Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP’s Fight for Equal Schools, 1916–1917

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2017-04-08 02:07Z by Steven

Walter White and the Atlanta NAACP’s Fight for Equal Schools, 1916–1917

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 7, Issue 1 (April 1967)
pages 3-21
DOI: 10.2307/367230

Edgar A. Toppin (1928-2004), Professor of History
Virginia State College

In 1917 a delegation of negroes went before the Board of Education in Atlanta, Georgia, to demand equal facilities for colored school children. This marked the beginning of the work in Atlanta of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The youthful branch secretary who sparked this drive, Walter Francis White, called this “our first fight and our first victory and … we have only begun to fight.” Despite his enthusiasm, Atlanta moved at a glacial pace toward parity in the dual school systems.

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The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Virginia on 2012-04-25 00:37Z by Steven

The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 4 (November 2007)
pages 389–415
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2007.00107.x

Melanie D. Haimes-Bartolf
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

That’s all you heard, everywhere we went, or whatever we done, “oh, he’s one of those issues.” We couldn’t work with white people, we couldn’t be in schools with them, we couldn’t associate with them, we couldn’t eat |with them). I think they came up with the slang word “free issue.” They had this hatred; they just had this ungodly hatred. They couldn’t accept you as a human.

At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.”‘ Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

In 1953, the school board of Amherst County, Virginia, approved plans for new white and black high schools, and the State Board of Education made it possible for Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indian children of Virginia’s tidewater to finish their education beyond the eighth grade at accredited Indian high schools outside Virginia. Notwithstanding, there was a group of children living in the Tobacco Row Mountains at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains for whom educational opportunity beyond the seventh grade would remain largely out of reach for another decade…

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