The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee

School Integration in Clinton, Tennessee

In 1956, Clinton High School in Clinton, Anderson County, Tennessee, was set to be the first high school in the South to be integrated after the Brown decision. Integration was progressing smoothly until John Kasper, leader of the White Citizens Council and a staunch segregationist, came to town. Protests and riots ensued from that day until early in December, when several white citizens escorted the African American students to class, as shown here. One of the escorts was badly beaten afterwards. As a result of the episode the school was closed on December 4, but reopened six days later without incident.

The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee

From PBS's History of Jim Crow, "The Desegregation of Clinton Senior High School: Trial and Triumph," by Clinton Beauchamp and Amanda Turner: In the early 1950s, Clinton, Tennessee, was the epitome of a typical southern small town--quiet, friendly, simple, and segregated. In 1956, however, violence over the desegregation of Clinton High School would rock this town to the core and leave an important legacy for years to come.

The trials began with a groundbreaking lawsuit, McSwain v. Anderson County. In 1950, five Negro children and their parents, backed by the NAACP, filed suit against the Anderson County Board of Education to gain entrance into Clinton High School. At that time, the law of Anderson County and the law of the State of Tennessee not only allowed but also required segregation in State high schools, and Negro students in Clinton were designated to attend either Rockwood High School in Rockwood or Austin High School in Knoxville. Presiding Judge Robert L. Taylor of the Federal District Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, dismissed the case on the grounds that Anderson County was providing equal or better educational facilities to the Negro students. The decision was appealed but was suspended pending a decision by the Supreme Court in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. On January 4, 1956, the final decree issued by Judge Taylor was "...that in Anderson County, as to high school students, segregation be ended by not later than the fall term of 1956."

The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee

The faculty and staff of Clinton High School began preparing for integration. For instance, students were assigned papers on the coming integration and involved in numerous class discussions. In addition, news of the school's impending integration was circulated in the local newspaper The Clinton Courier and announced at school assemblies and town meetings. A Clinton High student at that time, Jerry Shattuck, believes, "...the student body and the town of Clinton was pretty well aware of and prepared to accept the desegregation; I don't think they necessarily supported it, but, nevertheless, it was the law of the land and we were going to abide by it." Things progressed relatively smoothly throughout the summer.

On registration day, the 12 Negro students to attend Clinton High School signed up for classes with no trouble. It seemed that the integration might be implemented without any trouble, but the weekend before school was to begin, John Kasper came to town. Kasper was an ardent segregationist and leader of his own group, the White Citizens Council. He came into town and began to "stir up trouble." Kasper clearly stated his views on segregation in an article, "Segregation or Death" (Virginia Spectator, May, 1959), in which he stated, "The only defect with segregation as a national policy, as a policy of the government, is that it does not go far enough." Kasper would play a pivotal role in causing the problems in Clinton over the next few months and would be arrested several times.

Clinton, Tennessee

With the stage thus set, on Monday, August 26, 1956, Clinton High School made history by becoming the first public high school in the South to desegregate. On the first day of school, Kasper and a few other citizens he recruited to his cause began picketing outside the school but were quickly disbanded. According to Mr. Shattuck, "They were gone in five minutes because they were embarrassed: it was sort of an unnatural activity carrying pickets here in a small town like this. Nevertheless, there was a big press contingent here that morning, so, by the time the afternoon newspapers came out or the evening television shows came on, it was all about this big protest in Clinton, Tennessee, over desegregation. Well, the great protest was five people carrying signs for five minutes; but, in my opinion, the press misrepresented what happened. The next morning, there were 15 people carrying pickets." The numbers kept increasing, and, by Thursday, the town was inundated with hundreds of outsiders "going up and down the streets and generally raising Cain." It soon became apparent that Clinton's two-man police force was woefully inadequate for the task at hand, so Mayor Lewallen was forced to organize a home guard of deputized citizens to supplement the police force and attempt to restore order to the town. The guard was also placed at the homes of prominent citizens who had been threatened by segregationists. Despite all this turmoil outside, classes went on relatively normally inside the school.

The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee

The atmosphere within the school environment at this time varies depending on whom you ask. Alfred Williams, a Negro student who attended the school during this time, says that there was a significant amount of harassment from the white students. "You couldn't possibly get anything learned or done, because you were constantly afraid that the white kid next to you was planning to kill you." Mr. Williams was eventually expelled after pulling a knife on a group of white students that were threatening to kill his brother, Charles.

However, Mr. Shattuck, a senior and captain of the football team and Student Council President at that time, disagrees with Williams, "No, actually the black students weren't harassed that much. They got to school without incident, because they came in the back of the school, and the mob was in the front...Once inside the school, they faced no harassment, neither was there any welcoming with open arms. Except in November, when Kasper came back to town and organized the Junior White Citizens Council, and then it was petty stuff like ink in lockers, tacks in seats, jostling in the hallway, and that sort of thing. But, the football team stationed itself at the hall corners, and we put a stop to that real quick.... We felt that this was the law of the land, and we were going to abide by it." Bobby Cain, Clinton's first Negro graduate, agrees with Shattuck that there wasn't any overt hostility, and he says, "I did manage to make a few friends." Despite the mostly peaceful atmosphere inside the school, problems continued to mount in town.

