Schooling Jim Crow by Jay Winston Driskell

Author:Jay Winston Driskell [Driskell, Jay Winston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780813936154
Google: qPKyAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-12-03T03:02:32+00:00

4

“Close Ranks”

World War I as a Crucible for Black Solidarity, 1913–1919

In 1917, the Neighborhood Union would recall its bittersweet victory as it fought off another attack on black public education. That year, facing unprecedented growth in the size of Atlanta’s school-age population, the city abruptly announced that it would abolish the seventh grade in the city’s thirteen black grammar schools in order to pay for the construction of a new junior high school for white students.1 Since the Neighborhood Union had launched its first campaign to improve the city’s black public schools, the number of students enrolled had steadily grown, placing impossible demands on an already underfunded school system. At the beginning of the 1917–18 school year, 30,000 students enrolled in classes—up from 26,000 in 1913, an increase of 15 percent.2 However, the city once again proved unwilling to fund public education. The resulting budget shortfall led to considerable tension between the Board of Education and the city council, which held the purse strings.3 During the 1917–18 school year, Atlanta spent a paltry $31.45 per pupil, ranking last among the nation’s major cities; by contrast, the national average was $56.60, nearly twice that amount. Although the total budget for the school year had risen to $905,000, this sum was still only $7,000 more than the minimum deemed necessary by the Board of Education during the last budget crisis four years earlier.4 Without the money to provide classrooms, books, and teachers for all of Atlanta’s school-age children, the city opted instead to cut support for black education in order to accommodate the city’s rapidly expanding white student body.

No longer pulling any punches, the Atlanta Independent condemned this move as a plan “to keep one half of the people intelligent and the other half ignorant.” The paper’s editors reasoned that since “the Negroes are taxpayers and citizens of Atlanta in common with the white people,” they “ought not to stand silently by and allow this wrong to be perpetrated.”5 This was a far cry from the paper’s previous editorial position in which its editor, Ben Davis, asserted that rights had to be earned by “the individual as he rises in the estimation of his neighbors and becomes useful and helpful in the community where he lives.”6 The esteem of white neighbors rooted in the shared cultural practice of respectability now seemed to matter much less than establishing standing as taxpaying citizens, an identity shared by all adult Atlantans regardless of race. Davis used this new attack on the black seventh grade as a pretext to

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