African-American/Afro-Canadian Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present

206 Pages·2011·2.755 MB·English

by  Charles L. Glenn (auth.)

African-American/Afro-Canadian Schooling
BOOKS BY CHARLES L. GLENN
The Myth of the Common School, 1988, 2002. Italian translation 2004; Spanish
translation 2006.
Choice of Schools in Six Nations, 1989.
Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe, 1995.
Educating Immigrant Children: Schools and Language Minorities in 12 Nations
(with Ester J. de Jong), 1996.
The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies, 2000.
Finding the Right Balance: Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education, I & II
(with Jan De Groof), 2002.
Un difficile equilibrio: Europa continentale e mediterranea (with Jan De Groof), 2003.
Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, I–III (with Jan De
Groof), 2004.
Contrasting Models of State and School: A Comparative Historical Study of Parental Choice
and State Control, 2011.
Native American/First Nations Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present, 2011.
African-American/
Afro-Canadian Schooling
From the Colonial Period
to the Present
Charles L. Glenn
AFRICAN-AMERICAN/AFRO-CANADIAN SCHOOLING
Copyright © Charles L. Glenn, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11416-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29578-4 ISBN 978-0-230-11950-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230119505
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glenn, Charles Leslie, 1938–
African-American/Afro-Canadian schooling : from the colonial period
to the present / Charles L. Glenn.

p. cm.

1. African Americans—Education—History. 2. Blacks—Education—
Canada—History. I. Title.
LC2741.G54 2011
371.829(cid:2)96073—dc22 2011001468
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2011
With gratitude to Dean Kenn Elmore, Ruth Shane, Mike Dennehy,
Reggie Jean, Julianna Gonzalez, and others who are making a
difference at Boston University
Contents
Preface ix
Note on Terminology xi
Introduction 1
1 Assumptions about Race 5
2 Enslaved and Free Blacks before 1862 23
3 Equipping the Freedman 45
4 Jim Crow South 79
5 Jim Crow North 109
6 “Uplifting the Race” 127
7 Integration and Its Disappointments 149
8 Have We Learned Anything? 165
Notes 171
References 187
Index 199
Preface
T
his account of the schooling of Black children and youth in
North America over several centuries is written by a specialist in
educational policy and administration, not by an academic
historian, and it is based primarily on secondary sources. I make no
claim to provide new information based on original research, nor do I
engage in any of the debates among historians about how to interpret
particular aspects of this long and complicated story. My purpose has
been to make the story as clear and compelling as possible to the non-
specialist, and to show its whole sweep without neglecting the individu-
als whose role has been so important.
It is my engagement with the movements for social justice in the
1960s, followed by more than two decades as the state government
official responsible for educational equity and school desegregation in
Massachusetts, that has informed my reading of the abundant material
on the Black experience in Canada and the United States. Perhaps even
more, it is some thirty years as associate pastor of a series of Black
churches in Boston that has made me want to tell this story.
I wrote this book in parallel with another, also to be published by
Palgrave Macmillan, Native American/First Nations Schooling: From the
Colonial Period to the Present. While the experience of the two groups is
different in many respects, it has been marked in both cases by the
heavy influence of assumptions about race among the White majority,
assumptions that have deeply influenced the manner in which school-
ing has been provided.
Finally, it is remarkable how seldom Canada is mentioned in
h istories of education dealing with the United States, and how seldom
the United States is mentioned in Canadian histories of education.
Remarkable because the parallels are striking, and the differences
x ● Preface
significant. This is not, strictly speaking, a study of comparative policies
of the sort that I have written with my Belgian colleague Jan De Groof,
but it seeks to show how much each nation has to learn from the other.
In writing this book—so much out of my usual scholarly concern
with comparative educational policy—I have had a sense of discharg-
ing a debt to many with whom I have worked over the years in the
struggle for racial justice . . . and to countless others who went before
us and will come after.
Charles L. Glenn
Boston University
Note on Terminology
O
rlando Patterson writes, in the Introduction to his brilliant
Rituals of Blood, “I refuse to call any Euro-American or
Caucasian person ‘white,’ and I view with the deepest suspi-
cion any Euro-American who insists on calling Afro-Americans
‘black.’ ”1
There can be no doubt that we have been bedeviled in dealing with
race in North America by the problem of what to call people. When I,
as a “Euro-American” (certainly not Caucasian, since I have no ances-
tors from the Caucasus that I know of) college student, began working
with children in Roxbury, in the mid-1950s, it was still common for
their parents to refer to themselves as “colored.” In 1963, when I spent
some time in jail in North Carolina as part of the Freedom Movement,
and in 1965, when I was in Selma for the second attempt to cross the
Edmund Pettus bridge, we were careful to say “Negro.” A couple of
years later the rise of “Black” consciousness made it clear that my
involvement with racial justice could no longer be as a community
organizer in Roxbury; I obtained a state government position with
responsibility for enforcing the Massachusetts law forbidding the de
facto segregation of what state law referred to as “nonwhite” pupils.
Fifty years and more of engagement with racial issues have convinced
me, in short, that people have very different ways of thinking of them-
selves and that there is no way to avoid giving offense to some.
In the title of this book, I have used the awkward phrase “African-
American/Afro-Canadian,” but in the pages that follow I have simpli-
fied matters by using “Black” and “White,” despite my respect for
Orlando Patterson, and I have capitalized both terms even at the risk of
seeming to attribute to skin color more significance than—as will be
evident in my final chapter—in fact I believe it has and should have.
I am aware that the same debate about racial labels exists in Canada;
“Afro-Canadian” is used by some and rejected by others, as is “Black.”