The power to withhold education

I've begun reading about the closing of Prince Edward County schools from 1959-1964. It's been eye-opening to say the least, given my ignorance about America's civil rights history. It's also a window into the blindness of the sin of racism. But this story is also about the power of education and the power to withhold it.

Education can be used as a means of advancement and a weapon against ignorance, but what happens when it is deliberately withheld? Is this a form of oppression? When I read Karen Swallow Prior's bio of the English reformer, Hannah More, she fought for the education of the poor, but it was limited. They were only taught to read, not write. Boundaries of class needed to be preserved. Withholding or even giving a limited education achieved that end.

Fast forward to 1950's Virginia. In 1951, black high school students in Farmville went on strike to protest the terrible conditions of their schools. The Commonwealth was already ranked 45 out of 48 for public spending. Black schools received even less. The unequal conditions were justified on the basis of taxes. If you paid more taxes, you deserved greater benefit from those dollars. But the deck was stacked to begin with. The better jobs were only reserved for whites. The rest for blacks. This led to inequity of income and wealth. The NAACP became involved at the students' request, and Prince Edward County became one of the localities named in the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit.

Some members of the black community were willing to continue with "separate but equal" (in reality separate and unequal) in exchange for a better high school. Others wanted to push for desegregation. A new high school was built in 1953 with the hope that a desegregation crisis could be averted. But education is more than just a building. The quality was not the same. There weren't enough textbooks to go around. The library had few books. Audiovisual equipment, and basic teaching tools were "virtually nonexistent." Fourteen black schools went without needed improvement.

From the white citizens' perspective, they probably thought they were being more than generous to set aside public funding for a new school. In exchange, they wanted the lawsuit dropped and resumption of the status quo. But -

"They could hardly fail to see the overcrowded and inadequate buildings, the second-hand textbooks, and the almost nonexistent supplies. Unperturbed, they assumed that the resources allocated provided a sufficient education for members of what were considered an inferior population. A stratified and hierarchical society that offered limited employment opportunities to black adults did not rack itself with guilt over inequalities between schools. It never occurred to many whites that black students had a right to the same resources as their own children."

I am just at the threshold of this chapter in history, and it's hard to describe the sadness and, hopefully, righteous anger that I feel. You may ask, why bother with the past? Aren't things better now? If we don't know the past, we will repeat it because we have not learned from our mistakes. As to whether things are better now, they may be on paper. But in reality? I don't know. Maybe yes in some respects, but no in others. That's what I want to find out.


Source: Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Jill Ogline Titus, University of North Carolina Press, 2011, pp. 8-17.