The Separate & Unequal Era

            The Separate & Unequal Era

 The Separate & Unequal Era

Richard white once said, “the past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time”. Such a time as what, you may ask? Well, the educational freedom we have nowadays isn’t the same freedom students and teachers had back in the 1950s. America was a different nation back in the 50s, where it was either dangerous or even illegal in some states for ethnic minorities to attend white schools. From the viewpoints of many minority communities , “ public schooling affected their children’s chances for active participation in American life and served as the main community issue around which different people could rally to promote achievement, equality, and the promise of the American Dream” (Anderson, Pg.123-124) If the parents of ethnic children wanted them to attend school, they would have to risk their lives, their families lives and everything they owned. For example, when Joseph Albert Delaine filed a lawsuit against this “white” public school for not allowing his children to take the school bus, his wife and he got fired from their jobs; his two sisters and niece got fired; his house got burned down; his church stoned and burned; and he got fired at forcing him to leave. All those threats were symbolic of the 1950s and 1960s where ethnic children had to battle giants in order to be able to obtain education. 

As a matter of fact, “On September 3, 1965, seven of Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter’s children lined up to wait for the school bus that would take them to desegregate the all-white public schools in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Soon after their home was riddled with bullets in the middle of the night”(Anderson, pg.125). That left me baffled because I couldn’t comprehend how the white community could be so self-centered and racist that they loved only people of their race and color and discriminated against someone of color. Yet, Carter and Bertha believed that it was the best choice to switch schools so that their children, despite being tormented in school, could obtain the same opportunities and hopefully a job outside of the cotton fields. 

                                                                                                                            

Public secondary education was transforming and had become a strategic part of the national experience in the 1950s. American high schools were transforming from private schools into public ones. Educational opportunities for white children were expanding as well as scholarships and loans. However, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans alike were being robbed of this opportunity. That being said, Mexican Americans went to school for only about 4.7 years, unlike white children that pursue education until college. Topeka, Kansas, Farmville, Virginia, and Little Rock, Arkansas began fighting for equal education opportunities and African American children began protesting around 1966 outside of their schools. Similarly, “in the fall of 1968, approximately thirty thousand African American and Latino students embarked on a sustained boycott to protest the quality of education provided by the schools as well as the treatment students received from teachers and the whole school board. 

 

This movement poured in the 1970s and the fight for more than just english to be taught in school, for more female opportunities to be offered, for equal educational opportunities for people with disabilities began. Thus, educators and scholars began wondering if the nation could handle this all and settle something down that could offer citizens both equality and excellence which ultimately led to the Excellence In Education campaign in the 1980s. Overall, we need to shift our understanding from the struggle of fighting for educational equality to the role that education has on such a diverse democracy.