After reading the article Educational Inequalities Must Go! and the short film by Charles Houston, I find it interesting that in both accounts Houston uses the laws and constitution of the U.S. to show how much the American government on a local level, is ignoring its own laws and policies. The article in particular presents a new plan put on by the NAACP to figure out a way that can help to eliminate all inequalities for education of whites and blacks.
One of my critiques of the article is that it seems to be focusing on higher education as it mentions the two cases of black students and their admittance into graduate school. My only problem with this is that for these two students to make it to the graduate level, they must have been privileged in order to make it that far in their schooling. As shown in Sullivan’s book, Houston was interested in educating other black men to become lawyers. However, in order to raise the standards of education across the board, I believe it to be necessary to work at the local levels in elementary schools in order for all children to have an equal education. Houston certainly mentions this method as well in his articles and short film, but I think more could have been done right away with policy changes.
The plan that Houston and the N.A.A.C.P. laid out to equalize education was one that we have not seen a great deal of in our studies so far in this class. That is they sought to “insist that the U.S. respect its own Constitution and its own laws” (The Crisis). At a time when African-Americans were placed into categories based on their looks, this was an excellent way in which they could have legitimacy in the American legal system. There could not be any denial of the law and this was a beneficial method for the N.A.A.C.P. in order to reach their goal of educational equality.
Here are a few questions I have:
1. In what ways are W.E.B. DuBois and Houston’s goals relatable to one another?
2. Based on our discussions in class, what other ways could the N.A.A.C.P. and Houston approached educational inequality in America?
-Kate Fleischer
Kate, I think you bring up a really interesting point about Houston’s article focusing on graduate and professional programs. I did not think about it while reading the article. This attention to already educated African Americans may also reflect how the NAACP, in general, reached more well-off, established African Americans instead of reaching out to the masses. Although by no means did the organization ignore people in the lower reaches of society.
Maybe Houston focused on this because he felt that it might be an easier avenue to address rather than being able to approach head on the public school education inequalities.
I agree with you guys that the article is a little bit problematic in that it seems to favor reforming graduate level education opportunities for blacks over elementary school education opportunities. We know that the NAACP did not ignore education standards across the board as made evident by the Study of Educational Inequalities in South Carolina. That being said, I feel that the drive to reform this aspect of education is absent in the article. In fact, I think that the article somewhat contradicts Houston’s belief that there should always be a three ring fight going on at all time. By focusing on graduate level education the NAACP is ignoring the fight for equality in other aspects of education. I understand that this is only one article and cannot be used to epitomize the beliefs of the education, but the focus on graduate level education certainly felt strange.
I think that the reason why Houston focused on graduate school was because that was where the greatest inequality was. There were already blacks in public school systems through high school and then on through college as well, but significantly less in graduate school (at least, I got that impression from the article). So the graduate school “battle” was really the hardest (and possibly the most crucial) battle to fight at the time. I also thought that graduate school was really what concluded the education cycle and allowed those who completed graduate school to come back and teach pre-grad and high school. So really, once you get a few people through graduate school then they can help others get through pre-grad by becoming teachers.
Josiah, I think you’re right in saying that there were fewer blacks in grad school than the public school system, and that two students who did get to that level had an opportunity to greatly impact others by becoming teachers. However, with that said, I don’t think there was a greater importance of black graduate students, rather than elementary. Rather, as Kate said at this time, grad students most likely came from supportive, wealthy families–they did not represent the norm. They did have the opportunity to make widespread change by working through the system as lawyers or phds–I think this is why Houston focused on these two grad students. Even today, the national education policy focuses on getting more people into college, when there is still incredible need in the primary and secondary schools. While the public schools should prepare students for the next level with a quality education, many don’t.
I agree with mostly all that has been said earlier, but I wanted to address one of Kate’s questions about how Dubois’ and Houston’s goals kind of paralleled. Even though Houston had concentrated on the higher education, I think that his ideas were well founded since the African Americans needed to have representatives playing on the same level as Whites, especially within the system and in courts where these highly educated lawyers could defend the rights that have been constantly violated. This would be the only way to stop the perpetuating cycle of the Constitutional violations and poor education at all levels for African Americans. This is where I think that Dubois would agree with Houston since Dubois believes that African Americans should be self-reliant and what better way to do that then to have trained and educated individuals representing African Americans who have been brought to courts on biased charges. But not even just that, the educated lawyers could spearhead the fight within Congress and those channels since they would be fully aware of the boundaries that they were to fight within as well as be equipped to battle the spew of white lawyers that would undoubtedly try to debunk the African American attempts of equality.