Slavery, Racism and Education: Segregation
Segregation
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While the slave state politicians had failed in their antebellum legislative and Civil War military efforts to extend their social system to the north and west, they were more successful after the war with their second choice, something which, ironically, could be imported from the northern states: segregation. C. Vann Woodward wrote that although “Segregation in complete and fully developed form did grow up contemporaneously with slavery, but not in its midst . . . Jim Crow . . . was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South.” Segregation . . . “with the backing of legal and extra-legal codes . . . [had] permeated all aspects of Negro life in the free states by 1860.”[i] This in the context of the political initiatives enforcing segregation in the southern states under Jim Crow: “The first step in applying the formula [of white supremacy] was the total disfranchisement of the Negro . . .
First of all, the plan set up certain barriers such as property or literacy qualifications for voting, and then cut certain loopholes in the barrier through which only white men could squeeze . . . in addition all these states . . . adopted the poll tax.[ii]
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The Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson was, in a manner of speaking, the founding document of all-encompassing social Jim Crow (as differentiated from political and economic Jim Crow). “In Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, the Court subscribed to the doctrine that ‘legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts” and laid down the “separate but equal” rule for the justification of segregation.?
Two years later, in 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi the Court completed the opening of the legal road to proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement by approving the Mississippi plan for depriving Negroes of the franchise.[1][iii]
There had been similar, earlier developments in the north as Woodward had pointed out. “Although the North punished attempts to deprive blacks of their freedom, public policy otherwise promoted Negrophobia.?
That blacks were legally free did not prevent Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine from prohibiting them to intermarry with whites . . . In 1833 Connecticut passed a residency requirement for blacks seeking to attend free schools, declaring that open admissions “would tend to the great increase of the colored people of the state and thereby to the injury of the people [sic].”[iv]
As in the southern states, African-Americans “became pariahs in the North, isolated from the mainstream of life, economically proscribed, and subject everywhere to restrictions that mocked their alleged freedom.”[v] This situation worsened after 1900, when a backlash against the gains obtained during Reconstruction virtually eliminated African Americans from public life throughout the United States.
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W. E. B. Du Bois had observed that an ideological function of racism for the White population of the United States was, and it should be said, often still is, to persuade impoverished White residents of the country, Crawley’s “poor white folks,” to identify with their wealthier, more powerful, White neighbors as against their Black (or Hispanic or Asian) class peers.? They are told, “You might be as poor as a Black person, but you are better, better off, because you are White.”[vi] This dialectic of racist ideology beginning with prejudice against the descendants of enslaved Africans, becomes in this way an exaltation of the virtue of identification of “Whiteness,” a constantly changing ideological construction, including now this group, now excluding that, defined now in this manner, now in that. Used, politically, in the first instance, to maintain the power of the small group of White enslavers and human traffickers and their descendants over large numbers of Black Americans, and then by their descendants and successors, through Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the present day, it continues to prove useful to those seeking to maintain or gain political and economic power.
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Racism as an ideology, and as a basis for administrative actions, can be seen crystalizing in institutions outside the south with the segregation of the Federal workforce by a Virginian, Woodrow Wilson, who became President as the first southerner to hold that office since the Civil War.[vii]? The Woodrow Wilson House website states that “When Woodrow Wilson won the Presidency 1912, Washington, D.C. was home to a flourishing Black middle class with African-Americans making up nearly a third of the city’s population . . .
The federal government . . . had been integrated in the early days of Reconstruction and continued to be so up to Wilson’s arrival at the White House. Making up at least 10% of the federal workforce, African-Americans federal workers had the professional opportunities and resources to build a network of thriving, though segregated, educational and communal institutions in Washington, D.C. . . . Wilson gave his newly appointed cabinet the permission to segregate their departments. As historian Eric Yellin explains, segregation did not simply separate Black and white workers in the federal government, it halted Black professional advancement and restricted hiring in the desirable positions for which these men and women were qualified having passed the requisite civil service exams . . . [Wilson’s] administration’s active segregation of the federal government . . . helped to further cement the systemic racial injustices that defined American life in the 20th?century.[viii]?
