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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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update 7 July 2008 |
