Race, Class and Schools

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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November 21, 2012

By Kevin P. Chavous, Huffington Post

For most African-Americans, the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision is like the Holy Grail.

[…]

deseg classrm — A newly desegregated classroom following the Supreme Court’s 1954 “Brown v. The Board of Education” decision.

The primary thesis of Brown back in 1954 was that segregated schools exacerbated the inherent second class treatment of African-Americans that was a natural by-product of slavery. To address this problem, the Brown Court reasoned, the U.S. government had a responsibility to end segregated schools and the states were ordered to integrate their schools with “all deliberate speed.”

But, what do you do when the blood, sweat and tears of your history clashes with the realities of today?

[…]

The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; with a school population made up of 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. But increasingly, a growing educational gulf exists between the haves and have nots in our country, irrespective of race.

[…]

Does forced integration of races and classes in our schools today have a role in helping us get better educational outcomes for all?

Read more here.

Learn about how schools are still segregated.

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