Public Education, Discrimination, and Segregation in American at the Turn of the 20 th Century Essential Questions: Analyze the ways in which the education system centered around the economy and social structure of the late 1800s and early 1900s. What was the significance of segregation and discrimination in American during the turn of the century to people of all races, and how has it
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Public Education, Discrimination, and Segregation in American at the Turn of the 20 th Century Essential Questions: Analyze the ways in which the education.
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Public Education, Discrimination, and Segregation in American at the
Turn of the 20th Century Essential Questions:
Analyze the ways in which the education system centered around the
economy and social structure of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
What was the significance of segregation and discrimination in
American during the turn of the century to people of all races, and how has it
impacted life today in the US?
Food For Thought• What does education mean to you?• Do you think students in your generation take
education for granted? If yes, why do you think they do?
• Do you think the system is helping you, or failing you?
• If you could, how would change education?• When you have children, what will you want them to
gain from an education?
Public Education in the late 1800s and Early 1900s
• Goals:– To assimilate foreign born immigrants– To teach technical skills ensuring a larger work
force in America– To teach democracy– Above all – to properly prepare students for full
participation in community life
• LEFT: Excerpt from The New England Primer of 1690, the most popular American textbook of the 18th century
• In the industrial age, the economy demanded advanced technical and managerial skills
• People like Andrew Carnegie wanted an emphasis on capitalism in the curriculum “to provide ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”
• By 1900, more than half a million students attended high school– The curriculum expanded to include science, civics,
social studies, and vocational courses
Review of Sources
• Read through the following speeches and analyze the speaker’s response to segregation and the significance of the speech:– Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise
speech – W.E.B Du Bois’ Niagara Movement speech– Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman speech
Racial Discrimination
• In 1890, fewer than 1% of black teenagers attended high school– More than 2/3 of these students went to private
schools, which received no gov’t funding
• By 1910, about 3% of black students between the ages of 15 and 19 attended high school – but a majority of these students still attended
• Despite early segregation, African Americans founded Howard, Atlanta, and Fisk Universities, however funding did not allow that many to attend– By 1990, only 3,880 attended colleges and
universities out of about 9 million
Two Educational PerspectivesBooker T. Washington
• Prominent AA Educator• Born enslaved, and graduated
from VA’s Hampton Institute• Believed that racism would
end if blacks acquired useful labor skills and proved their economic value to society – he was a realist in this respect
• In 1881, headed the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute– Curriculum focus on
agricultural, domestic and mechanical work
W.E.B Du Bois
• First AA to receive a doctorate degree from Harvard
• In 1905, founded the Niagara Movement– insisted that blacks should
seek a liberal arts education so that AA communities would have well educated leaders
Two Quotes Define the Individual:Who said it?
• No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
• Booker T. Washington
• We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals . . . And the greatest of those ideals is that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
Top: Tuskegee campus, Left: Booker T’s home on campus, Right: History class inside one of the classrooms on campus
Life for Blacks After Reconstruction
• Despite the fact that Blacks won political and social rights during Reconstruction, they faced hostile and violent environments, namely in the south
• By the turn of the 20th century, Southern states had adopted a broad system of legal policies of racial discrimination and devised methods to weaken African-American political power
Segregation and Discrimination
• Segregation and discrimination did not only exist in the educational world for African American Americans, it existed in every aspect of life
• On March 9, 1892, three African American businessmen were lynched, illegally executed with out a trial in Memphis, TN
• Between 1882 and 1892, more than 1,400 blacks were shot, burned, or hanged without trial in the South
• Ida B. Wells, a friend of theirs and a local Memphis reporter saw lynching for what it truly was:
The Truth Behind Lynching• Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee
Stewart had been lynched in Memphis . . . where no lynching had taken place before . . . This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.”
• In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars.
• Free People of Color in New Orleans formed the Committee of Citizens -- a group dedicated to the repeal of that law.
Homer Plessy - Plaintiff• They eventually persuaded
Homer Plessy to test it. – Plessy was born a free man
and was an "octoroon" (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent).
– However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car.
The Railroad Test• June 7, 1892– Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad
in New Orleans that was designated for use by white patrons only, as mandated by state law.
– The informed railroad company asked him to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks-only car.
– Plessy refused and was arrested immediately.– He was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine
Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana
– Plessy argued that the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. • 13th - Slavery prohibition • 14th - Guarantees the same rights to all citizens of the United
States, and the equal protection of those rights, against the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law (14th)
– However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies as long as they operated within state boundaries.
Outcome
• In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896,the Court rejected Plessy’s case seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated either of those Amendments
• The case helped cement the legal foundation for the doctrine of separate but equal, the idea that segregation based on classifications was legal as long as facilities were of equal quality
Discrimination in the North
• Many blacks migrated north in hopes of fining better jobs and more racial equality
• However, every discrimination they had faced in the south, existed in the north
• Labor unions in the north discouraged black membership
Discrimination in the West • Mexican Workers:– In the late 1800s, RRs hired more Mexican workers
than any other ethnicity– And just like today, they worked longer hours for less
money– Debt peonage – a system than bound laborers into
slavery in order to work off a debt
• Excluding the Chinese:– By 1880, more than 100,000 Chinese lived in the US– Fear of job competition pushed the Chinese into
segregated schools and neighborhoods
Public Education, Discrimination, and Segregation in American at the
Turn of the 20th Century Answer the Essential Questions:Analyze the ways in which the
education system centered around the economy and social structure of the
late 1800s and early 1900s.What was the significance of
segregation and discrimination in American during the turn of the century
to people of all races, and how has it impacted life today in the US?