An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North by Zoë Burkholder (review)

Abstract

In her new book, Zo€e Burkholder analyzes more than one hundred and eighty years of debates about education with deep understanding and remarkable clarity of expression. But the value of her book goes significantly beyond this particular strength. Burkholder’s mastery of both the larger social and political contexts embedded in these years is such that it is a very important history of the United States with schools—and ideas about schooling and democracy—at its center. As Lizabeth Cohen did twenty years ago in A Consumer’s Republic, Burkholder roots her narrative in her home state of New Jersey. She uses this home base as a valuable resource for understanding locally expressed cultural patterns that, in some very sad ways, characterize the dominant features of American society. Burkholder begins this history in the 1830 s, when AfricanAmericans in Boston began an “integrationist movement” under the leadership of William C. Neil (19-28). Boston’s Black community worked with some white benefactors to create rigorous community-based schools for their children. Within a few years, this school would become part of the nascent publicly supported school system, except that the Black administrative leadership and faculty were removed at this point and replaced by Whites (18-19). This is just one painfully decisive moment in a larger movement outside the South whereby patterns of segregation in fact (if not precisely in legal text) are established. Early public efforts in the 1850 s to explicitly exclude African-Americans from “common schools” succeed but are then swept back (at least in legal text) between 1863 and 1867, simultaneous with the beginnings of the Port Royal Experiment in South Carolina, which presaged the Reconstruction which began in the South in 1867. In fact, Burkholder notes that, as Reconstruction proceeded in the South, with the help of federal troops, “every Northern state except for Indiana that had previously required or permitted school segregation passed legislation prohibiting it” (33). And yet, these were also the years when de facto segregation flourished. For this reader, Burkholder’s most refreshing and important accomplishment was her consistently detailed attention to enduring disagreements among Blacks over the most practical way to “equalize educational opportunity and advance the civic foundation of public education in a democracy” (8) Starting from the crucial point that this was the universal goal of Northern Blacks, this enduring