The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee

Friday, August 31 was the night of the big football rivalry game against Lake City. That night, even more cars poured into Clinton to see the game. Rumor spread that the segregationist groups were planning a cross-burning rally on the field at halftime. Although nothing happened at the game that night, the next night, Saturday night, was the night the State troopers and the National Guard were called into Clinton.

It started when a mob in the square in front of the Clinton courthouse got out of hand. The home guard, which had been inside the courthouse, began marching across the square in a line. It was then that the historic picture of the guard shown in newspapers and magazines across the country was taken. The guard was forced back into the courthouse by gunfire, and they called the governor. At that point it was decided that things were so out of hand that the State troopers were to be sent into the town. The story goes this way. Nearly 100 cars came over the bridge into town--with sirens blaring, they pulled up to the mob that had assembled between the courthouse and Hoskins, the local drugstore and soda fountain. Out of the lead, car climbed the six foot eight inch figure of Greg O'Rear, the head of the Highway Patrol, with a double-barreled shotgun slung over his shoulder. The story continues, that he stepped out and said to the assembled mob, "Alright, boys, it's all over." And, it was. The next day, the National Guard relieved the Highway Patrol and, from then through the end of September, policed Clinton.

The last major violent incident was on December 4, 1956, when the town held municipal elections. The White Citizens Council had put up a candidate for mayor who vowed to restore segregation if elected. On that day, three white citizens of Clinton decided to ensure that the Negro students going to Clinton High School arrived safely. Rev. Paul Turner, Sidney Davis, and Leo Burnett walked to the top of the hill and escorted ten of the 12 Negro students down the hill to the school. They got to the school safely, and, after the students went inside, the three men went their separate ways. However, when Rev. Turner turned to go to his church, First Baptist Church of Clinton, he was assaulted by a group of White Citizens Council members. While an elderly lady from a local flower shop managed to run the men off, Turner was, nevertheless, severely beaten. Although members of the White Citizens Council meant to scare citizens into supporting their candidate, he was soundly defeated.

Because of the assault on the Rev. Turner and numerous other incidents--including an attempt to enter the school where a student intervened to save Turner's wife, a Home Economics teacher, was saved from injury--Principal Brittain decided, that in the interest of the students' safety, he needed to act. So, the same day as the Reverend's attack, Brittain closed the school exactly two years after the Tennessee Supreme Court found segregation in education to be unconstitutional in Tennessee schools. Many of the seniors were terrified that they would be unable to graduate that year. "We could just see our senior year flying away," remarked one student. However, the violence could not hold Clinton High School down for long, and on December 10, six days after closing, the school was reopened.

Things remained quiet, and at the end of that year, Bobby Cain, the first Negro graduate of a desegregated public high school in the South, became a national news event. Members of the press from around the country attempted to talk to him. According to Jerry Shattuck, "Some of the senior boys got together and shielded him from the press that was trying to mob him." However, Mr. Cain's friend, Alfred Williams, remembers the event differently. "The night he graduated, they cut the lights out on him and hit him, then turned the lights back on. He never did find out who did it." After that year, major efforts by the segregationists in Clinton wound down. They felt that if one student could graduate, then more would follow, and indeed they did.

Principal Brittain resigned in the Spring of 1957. He and his wife had received countless threatening letters since the beginning of the school year and near constant harassment. A slight man of a 130 pounds, he lost 14 pounds, and had his life threatened no less than a dozen times during the school year. Earlier in the year, he had asked the student body to vote on whether or not they wanted him to resign; a similar ballot was taken home to the parents, and, except for six dissenting votes, the overwhelming majority believed that Brittain was doing a fine job and wanted him to remain. Nevertheless, by spring he had had enough and felt that it was time for him to resign. The problems had also taken their toll on the faculty of the high school.

By the beginning of the 1957-1958 school year, only seven of the school's teachers returned. Among them was Juanita Moser, who served as assistant principal and was a teacher. With a new principal, Mr. W.D. Human, school continued peacefully for the remainder of the year. It appeared to many that the worst was over, and that they had weathered the storm.

Two years later on Sunday, October 5, 1958, the peace of Clinton High School was once again shattered, this time by explosives. An estimated 75 to 100 sticks of dynamite ripped through the high school building in three successive blasts in the early morning hours. While the majority of the school was destroyed, no one was injured because the explosion's timing. The gym and the upper section of the school remained intact, but the rest of the building was in shambles with scarcely one stone remaining upon another. To this day, despite a Federal investigation, no one knows who was responsible for the bombing. To many, though, that really doesn't matter.

In the eyes of many people, the real story of the bombing and Clinton High School's integration is a story of a people united to preserve the peace and decency of a small town. Within three days of the bombing, Clinton High School students were attending classes in a borrowed school. Clinton High was moved seven miles away to the abandoned Linden Elementary School, which was donated by the Atomic Energy Commission, in Oak Ridge. While the old high school was salvaged for anything savable and, for the two years it took to complete the new Clinton High School building in 1960, students did their best to receive an education despite having to use chairs made for ten-year-olds and undersized lockers. Even the old rivalry of Clinton and Oak Ridge was put aside, and Clinton students arrived on their first day at Linden to the sounds of music from the Oak Ridge High School Marching Band.

