple, institutional policies and practices. Whether intentionally or not, these policies and practices have often discriminated by race, which is why we see so much difference in life outcomes based on race.

For example, in King County, Washington, there is a 10-year life expectancy difference between zip codes where residents are predominantly White and zip codes where residents are predominantly people of color.
We call this reality structural racial inequity.

Elements of Racially Equitable Organizational Change

The movement of an organization from one state to another involves many facets such as shifting power, changing policies and practices, and transforming values and culture. Race Forward and its core program, the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), uses a model of organizational change that includes four key components:

Visioning involves building shared values that move us towards a vision for racial justice.

Normalizing involves building shared understanding through ongoing conversations about the history of race, using common definitions and key concepts, such as racial equity and inequity; racial justice; structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized racism; and implicit and explicit bias, that help to center racial equity and people of color through an intersectional and inclusive framework.

Operationalizing involves building shared relationships within and across the breadth (all functions) and depth (up and down hierarchy) of organizations and sectors to shift power to advance transformative and equitable systems' change. Together, this changes the norms, practices, culture, and habits of thoughts within an organization and the outcomes produced by the organization.

Organizing to achieve racial equity, including across the breadth (all functions) and depth (up and down hierarchy) of an organization. Together this changes the norms, practices, culture, and habits of thoughts within an organization and the outcomes produced by the organization. Organizing involves building shared relationships within and across organizations and sectors to shift power to advance transformative and equitable systems' change.

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"Racial equity is about applying justice and a little bit of common sense to a system that's been out of balance. When a system is out of balance, people of color feel the impacts most acutely, but to be clear, an imbalanced system makes all of us pay."

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“A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: Desegregation.” Edited by Bethany Thomas, HUSL Library, Howard University, 2018, https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/blackrights/desegregation.
Editors, History.com. “Brown v. Board of Education.” History.com, A&amp;E Television Networks, 27 Oct. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka.
Editors, History.com. “Plessy v. Ferguson.” History.com, A&amp;E Television Networks, 29 Oct. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson.
McMillan, Shirley. “Shirley Teagle McMillan like the ... - University of Houston.” University of Houston, 2003, https://www.uh.edu/honors/Programs-Minors/honors-and-the-schools/houston-teachers-institute/curriculum-units/pdfs/2003/african-american-slavery/mcmillan-03-slavery.pdf.
Sam, Priscilla. “What Is Racial Equity?” Race Forward, 5 Oct. 2021, https://www.raceforward.org/about/what-is-racial-equity-key-concepts.
Semuels, Alana. “Segregation Is Increasing in America.” Time, Time, 21 June 2021, https://time.com/6074243/segregation-america-increasing/.
Williams, Heather Andrea. “African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.” Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2005, https://www.hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-77-issue-3/herbooknote/self-taught_325.

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The aftermath of racial segregation is still a reality that black students are living through today in the education system. Schools in low income neighborhoods tend to have lower graduation rates than schools in middle and upper class neighborhoods. Predominantly white schools have more resources and higher quality education. Black students who attend predominantly white schools are bound to face prejudice from peers and even teachers and administrators. No matter their economic status, Black students are still bound to face obstacles that are residual of segregation. Efforts must be made on all ends in order to desegregate schools, which starts with providing communities with equitable educational resources and celebrating diversity.

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The U.S. Is Increasingly Diverse, So Why Is Segregation Getting Worse?

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More than 80% of large metropolitan areas in the United States were more segregated in 2019 than in 1990, according to a new report.

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Desegregating the South meant integration of neighborhoods, schools, and other facilities. This process was gradual, as many people were against integrating, let alone desegregating, their cities.

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Desegregation

Desegregation did not happen overnight. In fact, it took years for some of the highly resistant states to get on board, and even then some had to be brought on kicking and screaming. Before the Court ever got involved with school integration, desegregation became a matter of executive focus. The wheels were put in motion by the president. In 1948, President Harry Truman issued an executive order to integrate the armed forces after WWII. After the three years if took for the army to carry out this order, they ultimately found that the earth still rotated and their weapons still worked.

Schools are what we tend to think of when we hear the word segregation. And it was schools that the Court spent a fair amount of time discussing in its opinions on desegregation. But the Court had time to issue opinions on other matters as well. For instance, the Court defended Congress in its ability to draft legislation that allowed blacks to integrate with whites in the area of employment. The Court also supported Congress's prevention of racial discrimination in facilities like restaurants. The Court even went so far as to integrate love, and ruled that states could no longer prohibit interracial relationships. The importance of the Supreme Court's willingness to uphold civil rights for blacks cannot be denied; this was not the same court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson some 70 years before.