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President Wilson’s father was Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a founder of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America.? President Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856 and brought up, at first among enslaved people and those holding them in bondage, such as his father, then among Freedmen and those who had held them in another form of servitude, in Augusta, Georgia; Columbia, South Carolina and Wilmington, North Carolina, as his father moved from one parish to another around the southeastern states. The racism of President Wilson was no doubt always politely expressed.? There were other prominent American politicians who expressed it in other ways.? For example, there was Senator Ellison D. Smith of South Carolina quoted above. Such sentiments, if not as clearly stated, continue to have a place in American public life.
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The segregation of the Federal civil service immediately “had persistently negative consequences for black civil servants. For civil servants who worked in the same department, were of comparable age, and earned a comparable salary before the segregation order, black civil servants earned approximately 3.4-6.9 percentage points (p.p.) less over the duration of Wilson’s term . . .
Consistent with the negative effects on relative earnings, black civil servants [were 14%] less likely than their white counterparts to own a home after Wilson imposed federal segregation. This gap remains persistently large for segregation-affected black civil servants even decades after Wilson left office . . . Twenty years after Wilson left office, black young children of civil servants report lower levels of education, lower earnings, and a decline in the overall income distribution rank of 9 percentiles . . . human capital differences were likely a factor . . . pointing to discrimination as a potential driver of racial economic disparities? . . . By reducing workers’ earnings, workplace discrimination may have also reduced the opportunities for black government workers to accumulate wealth and invest in their children. Limiting the ability of black workers to invest in children’s education may have in turn reduced the future earnings potential of young black children.[ix]
Emphasis added.
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As was shown by Wilson’s actions and their results, racism has had direct economic effects, both on the incomes of Black workers and on wealth accumulation among Black Americans.
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Administrative segregation in housing in northern cities can be traced to decisions by the New Deal’s “Home Owners' Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940 . . .
HOLC staff members, using data and evaluations organized by local real estate professionals—lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers—in each city, assigned grades to residential neighborhoods that reflected their “mortgage security” that would then be visualized on color-coded maps. Neighborhoods receiving the highest grade of "A"—colored green on the maps—were deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders when they were determining who should receive loans and which areas in the city were safe investments. Those receiving the lowest grade of "D," colored red, were considered "hazardous”[2] . . . HOLC created area descriptions to help to organize the data they used to assign the grades. Among that information was the neighborhood's quality of housing, the recent history of sale and rent values, and, crucially, the racial and ethnic identity and class of residents that served as the basis of the neighborhood's grade . . . HOLC assumed and insisted that the residency of African-Americans and immigrants, as well as working-class whites, compromised the values of homes and the security of mortgages. [x]?
And therefore, ensured that was the case.
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By 1944 Gunnar Myrdal could observe that “Segregation is now becoming so complete that the white Southerner practically never sees a Negro except as his servant and in other standardized and formalized caste situations.”[xi] Concerning the effects of segregation on Black people themselves, Du Bois commented in 1950: “This social degradation [of the Black population] is intensified and emphasized by discrimination; inability to get work, discrimination in pay, improbability of promotion, and more fundamentally, spiritual segregation from contact with manners, customs, incentives to effort despite handicaps.?
By outer pressure in most cases, Negroes must live among themselves; neighbors to their own people in segregated parts of the city, in segregated country districts.? The segregation is not complete and most of it is customary rather than legal.? Nevertheless, most Negroes live with Negroes, in what are on the whole the least pleasant dwelling places, although not necessarily always bad places in themselves . . . These districts are not usually protected by the police—rather victimized and tyrannized over by them . . . City services of water, sewerage, garbage-removal, street-cleaning, lighting, noise and traffic regulation, schools and hospitalization are usually neglected or withheld . . . No matter in what degree or in what way the action of the white population may increase or decrease these social problems, they remain the present problems which must be faced by colored people themselves and by colored people of widely different status.[xii]
In many parts of the country—for example, in the de-industrialized northern cities—the situation is similar today.