Many people view the integration of Clinton High School as a success story. Although some may debate this view, most Clintonians will agree that it was successful. As Jerry Shattuck puts it, "The people in Clinton themselves made it happen. They needed help from the State, and they got it, and, later on, they needed help from the Federal marshals, and they got it, but nowhere else [in the country], in my opinion, did the people let it be known through their actions what their will was. And their will was not a commitment to integration. It was a commitment to ‘This is our decent, civilized little town, and we're going to obey the law of the land and not let it be messed up.' I think that this is the real success of the story." (source: PBS.org)

The Desegregation of Clinton, Tennessee (1957)

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

Anti-busing protest in Boston, 1976

Nothing Changes

Peter Irons begins Jim Crow's Children with voices from the past. Drawing from WPA interviews, he quotes former slaves talking about difficulties they faced trying to read. "If we told [Mr. Tabb] we had been learnin' to read," recounts one slave, "he would near beat the daylights out of us" (p. 1). According to Irons, little has changed. African Americans still confront serious barriers to acquiring equal education in the United States.

In a sweeping work that traces black education from slavery to the present, Irons, who teaches at [***], suggests that Brown v. Board of Education,[1] the landmark Supreme Court ruling calling for the desegregation of public schools in the South, failed blacks. Although instrumental in dismantling federal approval of de jure segregation, or Jim Crow, in the South, Brown failed to deliver equal education to African American youth, a goal that continues to prove elusive, even today.

Much like James Patterson's Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy,[2] Irons summarizes an ever increasing body of secondary literature on school segregation, adding weight to ascendant views that Brown did not end America's struggle with segregated education. In pursuing this goal, Irons provides a detailed summary of educational policy towards blacks beginning as early as slavery. He does an excellent job of showing, for example, that the South was never much of an outlier in either its racial views or racial practice, despite the absence of formal Jim Crow segregation in the North. Irons also does a deft job of summarizing the NAACP's strategy leading up to Brown, a story familiar to fans of Richard Kluger's classic work, Simple Justice.[3]

The full weight of Irons's book, however, does not come to bear until the second half. Dedicating six chapters to the reaction and results of the Supreme Court's ruling, Irons shows first how southern and later northern and western whites opposed forced integration. He documents white flight, busing controversies, and even terrorism in cities like Cleveland (which boasted large black populations and extreme white resistance). In his closing chapters, Irons picks through the ruins of desegregation, even interviewing black students and former plaintiffs in Brown, revealing that Jim Crow's spirit, if not his body, lives on.

The culprit, according to Irons, is the federal judiciary, and in particular the Supreme Court. If it weren't for the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, he contends, integration would have continued. The courts proved effective in the early stages of integration, first by forcing the South to submit to federal mandates, and later by imposing busing on the rest of the nation--only to concede ground in the 1970s and 80s by removing busing mandates and tolerating white flight out of heavily black districts.

Irons's argument is, undoubtedly, right. If the Supreme Court had continued to aggressively back desegregation, Jim Crow would have suffered. But, this is not the only reason to read Jim Crow's Children. In fact, Irons's work raises questions that are, in certain ways, even more interesting still. Irons shows that American whites, contrary to their oft-professed liberal proclamations about racial equality, proved reluctant to sacrifice what they perceived to be the future of their children for an abstract social ideal. And the Supreme Court, as much symbolic authority as it may possess, has been unwilling and (perhaps more important) unable to force Americans, over long periods of time, to do things they do not want to do. Herein lurks the most interesting part of Irons's study. He shows effectively not just that courts refused to back desegregation, but that white America refused to back desegregation. In pushing aggressively for the abstract goal of integration, Irons shows how the courts, through busing and other plans, destroyed American cities by driving white taxpayers from them, eroded faith in the courts as a means of protecting white interests, and drove a wedge between liberal left-wing elites and the white working class, thereby setting the stage for the impressive consolidation of power across class lines that we see in today's Republican Party.

Jim Crow's children then, are not just African American youths who may have been better off under equalization programs, but Republican crusaders like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and William Rehnquist who rose to power expressly to dismantle what the Warren Court had wrought. Brown created both a myth and a monster.

Why? That is the subject of another study. And yet, racism, although an obvious culprit, may not be the only force at work here. On the contrary, an even deeper force, long at work within America's social formation, is likely also to blame. That is the utility of segregated education to the preservation of class.

When confronting the prospect of having their children bused into inner cities, white Americans did not have to be racist to realize that their children would suffer. It may be true, for example, that integration among children of the same class is a positive good. But, it may also be true that integration of children from different classes may prove, and will likely prove, the opposite. This is not because black children are different racially, but rather because Jim Crow involves much more than simply racial separation.

Segregation in America, whether de jure or de facto, has always been about resources just as much as about race. The idea behind segregation, initially, was not simply to punish blacks, but to create an underclass that was limited in terms of what it could accomplish, and thereby better suited for the menial tasks assigned to it. There was a reason, in other words, that Mr. Tabb would have beaten his slaves. If they had learned to read, they would have been less suited to being slaves.

Although slavery is gone, class structure continues in America, as in most societies. In this respect, centuries of segregated schooling have served their purpose--namely, the perpetuation of a class system in which African Americans inhabit the bottom caste, performing menial tasks with limited hope of advancement. The prospect confronting white parents with forced busing then, was to suddenly have their children relegated to the same lower class, not simply by association with black students, but being sent to underfunded, poorly equipped schools with student bodies who lacked the appropriate cultural, not to mention financial, capital.