Notable Supreme Court Cases:

Selected Library Resources:

George W. Noblit, ed., School Desegregation: Oral Histories Toward Understanding the Effects of White Domination, available as an ebook

Richard C. Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations: The Heart of Atlanta Motel and McClung Cases, KF224.H43 C67 2001

Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act, available as an ebook

Peter Wallenstein, Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry: Loving v. Virginia, KF224.L68 W35 2014

James W. Endersby and William T. Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation, KF4757 .E53 2016

Gale Archives Unbound Collections (available through Howard Libraries):

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HUSL Library: A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: Desegregation

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Desegregation Desegregation did not happen overnight. In fact, it took years for some of the highly resistant states to get on board, and even then some had to be brought on kicking and screaming. Before the Court ever got involved with school integration, desegregation became a matter of executive focus.

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With the first trial involving Oliver Brown and pervious trials involving many other plaintiffs, it was not until the fifth trial that segregation in schools was declared unconstitutional. In this case, the court ruled that segregated schools were "inherently unequal." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, appointed by president Harry S. Truman, unanimously declared in 1954 that segregation of schools violated the 14th Amendment. The court's ruling overturned the results of Plessy v. Ferguson from 1896, which stated that segregation abided by the Constitution.

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On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the "separate but equal" precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier inPlessy v. Ferguson and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement during the decade of the 1950s.

Arguments were to be heard during the next term to determine just how the ruling would be imposed. Just over one year later, on May 31, 1955, Warren read the Court's unanimous decision, now referred to as Brown II, instructing the states to begin desegregation plans "with all deliberate speed."

Despite two unanimous decisions and careful, if vague, wording, there was considerable resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In addition to the obvious disapproving segregationists were some constitutional scholars who felt that the decision went against legal tradition by relying heavily on data supplied by social scientists rather than precedent or established law. Supporters of judicial restraint believed the Court had overstepped its constitutional powers by essentially writing new law.

However, minority groups and members of the civil rights movement were buoyed by the Brown decision even without specific directions for implementation. Proponents of judicial activism believed the Supreme Court had appropriately used its position to adapt the basis of the Constitution to address new problems in new times. The Warren Court stayed this course for the next 15 years, deciding cases that significantly affected not only race relations, but also the administration of criminal justice, the operation of the political process, and the separation of church and state.

For more information, visit the National Archives' Digital Classroom Teaching With Documents Lesson Plan: Documents Related to Brown v. Board of Education.

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On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.

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There were five trials under the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Oliver Brown claimed that black schools were not equal to white schools.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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Plessy v. Ferguson was a Supreme Court ruling in 1896 that led to the segregation of black and white people, declaring that keeping facilities separate-but-equal was constitutional. Homer Plessy was a black man who was arrested and jailed for taking a vacant seat in a white-only train car. Plessy filed a petition against Judge John H. Ferguson, claiming that his verdict violated the 14th Amendment.

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context

After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.

Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.

As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and Black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for "Negro" or "colored" passengers.

Florida became the first state to mandate segregated railroad cars in 1887, followed in quick succession by Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and other states by the end of the century.

Black Resistance to Segregation

As Southern Black people witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the Black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance.

At the heart of the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson was a law passed in Louisiana in 1890 "providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races." It stipulated that all passenger railways had to provide these separate cars, which should be equal in facilities.

Homer Adolph Plessy, who agreed to be the plaintiff in the case aimed at testing the law's constitutionality, was of mixed race; he described himself as "seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood."

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a ticket on a train from New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a vacant seat in a whites-only car. After refusing to leave the car at the conductor's insistence, he was arrested and jailed.

Convicted by a New Orleans court of violating the 1890 law, Plessy filed a petition against the presiding judge, Hon. John H. Ferguson, claiming that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

Over the next few years, segregation and Black disenfranchisement picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. Congress defeated a bill that would have given federal protection to elections in 1892, and nullified a number of Reconstruction laws on the books.

Then, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson. In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not "social rights" (sitting in the railroad car of your choice).

In its ruling, the Court denied that segregated railroad cars for Black people were necessarily inferior. "We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy's] argument," Justice Henry Brown wrote, "to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

John Marshall Harlan's Dissent

Alone in the minority was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky. Harlan had opposed emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves during the Reconstruction era-but changed his position due to his outrage over the actions of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Harlan argued in his dissent that segregation ran counter to the constitutional principle of equality under the law: "The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution," he wrote. "It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."

Plessy v. Ferguson Significance

The Plessy v. Ferguson verdict enshrined the doctrine of "separate but equal" as a constitutional justification for segregation, ensuring the survival of the Jim Crow South for the next half-century.

Intrastate railroads were among many segregated public facilities the verdict sanctioned; others included buses, hotels, theaters, swimming pools and schools. By the time of the 1899 case Cummings v. Board of Education, even Harlan appeared to agree that segregated public schools did not violate the Constitution.

It would not be until the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the majority of the Supreme Court would essentially concur with Harlan's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson..

Writing the majority opinion in that 1954 case, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" in public education, calling segregated schools "inherently unequal," and declaring that the plaintiffs in the Brown case were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Sources

C. Vann Woodward, " Plessy v. Ferguson: The Birth of Jim Crow," American Heritage (Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964).
Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court - The First Hundred Years.
Louis Menand, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Limits of Law," The New Yorker (February 12, 2001).
Today in History - May 18: Plessy v. Ferguson, Library of Congress.

