Integration and Its Disappointments

By the early twentieth century, alongside the comfort that many Black teachers and others took in the existence of a separate system of schooling that was, to some extent at least, theirs to control and to derive material benefits and status from, there was a growing demand on the part of some Black leaders and intellectuals for elimination of official segregation of schools, and “the idea of a voluntary Negro community virtually disappeared from respectable discussion.”¹ This derives in part from decades of experience that “Black” schools would always be neglected and provided with inadequate resources. In 1915, William Pickens wrote an overview of “the Negro question” for the National Conference of Charities and Correction, arguing that the

Negroes in Northern communities are generally opposed to the separate school idea and face the usual accusation that they “do not want to associate with their own people,” which ignores the more positive reason which the Negro himself advances—the universal temptation and tendency of the school authorities to degrade the Negro schools wherever they have been successfully segregated…whenever retrenchment was necessary the Negro’s share was always trimmed down first.…[The Negro] knows that where Black and White attend the same school this discrimination is forever impossible.…Cincinnati, Washington and St. Louis have the best separate schools for the Negro in the United States, and it is significant that the percentage of attendance of colored children at these schools is lower than at the mixed schools of Boston, Cleveland and New York.²