I'll Find a Way or Make One by Dwayne Ashley

Author:Dwayne Ashley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061976933
Publisher: HarperCollins

Separate and Unequal

True to his 1947 speech before the NAACP, President Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights. The group submitted a momentous 178-page report entitled “To Secure These Rights,” which made recommendations for strengthening and safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans. The recommendations were guided by a conviction that civil rights were guaranteed by the Constitution and essential to domestic tranquility, national security, and the general welfare and continued existence of America’s free institutions. Among the members of the committee was Dr. Channing Tobias, a graduate of Paine College in Augusta, Georgia.

Within a year of the report, Truman had appointed another interracial committee to assess the problems in the realm of higher education. The group’s report was stinging in its indictment of the educational inequities between blacks and whites. “In 1940 the schooling of the Negro was significantly below that of whites at every level from the first grade through college,”7 the report stated. It noted that 11 percent of the white population 20 and over had completed at least a year of college, and nearly 5 percent had obtained degrees. In contrast, only 3 percent of African Americans 20 and older had gained at least a year of college, and just 1.5 percent had graduated.

The committee also reported that 85 percent of the 75,000 black students who were enrolled in college during 1947 were attending segregated institutions, and that educational facilities for African Americans on all levels were inferior to those provided to whites. “Whether one considers enrollment, overall costs per student, teachers’ salaries, transportation facilities, availability of secondary schools, or opportunities for undergraduate and graduate study, the consequences of the segregation are always the same, and always adverse to the Negro citizen,” observed the report. The committee made several recommendations for remedying the inequities. Prominent among them was that the federal government pass legislation outlawing state segregation statutes and that federal monies be made available to bolster black schools until such legislation was passed and enforced.

The report was a significant blow to Jim Crow policies and a sound endorsement of what black educators and students had long argued for—equal support and equal access. Many African American educators and civil rights activists viewed the committee recommendations as a sign that the time was ripe for challenging state laws that allowed segregated schools.

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