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Ashley Jardina, et al., have recently found that among adults with just a high school diploma “the share of workers with hourly wages below the national median is 14.1 percentage points higher among Black [adults] than among white [adults]. Similarly, the share of Black [adults] in low wage occupations is 12.5 percentage points higher than the share of white [adults].” The gap among workers with Bachelor’s degrees is similar. “Of the top ten jobs by volume for Black workers with a bachelor’s degree, only three are high-wage. Among the top ten occupations by volume for whites with bachelor’s degrees, we can see that five of the ten occupations are high-wage, four are upper-middle wage, and one is lower-middle wage . . . a four-year degree does not provide Black workers access to the same set of occupations as it does for white workers.”[xiii] The percentage of Black adults with four-year degrees, as well, is consistently, meaningfully, lower than that of White adults with four-year degrees.
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Wealth is an indicator of racial inequality, perhaps more important than income. ?The median wealth of White families was $287,000 in 2022, that of the median Black families, $45,000.[xiv] According to researchers Kuhn and Steins: “The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years.”[xv] Ellora Derenoncourt, et al,. have also studied the economic effects of racism in terms of the accumulation of wealth.? Regarding the “racial wealth gap [which] is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1 . . .
[W]e find . . . convergence stalling after 1950. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households, and income convergence has stopped . . . In 2019, Black Americans held just 17 cents on average for every white dollar of wealth. By comparison, the income gap is 50 cents to the dollar . . .
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By way of explanations for the wealth gap, Derenoncourt states that “Black households hold nearly two thirds of their wealth in housing and very little in equity [stocks and bonds] . . .
While housing wealth has appreciated since 1950, stock equity has appreciated by five times as much. These large price increases in equity markets have led to disproportionate capital gains for the wealthiest Americans, a group that is almost exclusively white . . . Growth in Black wealth lagged behind the reference in which Black and white Americans faced equal opportunities for wealth accumulation, consistent with nearly 100 years of explicit capital and labor market exclusion after slavery . . . Despite robust income convergence between 1950 and 1980, white savings rates exceeded those of Black Americans’ . . . ?such differences translate directly into increases in the racial wealth gap.[xvi]
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Racial income differentials from similar forms of employment; racial differentials in the types of employment available; racial differentials in housing with the consequent differences in wealth and differential access to good schools, and racial differences in adult educational attainment preserve racial disadvantage in the United States, perpetuating it from one generation to the next of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
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The experience of slavery itself, then those of bondage and segregation, have had profound effects on the opportunities for educational achievement of the descendants of enslaved Africans. With, on average, lower incomes and smaller family resources than their White peers, lacking the social networks that provide their White peers and neighbors with entrée to systems of opportunity, those economic and social handicaps have been passed on from one generation to another.? As Thomas Piketty observed, before the Civil War “In the South we find a world where inequalities of ownership took the most extreme and violent form possible, since one half of the population owned the other half: here, slave capital largely supplanted and surpassed landed capital . . .
