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The Negro’s Progress in American
Education
By Edgar Wiknight
Despite their manifold
handicaps, the American Negroes made greater progress in
education during the first half of the twentieth century than in
any of their other activities.
The increase of their
attendance at public schools had been especially highly marked,
and there had also been a marked increase in their attendance at
higher educational institutions. But Harvard had been
established nearly two centuries, the College of William and
Mary more than 130 years, and Yale more than 125 years before
the first Negro received a collegiate degree.
John Russwurm had been
graduated from Bowdoin College in 1826. Charles S. Johnson says
that Russwurm “added to this accidental distinction that of
being the founder of Freedom’s Journal, the first Negro
newspaper.” For twenty years following his graduation, only
seven other Negroes were graduated from recognized colleges, and
by 1860 there had been only twenty-eight.
In 1900 there were ninety-nine
colleges for Negroes in the United States, with 2.6 thousand
students, and that year 156 baccalaureate degrees were
conferred. Although the number of institutions for Negro higher
education had increased to only 108 in 1950, enrollments
in them had increased to 74.5 thousand, and baccalaureate
degrees to more than 13 thousand, and there was increasing
attendance of Negroes in higher institutions in those states
that did not provide separate schools for the two races.
While the number of bachelor’s degrees had
increased eight-four times in a half century in the Negro
colleges, the corresponding figures for all institutions for
higher education in the United States was sixteen. Negro college
faculties had increased from 1.5 thousand in 1900 to 5.8
thousand fifty years later. At the beginning of the century,
Negroes composed only 57 percent of the faculties in these
institutions. In 1950, the figure was above 90 per cent.
The educational and general income of the
Negro colleges meantime had grown from about $1 million to
approximately $40 million, but even this was a somewhat slower
increase than appeared in the income of higher education as a
whole. In 1900 the total value of all Negro collegiate property
was reported at close to $8 million. In 1948, the latest date
for which comparable statistics were available in 1950, this
figure was about $120 million.
Prior to 1951, no Negro college offered work
above the master’s degree, but in that year North Carolina
College, at Durham, a publicly supported and controlled liberal
arts college for Negroes, was enabled by an appropriation by the
state of North Carolina to enter upon work for the Ph.D.,
especially in the field of professional education. Prior to
1936, some 132 Negroes had received this degree and 155 Negroes
had been admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. By 1950 many more had
received that degree and had membership in that scholarship
society.
Negroes had been part of the national
citizenship since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to
the Constitution of the United States in 1868. At that time
illiteracy among them was close to 90 per cent. By 1930 this had
declined to about 16 per cent, but the problem of Negro
illiteracy constituted at mid-century a large part of the entire
problem of illiteracy in the United States. In 1940 about 75
percent of all Negro workers were classified as unskilled or
semi-skilled, and less than 3 per cent as professional.
In conditions of health, crime, and
delinquency, the Negroes suffered disproportionately when
compared with the whites. Death rates among them were higher,
with tuberculosis, cardiac diseases, and diseases of infancy the
major causes of death; and as a group they furnished an excess
proportion of the inmates of state and Federal prisons and
reformatories. The improvement of the health of this minority
group to the point where it would compare favorably with the
white people would wipe out many disabilities from which Negroes
suffered, improve their economic condition, and stimulate their
native abilities.
Statistics and other experts for insurance
companies said that health was “basic to the general welfare
of the Negro as it is to no other race,” a condition that
placed heavy responsibilities on the schools.
Source: Edgar Wiknight.
Fifty Years of American Education: A Historical
Review and Critical Appraisal . NY: The Ronald Press Co. 1952,
pp. 424-426
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 1 December 2011
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