If Irons had pursued this angle of analysis, he may have been less harsh on the Supreme Court. After all, Brown itself was an ambitious move--one that most white Americans agreed with only insofar as it did not affect them personally. In fact, like the due process revolution for criminal rights initiated by the Warren Court, Brown was a radical step against the grain of American popular opinion, one that invited the very backlash it received.

History, for better or for worse, is rarely determined by a few old men, even if they are Supreme Court Justices. On the contrary, larger forces play into the reasons why Supreme Court justices rule the way that they do. Haunting the Warren Court, for example, was the Cold War. Irons doesn't consider this in his analysis, and yet scholars like Mary Dudziak have shown its effect.[4] In fact, if Irons had considered Dudziak's work, his conclusions would only have been stronger. After all, once the Cold War ended, there was little compelling reason to promote equal education, save perhaps abstract moral ideals. Like it or not, these have never governed educational, or any other policy, in the United States. (source: History Net)

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

Mississippi Negro Education

The fraudulent state elections of 1875 removed many black and Republican lawmakers who had supported public school funding. Conservative white Democrats regained control of state government and gradually began to reduce the taxes that had funded public education. The Republican governor was forced to resign and the lieutenant governor and the state superintendent of education were impeached and removed from office.

During the early 1870s the education of black children was further endangered as a campaign of intimidation and violence was waged against black schools and their officials. The Ku Klux Klan made the public schools and their teachers targets for their acts of destruction and mayhem. By 1885 the state had cut education funding to the point that the effectiveness of the schools was being called into question.

In 1886 State Superintendent J. R. Preston implemented a revised education code that raised educational standards for both teachers and schools. The new law adjusted teacher salaries to school size and required teachers to take and pass a licensing examination. With white Democrats firmly in control of the state government, it was only a matter of time before laws pertaining to education would be either changed or nullified by those who opposed the education of the Negro.

Public Education Under the Constitution of 1890

The consolidation of political power in the Democratic Party led to a call for a new state constitution. The Constitution of 1890 was for the most part very similar to the previous state constitution with regard to education. There were however two notable differences. The first difference was found in Article VIII, Section 207 which read, “Separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races.” This provision established legal segregation in the common schools. A similar law passed in 1888 had legalized segregation of public accommodations such as trains and railway stations. The education of the Negro was considered a necessary evil by white southerners who resented paying taxes to support black schools. Methods of circumventing the constitutional education provisions soon emerged. Funds earmarked for black schools were blatantly designated to white schools. This early misappropriation of education funds contributed to inequalities in black school facilities and in the salaries of black teachers. One other significant difference between the two constitutions was the provision for the establishment and support of institutions for the education of the deaf, dumb, and blind. Changes in the school laws came rapidly during this period, but by 1890 most Mississippians had accepted public schools as a cost-effective alternative to expensive private academies.

With state government once again in control of an all white Democratic Party, the public began to invest in the education of its white children to the neglect of the majority black children. As white leadership in predominantly black counties shifted funds to build and maintain white schools, black communities worked hard to offset the funding imbalances. To make up the difference black communities often were “double taxed,” having to pay the state poll tax and then to collect donations within their communities to sustain the education of their own children. Black schools were also assisted by northern philanthropy through such organizations as the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund and the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

(source: Jackson State University)

Connecticut's "Black Law" (1833)

Lacking no legal means to prevent Prudence Crandall from opening her school, Andrew Judson, a local politician, pushed legislation through the Connecticut Assembly outlawing the establishment of schools "for the instruction of colored persons belonging to other states and countries." But the tide of abolitionism was turning, for five years later, in 1838, Connecticut's Black Law was repealed. Phillip Pearl, the chairman of the committee that had passed the Black Law, led the movement for its repeal, telling a friend, "I could weep tears of blood for the part I took in that matter--I now regard that law as utterly abominable." (Yale)

Connecticut's "Black Law" (1833)
An act in addition to an Act entitled "An Act for the admission and settlement of Inhabitants of Towns."

WHEREAS, attempts have been made to establish literary institutions in this State for the instruction of colored persons belonging to other states and countries, which would tend to the great increase of the colored population of the State, and thereby to the injury of the people: Therefore,

Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Assembly convened, That no person shall set up or establish in this State, any school, academy, or literary institution, for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State, nor instruct or teach in any school, academy, or literary Institution whatsoever in this State, or harbor. or board, for the purpose of attending or being taught or instructed in any such school, academy or literary institution, any colored person who is not an inhabitant of any town in this state, without the consent, in writing, first obtained of a majority of the civil authority, and also of the select men of the town in which such school, academy, or literary institution is situated; and each and every person who shall knowingly do any act forbidden as aforesaid, or shall be aiding or assisting therein; shall, for the first offence, forfeit and pay to the treasurer of state, a fine of one hundred dollars, and for the second offence shall forfeit and pay a fine of two hundred dollars, and so double for every offence of which he or she shall be convicted. And all informing officers are required to make due presentment of all breaches of this act. Provided, That nothing in this act shall extend to any district school established in any school society, under the laws of this state, or to any incorporated academy or incorporated school for instruction in this state.

Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That any colored person, not an inhabitant of this state, who shall reside in any town therein for the purpose of being instructed as aforesaid, may be removed in the manner prescribed in the sixth and seventh sections of the act to which this is in addition.