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate But Equal Doctrine | HISTORY

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Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.

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After the Civil War, a series of amendments were passed that gave African-Americans more rights. The 13th Amendment banned slavery except for reason of punishment. The 14th Amendment declared that anyone born on American soil or legally acquired citizenship is protected by the rights of the Constitution. The 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote. Black people began building their own schools and creating their own curriculums. Education became a priority to the African-American community as the movement towards economic, political, and social equality began to gain momentum. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois were iconic figures at the time as advocating for education of African-Americans was controversial.

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In Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, Heather Andrea Williams meticulously chronicles African Americans' quest for education. Focused specifically on the struggle that began in the antebellum period and continued through Reconstruction, Williams's analysis is punctuated with rich anecdotes of ordinary African Americans' personal and collective fight for education.

Most White Southern slaveholders were adamantly opposed to the education of their slaves because they feared an educated slave population would threaten their authority. Williams documents a series of statutes that criminalized any person who taught slaves or supported their efforts to teach themselves. One statute in particular, passed in North Carolina in 1830, articulated that "any free person, who shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within this State to read or write, the use of figures excepted, or shall give or sell to such slave or slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable to indictment in any court of record in this State." The statute was enacted because of a fear that if slaves became literate they would also become critical of their slave status and eventually rebel.

Slaves who attempted to educate themselves, if caught, suffered physical and psychological consequences. Nonetheless, even under the strict limitations of slavery, slaves still developed ingenious strategies to become literate. Williams tells the story of slaves who received their instruction in "pit schools," so named as such because they were "pit[s] in the ground way out in the woods away from the master's surveillance." She also writes about slaves who "hid spelling books under their hats to be ready whenever they could entreat or bribe a literate person to teach them." During the Civil War - a time when the fate of the institution of slavery was yet undetermined - African Americans' desire to learn continued to burn. Williams tells of some Black soldiers studying their lessons during their lunch breaks and grasping at every opportunity to advance their education. She found that "during the transition from slavery to freedom, many African Americans simultaneously attempted to satisfy material needs with intellectual longing." She presents detailed evidence of African Americans simultaneously clamoring for their education and their freedom.

Upon emancipation, White southerners' fear of an educated Black population did not dissipate; they used violence and arson to prevent attempts to educate the freed slaves. Yet, in spite of the danger and meager resources, many Black freed slaves constructed and operated their own schools. Williams discusses how students would ask for longer class days and shorter vacations in order to maximize their instructional time. They would walk miles from their homes to the nearest school, some "barefoot, wearing torn, ragged clothing." Parents who could not attend schools themselves encouraged their children to learn as much as possible. These independent African American schools, Willliams argues, served as "the central point of an educational sphere, as students as taught became teachers at home."

Black educators were integral to advancing the literacy campaign. "With so much invested in the empowering potential of education," Williams discovered that "freedpeople identified teaching as a critical job for building self-sufficient communities and called both men and women into service." Various documents and narratives attest to the pedagogical conflict between Northern White missionaries and local African American community leaders and parents, who "sometimes had conflicting answers to the critical question of who would direct hiring and who would make pedagogical decisions in freed slaves' schools." To illustrate this point, Williams offers the example of S. W. Magill, an American Missionary Association employee who sought complete control over Savannah's Black educational institutions. He was outraged that the freed slaves had established the Savannah Educational Association, and in response he "complained that black people expected him to work with them rather than hand over authority." Placing Black teachers and administrators in Black schools was part of the freed slaves' larger campaign for self-determination.

William posits that the newly emancipated African American communities' success in establishing their own educational institutions impacted and "transformed" education in the American South. While in a few cases, African American teachers taught poor southern Whites in predominantly African American independent schools, northern missionaries and state legislatures eventually "took action to establish educational facilities for large numbers of poor whites who had previously gone unschooled." Williams points out that the notion of a literate and free African American population both threatened and inspired White southerners to seek educational opportunity for their own communities.

The powerful narratives of Blacks striving to build their own schools, selecting their own curriculum and teachers, and ultimately setting the educational standard for all southerners entices even the most reticent consumer to read this slice of American history in its entirety. Interweaving an eclectic selection of primary documents and seminal secondary sources, Williams offers her readers an outstanding resource for further study into the history of the southern African American educational experience and its influence on the birth of public education in the South.

D.S.

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In Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, Heather Andrea Williams meticulously chronicles African Americans' quest for education. Focused specifically on the struggle that began in the antebellum period and continued through Reconstruction, Williams's analysis is punctuated with rich anecdotes of ordinary African Americans' personal and collective fight for education.

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Enslaved black people were informally educated on the principles of Christianity, as slave owners justified slavery through the Bible. At the time, slaves were not considered U.S citizens; therefore, public education was not available to them. Slaves who attempted to educate themselves were often punished.