Racial Segregation:

· Anglo Americans didn’t accept integrated educational institutions.

· Racially segregated schools were established in the late eighteenth century until Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional in 1954.

· In 1787 African American leaders in Boston petitioned legislature for funding for schools because they received no benefit from free schools.

· Charles Ray tried to enter Wesleyan College in 1832, but student’s protests forced Ray to leave.

· Canaan, New Hampshire and the Noyes Academy both admitted mixed racial students. In 1835 Canaan admitted 28 white students, and 14 black students.

· Segregation involving everyday life began.

Boston and the Struggle for Equal Opportunity:

· Boston organized the first comprehensive system of urban schools in the Massachusetts Education Act of 1789.

· In the beginning of the nineteenth century no law or tradition excluded black children from public schools.

· Very few black children were even able to go to school.

· The black population in 1800 asked the Boston School Committee to establish a separate school for their children, so they could get funding.

· In 1806 the Committee changed their outlook and opened segregated school with public funding and contributions by white philanthropists.

· In the 1820’s it was clear that the black schools were not getting the same treatment as the white schools.

· Black parents were paying taxes for the white schools as well as the white people.

· The Boston School committee responded by focusing efforts on building new segregated schools.

· In 1849, the protests over segregated schools finally reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court when Benjamin Roberts sued the city for excluding his five-year-old daughter from the white primary schools.

· The issue of segregation in Massachusetts schools was finally resolved in 1855.

The Ghost Dance: the Educational Dilemma for Native Americans

· Learning to read and write was essential for trade and negotiations with the U.S. Government.

· The Great Spirit.

· The Great Spirit offered a bible to the Indians but they could not read from it.

· Arcowee told the Indians that it was time to learn how to read, because the white people had refused to share the knowledge that the Great Spirit had given them.

The Civilization Act

· A man named Thomas McKinney who was the Indian trade superintendent, believed in the power of schooling to culturally transform Native Americans.

· McKinney believed that education was the key to social control and improvement of society.

· By 1819 McKinney was able to convince Congress to pass the civilization Fund Act to provide Money for the support of schools among Indian tribes.

· In 1819 the Civilization Fund Act had legislation provide an annual sum of ten thousand to be used by the president to fund the establishment of schools.

Education and the Trail of Tears.

· The Cherokees faced the physical roundup by the U.S. Army and by 1838 only about 2,000 of about 17,000 Cherokees had made the trip west.

· Indian tribes quickly set up business of governments and established school systems.

· The Choctaws were the most successful.

· In 1842, the ruling council of the Choctaws Nation provided the establishment of a comprehensive school system and a mandatory law was in place in 1889 by the nation.

· By 1848 the Choctaws had established nine boarding schools.

· Missionaries transferred the bible, hymnbooks, moral lectures and other religious tact’s so that many Choctaw people could read them.

· The Spencer Academy for boys and the New Hope Academy for girls were established.

· The success of the Choctaw and of the Cherokee school systems was highlighted in a congressional report in 1969.

Irish Catholics

· Irish weren’t welcome as residents or for employment.

· Pushed out by Famine.

· Greeted with open hostility by Americans.

· 1845- 1 million Irish had immigrated to the United States.

· The majority of all Irish were Catholic.

· Common school (public school) was dominated by Christian values.

· Irish felt shut out of public schools.

· Catholics demanded money from the government.

· Governor William Seward supported the Irish Catholic Schools and increased state support of education.

· Seward worried that Catholic immigrant children world grow to be illiterate and become burdens on the public if they had nowhere to go to school.

· Seward proposed in 1849 that the schools become part of the state school system while retaining their private chapters and religious affiliation.

· Catholics petitioned to the Board of Alderman for a portion of the common school fund.

· Catholics were willing to take religion out of their in-school reaching and offer it after hours.

· Protestants agreed that if the Catholics would teach religion after hours, so would they.

· In 1842 school issues caused a riot between Irish Catholics and the anti-Catholics.

· In 1843 Philadelphia Public School board ruled that Catholics could read their own versions of the bible.

· As a result….

Learning in the Plantation System

· Literacy was a punishable crime for enslaved Africans in the South

· By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860, it is estimated that 5 percent of slaves had learned how to read.

· It was easier for slaves to learn to read if they worked in cities like Charleston and Savannah.

· In these communities, there was a chance for slaves in theses cities to earn money to buy their freedom.

· Plantation life still sometimes provided the opportunity for secret learning.

· African Americans often tried to play dumb so their masters didn't know that they had learned to read.

Native Americans

· US political leaders considered educational method for gaining Native American land.

· A major problem facing the US government after the Revolution was acquiring the lands of Native Americans to the south and west of the lands already controlled by white settlers.

· Having fought a long and costly war with the British, the US government did not have the resources to immediately embark upon a military campaign against the southern tribes.

· The easiest route to acquiring their lands was to purchase them through treaties
the US government treated the purchase of Native American lands as the same thing as bringing the land under the control of the laws of the American government.

· Cherokee land purchased by the US government would have remained under the governance of the Cherokee tribe rather than being placed under the control of US laws.

· Government leaders decided that the best methods of convincing the southern tribes to sell their lands were civilization programs.

· As a means of civilizing the Native Americans, Washington proposed the establishment of official US government trading houses on tribal lands as a means of rendering tranquility with the savages permanent by creating ties of interest.

· When Jefferson became president in 1801, he hoped trading houses would be the means for civilizing Native Americans and gaining their lands.

· The US wanted to turn the Native Americans into farmers as a solution to gain their lands.

· They were taught husbandry, and household arts.

· As a result, population went up.

· Jefferson, as well as many other European Americans, believed it was important to teach Indians a desire for the accumulation of property and to extinguish the cultural practice of sharing.

· US believed that by putting up trading houses they would be able to change the belief and desires of the Native Americans.

· US government agents were the principal means for instituting Jefferson's civilization policies.

· Among the Cherokees, government agents were instructed to establish schools to teach women how to spin and sew and to teach men the use of farm implements and methods of husbandry.

· Agents acted as teachers and advertisers of manufactured goods.

· They were to begin the cultural transformation of Native Americans that would change Native American ideas about farming, families, government, and economic relations.

· Native Americans thought that educations could be used to their advantage for protecting themselves from the government.

Slavery and freedom on the north.

· The demand for slaves grew and slaves brought over from Africa were mostly farmers and herdsmen from small villages.

· Newly arrived slaves spoke many different languages and had little of no contact with Europeans.

· Ira Berlin reported that slave men outnumbered white laborers in many New Jersey counties.

· New slaves resisted European culture such as: names, Christian religion, ECT…

· Some Africans learned to read and write well enough to petition Massachusetts general court for freedom.

· Being a free slave didn’t guarantee freedom.

· Separate educational facilities were required for African Americans.

· White population refused to send kids to schools with black children.

Native Americans, Education, and Social Class.

· The civilization Fund Act of 1819 contributed to the development of social classes among Native American tribes and to a lasting division between “progressives” and “traditionalists.”

· Funds from the Civilization Fund Act were used primarily on sending missionary educators into southern tribes.

· William McLoughlin estimates that by the 1820s wealth was concentrated in mixed families who made up 25 percent of the population of the tribe.

· Wealth was measured according to the number of slaves, wagons, plows, looms, and land under cultivation.

· Kingsbury built 4 log cabins for boarding students and a schoolhouse designed to teach one hundred students.