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That any person, not an inhabitant of this state, who shall reside in any town therein, for the purpose of being instructed as aforesaid, shall be an admissible witness in all prosecutions under the first section of this act, and may be compelled to give testimony therein, notwithstanding any thing contained in this act, or the act last aforesaid.

Sec. 4. Be it further enacted, That so much of the seventh section of the act to which this is an addition, as may provide for the infliction of corporeal punishment, be, and the same is hereby repealed.

SAMUEL INGHAM, Speaker of the House of Representatives.
EBENEZER STODDARD, President of the Senate.
Approved, May 24, 1833.

(source: Yale)

Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury Female Boarding School

Prudence Crandall

Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury Female Boarding School

In the fall of 1831, the residents of Canterbury, Connecticut, approached 27-year-old Prudence Crandall about opening a private school for young women in their community. Crandall accepted the invitation and paid $500 as a down payment to purchase the recently vacated Paine mansion located on the town's green. Having been educated at the Friends' Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island, and having taught at local district schools, Crandall came to the position with a fine reputation as a teacher. The Crandall family, Quakers from Rhode Island, moved to south Canterbury when Prudence was young.

The Canterbury Female Boarding School enjoyed the complete support of the community and was soon a success. Subjects taught included reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, history, chemistry, astronomy, and moral philosophy. Basic tuition and room and board cost $25 per quarter. Students paid extra fees for instruction in drawing, painting, music, and French. With student tuition, Crandall was able to pay off the $1500 mortgage within a year.

At the time Crandall opened her school in Connecticut, white and African-American children received a free elementary education at the district schools. No further public or private education was made available to black children. Crandall became aware of the injustices to African Americans in Connecticut and elsewhere through her housekeeper Marcia Davis, and Marcia's friend Sarah Harris, both African Americans. Sarah's father was the local distributor of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Marcia sometimes would leave copies of the newspaper where Crandall would find them.

In the fall of 1832, Sarah Harris asked Prudence Crandall to admit her to the Canterbury Boarding School. Originally from Norwich, Connecticut, a town traditionally having a larger population of African-American families, Harris hoped the education Crandall's academy offered could help her achieve her goal of returning to Norwich as a teacher. Crandall agreed to let Sarah attend the school as a day student. She immediately lost the support of the townspeople. A number of Canterbury's leading gentlemen, including the secretary of Crandall's Board of Visitors, supported the colonizationist movement, which feared the integration of the races and proposed sending all African Americans in America to Africa. This issue was being passionately debated at the time Crandall admitted Sarah Harris to her school.

Parents threatened to withdraw their daughters if Harris remained in the school. Crandall soon realized she must find some alternative to keep the school open. In the spring of 1833, she traveled to Boston to meet with William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator. They discussed the possibility of closing the academy to white students and reopening with an African-American student body. With Garrison's assistance she traveled throughout New England to meet with upper-middle class families who might be willing to send their daughters to the school. She soon realized this idea could be successful. Newspaper advertisements were placed announcing that as of April 1, 1833, the academy would reopen for the purpose of educating "young ladies and little misses of color." According to Crandall, "the sole object, at this school [was] to instruct the ignorant and prepare teachers for the people of color that they may be elevated and their intellectual and moral wants supplied."1 A delegation of town leaders urged her to abandon the project and led a general boycott of the school when Crandall refused.

Although the school opened with only three students, Crandall recruited others from Boston, Providence, and New York City. Enrollment soon rose to 24 students, most of whom were boarders. The curriculum was identical to that of Crandall's first Canterbury school. Both Crandall and her students endured harassment from angry townspeople. Shopkeepers refused to sell them food and townspeople pelted the building with stones and eggs. Under the shield of darkness, the school's opponents even attempted to set the building on fire in January 1834. Crandall's Quaker upbringing contributed to her moral convictions and her decision not to bend to public pressure. The Quakers strongly opposed slavery and promoted education for women and minorities. Crandall herself believed in the cause of immediate abolition.

So determined and influential were Crandall's opponents that, on May 24, 1833, the Connecticut General Assembly enacted a measure known as the Black Law. This act restricted African Americans from coming into Connecticut to get an education and prohibited anyone from opening a school to educate African Americans from outside the state without getting the town's permission. The law did not prevent African Americans that were residents of Connecticut from going to district schools. Convinced the Assembly's action was neither morally just nor constitutionally correct, Crandall ignored the law and continued to recruit and teach her students until her arrest on June 27, 1833.

Map of Canterbury, Connecticut

Crandall spent one night in jail for violating the Black Law. At her trial on August 23, 1833, the jury failed to reach a verdict. The case went to a second trial in October 1833, where she was found guilty. Judge David Daggett told the jury, "It would be a perversion of terms, and the well-known rule of construction to say that slaves, free blacks or Indians, were citizens within the meaning of that term, as used in the Constitution. God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound by my duty, to say they are not citizens." According to this argument, the Constitution did not entitle African Americans to the freedom of education. Crandall appealed the decision to Connecticut's Supreme Court. While she and her abolitionist supporters pursued their legal challenges to the Black Law, her school continued to operate. When supporters visited the school, Crandall's students performed a song for them, revealing their fear and sorrow:

Sometimes when we have walked the streets
Saluted we have been
By guns and drums and cow bells, too
And horns of polished tin.
With warnings, threats, and words severe
They visit us at times
And gladly would they send us off
To Africa's burning climes.2

The Black Law and Crandall's resistance to it sparked a year-long debate among New Englanders on the issues of abolition and colonization. The Liberator thundered against the injustice, and soon all of America knew of Canterbury and Prudence Crandall. The conflict allowed abolitionists to dramatize the evils of prejudice. Leaders in the movement helped Crandall recruit students for her school, gave her support, and provided for her financially.

