Introduction
Before 1890s most places in the Southern America had only a rudimentary public school system. However, after the Civil War, the southern states established a dual system of education that was based on race. All these separate schools were just the same (Smithsonian, n. d.).
However, the commitment by the African American parents and teachers never faltered towards education. They formed a tradition of self-help education and they were among those first southerners who campaign for the establishment of a universal public education. They actively supported the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary societies, and white charities. In addition, the black communities, many who were very poor, also invested a lot of their own resources in building as well as maintaining schools in order to meet their educational needs and also to reflect their values (Smithsonian, n. d.).
The migration trend of the past five decades started to reverse in the early 1970s. The majority of the migrants from the North were college graduates seeking employment opportunities in the growing southern economy. The demographers who have conducted studies on the return of the African Americans to the South from the North have indicated that they generally had higher educational and occupational status as compared the non-migrants. Their incomes were more on average as compared to that of the overall African-American in the South.
During the 1990s, a study by Gary Orfield documented that the public schools in America had become more segregated (between white students and African American students). He noted that the Latinos have always been segregated most than the blacks for several years, and not only because of ethnicity and race but also poverty. For example, in the South, he indicated that since 1988 to 1998, most of the development of increasing the integration in the region in the previous two decades had been lost. Furthermore, he also mentioned that the South is still highly integrated as compared to how it was before the revolution of the civil rights, and it was moving backward at a higher rate (cited in Chemerinsky, 2003).
The highest numbers of integrated education were based in the small rural areas and towns of the country as well as the huge metropolitan counties in which the suburban and city schools were singly part of the district schools that resulted from the broad desegregation order. The farthest form of desegregation, which often involves the whole metropolitan areas, seemed to be long lasting and more stable but largely confined within the school systems of the Southern county-wide. Most Americans resided in the metropolitan areas, and there were more segregation between school districts with different racial composition, but not within single districts. By 1970s, the studies showed that the South had already become the most integrated region in the nation. In 1976, it is estimated that 45.1 percent of the African American students in the South were attending the schools with majority whites as compared to 29.7 percent in the Midwest and 27.5 percent the Northeast. The number increased because of desegregation of schools (Orfield, 2001).
However, in the early 20th Century, the Southern higher education was fragmented, poor, and almost entirely focussed on the undergraduate education only. Some of the southern universities and colleges were among the oldest in America, and they had been stable while others prosperous, before the outbreak of Civil War. The war also interfered with the dreams of establishing modern universities which can offer graduate as well as the professional study. In the first two decades of the 20th Century, many southern state universities tried to re-establish themselves in order to get more assistance from their situated states, to enrol more students, and move toward the required university standards from the norm of collegiate (Pascoe, Leathem & Ambrose, 2005).
References
Chemerinsky, E. (2003). The Segregation and Resegregation of American Public Education: The Courts’ Role. North Carolina Law Review, 81. Retrieved from http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1712&context=faculty_scholarship
Pascoe, Craig, S., Leathem, Karen, T. & Ambrose, Andy (Eds.). (2005). The American South in the Twentieth Century. Georgia: The University of Georgia Press.
Orfield, Gary (2001). Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation. The Civil Rights Project Havard University. Retrieved from http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/schools-more-separate-consequences-of-a-decade-of-resegregation/orfield-schools-more-separate-2001.pdf
Smithsonian National Museum of America History (n. d.). The Quest for Education. Retrieved from http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/2-battleground/quest-for-education-1.html.
