A Dream Deferred? An Examination of Black Education in the United States

Abstract

The history of education in the United States is situated on a dual system that has elicited binary themes and purposes: schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second-class citizenship. Such opposing traditions have thrived in American society and have been validated by the government and mainstream society. While education is regarded as a means for great equalization, history echoes the socio-historical factors that impacted formal education for African Americans since the conception of the United States. Nevertheless, the representation of Black education in the historical literature is often narrow and primarily focuses on the fiscal inequalities between segregated Black and White schools. It further characterized Black education as deficient and dependent on outside stakeholders. However, some scholars who have conducted historical research on Black schools during segregation have gone beyond such truncated representations (Bracey, 2016; Green, 2018; Walker, 2013). This article investigates an important, but often ignored, intellectual trend in the historical and contemporary scholarship on Black schooling. It further offers a counternarrative to the representation of predominantly Black schools and the experiences of Black people in education, and suggests directions for research on contemporary education for African Americans in the United States.