Many Americans wonder: is it hypocritical for a Black integrationist to leave a predominantly white university to work at an historically Black one?
An historical perspective helps shed light on this important question. I have traced debates within northern Black communities over the question of which would better serve the larger civil rights movement, racially integrated schools or separate, Black-controlled ones. These debates stretch back to the nation’s earliest, tax-supported schools in Boston in the 1840s and forward to the present day.
School integration seeks to break down the sinister effects of residential segregation created by decades of redlining, housing discrimination, white flight, gentrification, and discriminatory zoning by deliberately engineering diverse schools, typically by busing students out of their racially homogenous neighborhoods. Separation requires these very plans to be dismantled so that Black parents can have control over local, majority Black schools in their immediate neighborhoods. Although it is not impossible, it is challenging to pursue both strategies at the same time.
To date, neither has been entirely successful, yet both ideals—integration and separation—reappear with each new generation of students, parents, educators, and leaders who insist that quality public schools will improve Black students’ life chances, empower Black communities, and begin to redress larger racial inequalities in American society.
For this reason, historians are not surprised by Ms Hannah-Jones’ decision to abandon a majority white university for an historically Black one. The logic at the heart of this dilemma echoes back across the generations, including her frustration with high levels of racial discrimination at a predominantly white school and her powerful belief that a separate, Black-controlled one offers a more nurturing and supportive environment in which to succeed so that she can do more to advance the larger Black freedom struggle.
A meticulous historical analysis of school board records, court cases, the Black press, and civil rights organizations shows that either school integration or separation dominated the political discourse of northern Black educational activists in the US during particular historical eras. For example, school integration dominated between 1840 and 1900, but separation was more pronounced between 1900 and 1940, at which point school integration rose to prominence again alongside the wartime Black civil rights movement, before being subsumed by the Black Power movement in 1966. By 1975, African Americans remained committed to school integration as a strategy, but they modified this approach to include many of the features we associate with separate schools such as a critical mass of Black students, more Black teachers and administrators, and a curriculum and pedagogy that reflected Black students’ lived experiences.