This complex and contradictory relation to inequality largely persists in the United States to this day: on the one hand this is a country of egalitarian promise, a land of opportunity for millions of immigrants of modest background; on the other it is a land of extremely brutal inequality, especially in relation to race, whose effects are still quite visible.[xvii]
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Efforts to desegregate schools, and efforts to resist integrating them, have continued for decades, increasingly focusing on northern urban centers.? For example, although schools in New York state were legally desegregated in 1873, and segregation in New York City schools ended in 1938, the last school in the city that was designated for Black children did not close until 1944. The persistence of de facto segregation in New York led on February 3, 1964 to “the largest civil rights mobilization in U.S. history before the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests,” when over 460,000 students and teachers demonstrated in New York City for desegregation of that city’s schools.[xviii] It failed. The schools in New York City, by and large, remain segregated. After the Supreme Court in 1971 ruled 9-0 in the Swan decision to allow busing to desegregate schools, desegregation of schools became identified with busing.? Demonstrations, riots (such as in Boston in 1974), and “White flight,” specialized (or magnet) high schools, consequently increased school segregation. Most recently it has increased by 35% from 1991 to 2020 in the 100 school districts that enroll the most non-White students.[xix]
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If none of that is surprising; if it seems obvious that Black families will have smaller incomes than White families, less wealth, will be less well-educated, if it is to be expected, perhaps the reason is the pervasive influence of an underlying cause, an ideology emanating from a long dead economic system, the ideology of racism, acting today to enforce and reproduce inequality. Racism was given a classical formulation by Alexander H. Stephens, then Vice President of the Confederate States of American, during his “Cornerstone” speech on March 21, 1861.? Stephens asserted as a “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”[xx]??This was the core of the ideology of racism in the United States both before Emancipation as slavery and after as Jim Crow. It lingers, in an attenuated form, influencing socio-economic practices and institutions, not least those of the educational system. How else to explain that year after year many, in some places, most, Black children do not have the same education opportunities and resources as White children? How else indeed?? Perhaps, some say, it is a matter of economic class, not racial caste.? Perhaps it is a matter of differences in the intergenerational transfer of cultural capital.? Perhaps it is caused by de facto segregation, for example, the common difference in the quality (and resources) between suburban and urban schools. Perhaps it is some combination of these.? Those questions call for investigation. This book sets out to perform that task using, as what Gunnar Myrdal called his “value premise”: equality itself.[xxi]
Michael Holzman
[1] An effort still underway in Mississippi in the 21st century.
[2] Hence “Redlining.”
[i] Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 17; p. 18.
[ii] Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 83-4; pp. 53-4.
[iii] Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 71.
[iv] McManus, Edgar J. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973, p. 183.
[v] McManus, Edgar J. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973, p. 185.
[vi] .” . . through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a evolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes.” Arendt, Hannah.? The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968, p. 206.
[vii] Cooper Jr., J. M. (2009). Woodrow Wilson: A biography. Knopf. Berg, A. S. (2013). Wilson. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
[viii] “Wilson and Race,” President Wilson House, https://woodrowwilsonhouse.org/wilson-topics/wilson-and-race/
[ix] The costs of employment segregation: evidence from the federal government under Woodrow Wilson Abhay Aneja Guo Xu Working Paper 27798 https://www.nber.org/papers/w27798.
[xi] Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 118.
[xii] Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn, in Writings, Dusk of Dawn, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 687-8.
[xiii] The Limits of Educational Attainment in Mitigating Occupational Segregation Between Black and White Workers. Ashley Jardina, Peter Q. Blair, Justin Heck, and Papia Debroy NBER Working Paper No. 31641 August 2023, p. 23; p. 27.
[xiv] Kent, Ana Hernandez and Lowell R. Ricketts. “U.S. Wealth Inequality: Gaps Remain Despite Widespread Wealth Gains,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, February 7, 2022.
[xv] Kuhn, Moritz and Ulrike I. Steins. “Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016. Journal of Political Economy (vol. 128, no. 9, September 2020, pp. 3469-3519. See also: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/06/racial-wealth-gap-may-be-a-key-to-other-inequities/
[xvi] Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020 Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick NBER Working Paper No. 30101 June 2022 JEL No. J15,N11,N12 Abstract.
[xvii] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 161.
[xviii] Lefty, Lauren. “The Long Fight for Educational Equity in NYC. Museum of the City of New York, February 11, 2021. https://www.mcny.org/story/long-fight-educational-equity-nyc
[xix] “Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Economic School Segregation, 1991-2020,” Research Brief, May 2022, The Segregation Index, Ann Owens, et al.
[xxi] “There is no other device for excluding biases in social sciences than to face the valuations and to introduce them as explicitly stated, specific, and sufficiently concretized value premises.” Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1944, p. 1045.
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