African Americans and Education
Missionary groups in Northern Mississippi helped establish schools to educate African American youth. White supremacists realized the on-goings on such missionary groups and demanded to have control of the system, hoping to quell efforts to educate African Americans.
The Constitution of 1868 did not include information on integrating public schools and it was determined by legislators that each individual school district to include integration or not. Superintendents of each county were told to divide the funds equally between white and black schools in the district, but equal rights was very uncommon and most of the funding was sent to white schools.
Therefore, white schools were better constructed and were able to better serve the students academically. During the 1870s, education for blacks was further endangered as violence erupted in protest to educate African Americans. Also, the government cut greatly decreased funding for public schools and effectiveness of schools diminished.
State Superintendent J. R. Preston in 1886, created a revised education code that slowly raised standards in the classroom and teachers were then paid more in salaries than before and were required to take teacher licensing exams.
Read more about this topic: Education In Mississippi
Famous quotes containing the words african, americans and/or education:
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“Southerners, whose ancestors a hundred years ago knew the horrors of a homeland devastated by war, are particularly determined that war shall never come to us again. All Americans understand the basic lessons of history: that we need to be resolute and able to protect ourselves, to prevent threats and domination by others.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches—enduring loneliness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)