Old Windham County Courthouse (Brooklyn Town Hall)

The Brooklyn Town Hall was originally built in 1820 to serve as the Windham County Courthouse. The Prudence Crandall trial was held here on August 23, 1833. Crandall was in violation of the “Black Law” for running a school for African American students, but she pleaded “not guilty” in a stand against bigotry and discrimination. After purposely refusing to post bail to avoid being jailed before her trial, Crandall spent a night in a jail cell in the basement of the Courthouse. A daughter of abolitionist George Benson volunteered to stay with her.

On July 26, 1834, the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors dismissed the case against Crandall on a technical issue. The lower court decision that African Americans were not protected as citizens, however, remained standing. Although Crandall had won a technical legal victory and was free to return to her school, the townspeople of Canterbury would not accept the Supreme Court's decision. On the night of September 9, 1834, an angry mob broke in and ransacked the school building. With clubs and iron bars, the mob terrorized the students and broke more than 90 windows. What the Black Law and local ostracism had not been able to accomplish, this mob achieved. Fearing for the girls' safety, Crandall closed the school the following morning.

In 1834 Prudence Crandall married Calvin Philleo. They left their home in Canterbury shortly after the school closed. Her courage and persistence continued to win her national attention in abolitionist circles. She spoke and was entertained at banquets sponsored by abolitionists and African-American societies. In 1848 she moved to Illinois where she farmed land owned by her father and taught school. In 1877 she moved to Elk Falls, Kansas, where she started a school that served American Indians. In 1883, Mark Twain, a resident of Hartford, Connecticut, helped obtain a pension for Prudence Crandall from the Connecticut Assembly. He also offered to buy her former home in Canterbury for her retirement, but Crandall kindly declined the offer. She died in Elk Falls in 1890 at the age of 87.

Noyes Academy: A New Hampshire Struggle for a Black College

The brief, but courageous life of Noyes Academy

Noyes Academy was opened in 1835 for “youth of good character, without distinction of color”. Black students included Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, and Julia Williams, all of whom became historic black leaders. Open only months, the building was literally dragged away, the building later torched, and this early attempt at integrated education failed. Active among the Trustees were David Child, S.E. Sewall, of Boston, and Nathanel P. Rogers, of New Hampshire, all friends of Mr. Garrison. This photo is of a rebuilt replica of the destroyed Academy.

While researching his book on the New York City school system, Professor ofHistory Craig Wilder came across a surprising local connection. "I was researching early black activists, where they were educated, and I found that some were students at Noyes Academy in nearby Canaan, N.H.," said Wilder. Canaan, a small town 20 miles east of Hanover, was for a few months in 1835 home to Noyes Academy, an institution founded on the idea - revolutionary in pre-Civil War America - that blacks had the same rights as whites to formal education. Wilder found the story that resulted so fascinating that he developed his research into a presentation for a "Chalk Talk," Alumni Relations' Saturday pre-game fall lecture series.

Map of Canaan, New Hampshire

Slavery was officially abolished in New York state in 1827, prompting a push among black parents for educational opportunities for their children. Although many cities offered some form of segregated schooling for black children, the kind of classical, formal education available to affluent whites was inaccessible to African Americans.

As a result, a group of abolitionists founded Noyes Academy with a view to offering students a classical education regardless of race or gender. A solid majority of the school's major donors and trustees voted to allow integration and the decision was announced in the Boston abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

Mikel Wells' painting depicts the 1835 Removal of Noyes Academy. (Canaan Historical Society)

William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator reports on the razing of the Noyes Academy on September 5, 1835: "Three Selectmen of the town of Canaan deny a published statement that the citizens of the town support the school. Then follows an account of the removal of the school."

"This is the story of the vote at a Town Meeting, held July 31, at which there was a vote to remove the school, and a committee appointed to discharge that duty, “the performance of which, they believe the interest of the town, the honor of the state, and the good of the whole community, (both black and white) required without delay.” Then follows the account of how three hundred people, with ninety to one hundred oxen, carried out the work “with very little noise, considering the number engaged, until the building was safely landed on the common near the Baptist meeting-house, …..” The account claims the duty to have been carried out in the “spirit of ‘75”, and in memory of those who have fought and fell struggling for liberty."("Removal of Noyes," Liberator, 5 Sept. 1835)

Main Street in Canaan, New Hampshire, USA

Records of the academy and its students are scarce, but evidence suggests that among the more than two dozen students who formed the school's first and only class, some 14 were African Americans. What Wilder finds so remarkable is the hardship many students endured to reach Canaan and a chance at education. They came from all over the Northeast, their travel impeded not just by lack of funds but by restrictions on their use of public transportation and lodgings.

"Blacks could not ride in the cabins of steamboats," said Wilder. "They had to sleep out in the elements. How the students got to New Hampshire was heart wrenching. These black teenagers made long journeys under terrible conditions. It was an extraordinary struggle and sacrifice for education."

