High-Quality Black High Schools Prior to Desegregation and their Role in the Education of Leaders in the Civil Rights Campaign

Abstract

New data reveal that while Black education in the rural South and Border states was marginal during the Jim Crow era, in more populated areas Black high schools often achieved quality exceeding expectations for the discrimination and inferior resources of the times. A key factor in their performance was that Black university graduates could not get jobs in the White establishment commensurate with their qualifications. As a result, Black schools were often able to employ the cream of talent in the African American community as administrators and teachers. Black educators tended to be strongly committed to their students.

Good Black school systems developed far earlier in Washington D.C., Border States, Virginia, and North Carolina, than in the Deep South. However, in spite of especially harsh discrimination and poor resources in Alabama and Mississippi, high schools in those states prepared a disproportionate number of Black leaders in the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The circumstances of superior Black educational achievement before desegregation have relevance to better understanding of current educational problems.