Among the students enrolled in Noyes Academy were several African Americans who later rose to prominence as abolitionists and activists. Henry Highland Garnet, an abolitionist remembered for his call for slave revolts as the antidote to slavery, and Alexander Crummell, who advocated that freed slaves emigrate to Liberia, both attended Noyes. Their fellow student Thomas Paul, Jr. would go on to be one of the earliest black graduates of Dartmouth. Paul was a member of the class of 1841.

Within months of its opening, opponents of integrating the academy appealed to the town of Canaan to close the school. At first, said Wilder, this tactic met with little success but the segregationists launched a campaign to discredit school officials and cultivate hysteria over the possibility of interracial marriage and racial mixing. "The local newspaper ran articles warning about young black men arm in arm with white women," said Wilder.

In August of 1835, hundreds of men from Canaan and surrounding towns, including Hanover, launched an assault on the school. They arrived with 90 oxen, ropes and chains. Working in shifts, they physically dragged the schoolhouse off of its foundation and destroyed it. The students watched from the homes of the local townspeople with whom they boarded. After destroying the school, the mob threatened the students and the people sheltering them by firing cannons at the homes.

Garnet, who, with many of his classmates, was boarding with school founder George Kimball, fired a return shot from the window, deterring the mob long enough for the students to be smuggled out of town under cover of night.

Beyond its interest as a forgotten narrative of New England, Wilder said he values the story of Noyes Academy for what it says about courage and commitment to education. "These were remarkable students," said Wilder, "and courageous abolitionists who risked persecution to further education and oppose slavery." (source: Dartmouth Life, " The brief, but courageous life of Noyes Academy," by GENEVIEVE HAAS, December 2005)

Noyes Academy: A New Hampshire Struggle for a Black College


In 1835, Noyes Academy, in Canaan, NH, opened its doors to young men and women of all races; enrolling black teenagers from the northeast. That summer, the school was attacked by hundreds of armed men who opposed an integrated school in NH. Investigate the issues of the Academy’s rise and fall, the bold abolitionists who built it, and the extraordinary students who defended it with their lives.

American Apartheid Education

From the Nation Magazine Johnathan Kozol's "Overcoming Apartheid,"

Little Rock 1957

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that integration "failed" and to settle instead, in Orfield's words, for better ways of "doing Plessy" in the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations of futility ignore the reality that as many as 10 million black, white and Hispanic children have attended school together in interdistrict programs in which integrated schooling has become a fact of life for an entire generation of black children. In large numbers, the inner-city students in these programs have gone on to universities and colleges and become civic leaders in their own communities.

In the Milwaukee area, for instance, twenty-two suburban districts currently participate in a student-transfer program to promote school integration across district lines, which has been in operation now for nearly thirty years. Under the program four thousand students transfer between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the middle-class suburb of Shorewood, for example, 11 percent of the student population comes into the district from Milwaukee. Including minority children who already live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the recently retired superintendent, "our school district is about 19 percent black and Hispanic, and the community has a great comfort level with that.... I think parents got to know each other as friends.... I think that evaporated away a lot of the psychological resistance." Linehan also notes that starting integration in the elementary grades made it much easier for children "simply to be children with each other." Stereotypes fall away, he adds. "It's more difficult to conjure up 'the other' when you're building sand castles together."

In St. Louis also, a suburban-urban interdistrict transfer program has been in place for more than twenty years. The program, initiated under a court order in 1983, today enrolls about 10,000 children from the city, who represent nearly a quarter of the school-age population of black children in St. Louis, while about 500 children from the suburbs make the opposite commute. Although recent cutbacks in the funds provided by the state to underwrite these transfers have imposed a heavier financial burden on the sixteen districts that participate, most of the education leaders there have made clear their preference to continue with the program even in the face of opposition from the state.

In the Louisville area as well, school integration, initially carried out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city schools and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of rendering Kentucky's public schools the most desegregated in the nation. The typical black student in Kentucky now attends a school in which two-thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian.

When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut back on Kentucky's integration program, protests were voiced by community groups, the teachers union, the local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations Commission and the regional branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. A survey revealed that the number of black parents who believed their children's education had improved under the busing plan exceeded those who took the opposite position by a ratio of six to one. Less than 2 percent believed that education for their children would be better in resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences of opposition from groups or individuals who represent small pockets of resistance, support for school desegregation in the Louisville community continues strong and unabated to the present day.

Public policy has largely turned its back on the aspirations embodied by these instances of school desegregation. "Even many black leaders," notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, are weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation and "have given up on integration," arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not need white classmates in order to learn." So education policies, he says, "now aim to raise scores in [the] schools that black children attend." "That effort," he writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds." The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, he reminds us, "was not about raising scores" for children of minorities "but about giving black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently.... For African-Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience."

Nonetheless, programs that promote school integration continue to be threatened in some sections of the nation. In Milwaukee, for example, legislation has been introduced three times since 1999 to do away with or substantially reduce interdistrict transfers. Much of the pressure has come from those who argue that the money spent for integrated education should be spent instead to upgrade schools within the city, the assumption being that the state cannot afford to make both of these purposes attainable. In the first two attempts, the legislation was defeated. When on the third attempt, in 2003, the legislation was approved, it was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.

There will be further legislative efforts like these in the future, says Jack Linehan, the former Shorewood superintendent--this, he notes, despite academic outcomes for the students in the transfer program that are consistently far better than those of students who remain in Milwaukee. The four-year graduation rate of inner-city students who have been attending school in the suburban districts is typically 95 percent or higher, Linehan observes, while the rate for students in Milwaukee's schools averages below 60 percent. If the legislature should succeed in cutting funding for the interdistrict plan, says Linehan, suburban districts would be forced to raise their local levies up to 25 percent to keep on with the program. "The only other option is to send these children back, which I believe would be immoral. We cannot say, 'We didn't mean it, now there's no more money.'"

In perhaps the most disheartening development, the interdistrict program in St. Louis is facing the risk of termination in the next three years. A court-supervised phaseout of state funding for the program, while it does not prohibit integration, significantly discourages suburban districts from accepting students from St. Louis after the 2008-09 academic year. The suburbs, for the most part, have wanted to continue; indeed, students in the affluent community of Clayton walked out of classes in 2004 to protest a possible withdrawal from the program, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The principal of Clayton High School told the paper he was "proud to be part of a community that values diversity in a metro area so segregated." But the state, beginning in late 2004, cut assistance to the district from the full per-pupil cost in excess of $13,000 to approximately half that sum, a loss in funding that has led the Clayton School Board, against the wishes of its students, to vote to terminate the program and accept no further applicants after 2008.

Other St. Louis suburbs may be driven to the same decision. Already, as a result of the first stages of the phaseout, the number of city students going to suburban schools has dropped by about 3,000 from a peak of 13,000 in the 1990s, while the number of suburban children going to St. Louis schools has dropped to half the number who were making this commute during the 1990s. "The state government," Orfield notes, "beginning under former Governor John Ashcroft, has fiercely opposed the integration program. It works, so it will be killed, unlike charter schools, which do not work and will be expanded." As in Milwaukee, the success of students in the program has been documented thoroughly. Ninety percent of transfer students graduating from suburban high schools have pursued postsecondary education, most attending two- or four-year colleges, compared with only 47 percent of graduating minority seniors in St. Louis. And the volume of applications by minority parents to enroll their children in the program has continued to be strong and is, indeed, increasing. In 2004 nearly 6,000 parents submitted applications for the 1,300 openings that were available.

Is it accurate then to say that most Americans, and black Americans especially, as we are told so frequently, have decided to give up on integrated education? National surveys, Orfield notes, do not bear this out. More than two-thirds of Americans believe "desegregation improves education for blacks," and "a growing population is convinced" it has a positive effect for whites as well. In surveys among young adults, 60 percent believe the federal government ought to make sure that public schools are integrated. The same percentage of black respondents do not merely favor integrated education but believe that it is "absolutely essential" that the population of a school be racially diverse. (Only 8 percent of blacks and only 20 percent of whites say this is not of much importance.) Opposition to desegregation among whites, Orfield pointedly observes, is highest among those who have no experience of integration. Yes, as those who have participated in these programs rightly note, there are the multitude of challenges that transfer students often do confront; and these are not always minor problems, nor are they exclusively, as some may think, "the problems they bring with them." Many are created by insensitivity or insufficient care in prior planning on the part of the receiving districts, others by resilient racist suppositions on the part of educators or administrators even in some of the most self-consciously progressive white communities.

Still, oral histories of students who experience desegregation usually reveal that even when the social adaptations may be difficult at first, the students consider the benefits they ultimately gain to be well worth the challenges they've faced. And despite the social tensions students in these interdistrict programs do sometimes encounter--and despite those famous "separate tables" in the cafeterias to which black students often gravitate, and in regard to which an awful lot of lamentation is devoted in the press--many of the white and nonwhite students get to know each other far too well not to be drawn to one another, finally, as friends.

Most parents of black and Hispanic students who have asked for my advice when they were trying to decide upon a school their children might attend have told me they have rarely thought about the pros and cons of trying to enroll their children in suburban schools or, indeed, in racially desegregated schools within their district, because they do not believe it possible that they would have the chance to exercise this option if they wanted to. Orfield believes that we can make it possible on a far broader scale and that we have, in any case, a moral obligation to devote ourselves to heightening that possibility in any way we can.

In answer to those who say they share this goal but point to the obstacles presented by the current makeup of the federal courts and the lack of any apparent interest in advancing such a purpose on the part of national elected leaders or the leaders of state government, Orfield, a political scientist by training, gives a clear, unshakable response. "The notion that apartheid in the South could be dismantled 50 years ago seemed wildly improbable as well," he noted. "Breaking down the barriers to interdistrict integration and reducing residential segregation in the suburbs have at least as good a chance of ultimate success. It will take a major political thrust in order to achieve this. We will certainly need some better people on the courts. But look at what Charles Hamilton Houston and W.E.B. Du Bois and those who worked with them during the decades long before the Brown decision faced when they were looking at a system of apartheid in the South which nobody was seriously resisting and which neither political party was opposing. And they nonetheless were asking, 'How do you take this thing apart?' And they did it. They started a movement. They created the intellectual force to make it possible. This is what we need to do as well."

And, he said, with a determination that is seldom heard within the discourse of too many tired-sounding liberals these days, "When we do create that force, it will be successful also."

(source: The Nation)

Jonathan Kozol: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America