5.1: African American Education - Readings and Media

The selected readings, images, and videos of this module will inform students about African Americans fight for education and how key figures, legal activities, and the United States racial climate has informed African Americans' educational experiences.

Readings and Videos

The Great Migration

Fifty years after the United States outlawed slavery, African Americans fled the South in huge numbers in a movement that became known as the Great Migration. Resettling in northern cities, where they sought better lives, employment, some degree of social equality, and an escape from daily violence, the migrants (numbering approximately 500,000 in the first wave, from 1916 to 1919) did find more opportunities in the North, where they transplanted some of the most vibrant aspects of their culture. However, they also faced brutal violence reminiscent of what they had left behind in the former Confederate States of America.

Fleeing Jim Crow Laws

The mass migration transformed both the South and the North. Most notably, African American migrants settled in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and the Harlem section of New York City. Those cities became the first U.S. urban centers with large African American populations. What attracted African Americans to the North? The answer lies not only in the opportunities they believed existed in the North, but also in the fact that the South was a brutal place for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. In the years following emancipation, Southern politicians enacted so-called Black Codes that very closely replicated slave codes—a series of laws that severely limited the personal and social behavior of enslaved Black people.

The new Black Codes, known as Jim Crow laws, enforced strict racial segregation in every aspect of southern life, including education, transportation, and the legal arena. Although Jim Crow laws were a blatant violation of civil rights guaranteed to African Americans in the post-Civil War era, in 1896 they received the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision that codified the separate-but-equal doctrine. The formerly enslaved also endured crushing poverty and continued subservience to white Southerners under sharecropping—a form of pseudoslavery in which white landlords retained economic control over African Americans. A boll weevil infestation that obliterated cotton crops across the South beginning in 1915 further worsened African Americans' state of economic dependence.

In addition, African Americans also faced entrenched violence in the South. For example, the Ku Klux Klan and even some mainstream white citizens regularly lynched African Americans as a means of maintaining social control through terror. In short, the American South was an especially dangerous place for African Americans by the time World War I opened up new opportunities in the North. Labor agents traveled to the South to entice African Americans northward, while at the same time Southern employers and landholders often intimidated and brutalized African Americans who tried to leave. The mass exodus of African American laborers left the already economically troubled South in an even worse condition.

The Lure of the North

In addition to the lure of jobs, African Americans were persuaded to move northward by the encouraging letters of friends, family, and others who themselves had made the trip. African American churches in the North extended assistance to potential migrants as well. Perhaps most importantly, the Chicago Defender, a newspaper edited by African American Robert Abbott, railed against Southern injustices and encouraged African Americans living in the South to migrate to Chicago and other Northern cities, where conditions were far better for African Americans. The power of the Chicago Defender was such that many Southern localities banned its distribution, fearing its goal of tempting African Americans to leave the South.

On arrival in the North, African Americans found that there were jobs to be had. Those newfound job opportunities were due to the recruitment of U.S.-born white men into the military during World War I, which left positions vacant. Immigration laws of that era had severely restricted the influx of European immigrants who would normally fill those positions, and in the absence of native-born white workers and European immigrants, African American migrants filled the jobs. The newcomers, however, received substantially lower pay than their white counterparts and were often excluded from promotions or higher-paying positions. Nevertheless, wartime industrial production increased exponentially, creating many new positions that African Americans eagerly filled.

Impact on the North

The effects of the Great Migration on the North were nothing less than transformative. African Americans brought with them their culture, which left an indelible mark on the Northern, urban way of life. Among those cultural contributions was the introduction of "soul food" to Northern cuisine and the hugely influential infusion of blues into Northern music. In addition, African American migrants were part of a larger cultural transformation that sowed the seeds of what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance and contributed to the emergence of modern Black society.

Even while making some economic strides and enjoying a cultural flowering, African Americans often found the urban North to be as inhospitable and hostile as the South had been. In the North, as in the South, racism permeated every aspect of public life. The relatively new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in mounting legal challenges to discrimination. Additionally, the National Urban League was created in 1911 to advance the interests and protect the rights of new African American migrants. Such leaders as Ida Wells-Barnett fought to bring an end to physical assaults on African Americans, most particularly in the form of lynching, while W.E.B. Du Bois and others worked in the courts to challenge legal discrimination.

The challenges those activists faced were daunting. Believing themselves to be at risk of losing their economic and social position, frightened white Northerners lashed out at the new arrivals. Matters worsened in 1919 when American soldiers returned from World War I only to find a social and cultural landscape vastly changed by the Great Migration. A series of race riots erupted that targeted African Americans, igniting racial hatred and causing immense economic, physical, and personal damage. The most violent of those riots was East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917 and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. White gangs, often with the unspoken or open support of local police, roamed the cities, attacking African American citizens. In all, more than 20 race riots broke out in American cities in 1919, and the human toll was staggering.

Second Migration and Aftermath

A second migration wave that began in 1940 would generate similar demographic changes and, unfortunately, would lead to a repeat of the kind of racial violence that characterized the mass movement of African Americans to the North in the early part of the 20th century. The tremendous demographic changes brought by the Great Migration and the cultural and political transformations it produced also laid the foundation for the later civil rights movement. Faced with such extreme and pervasive discrimination in the North, African Americans demanded and fought for equal rights.

Because of factors encompassing social conditions, racism, economic opportunity, and quality of life, during the 1990s the migratory direction of African Americans began to reverse. The overall condition and high crime rates of Northern cities, especially inner-city neighborhoods, had deteriorated to the point that many Black residents began to move to the South. By the turn of the 21st century, two times as many African Americans were moving to the South as those who were leaving the South.

Maeve Devoy

Allen Raichelle

Devoy, Maeve, and Allen Raichelle. "Great Migration." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1407061. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.

Segregation

Segregation in the United States consists of the legal or socially enforced separation of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities from mainstream society both in public and private spheres. Such practices included restrictions on public accommodations, transportation, education, and employment. It can further involve the spatial separation of groups along with the mandatory use of different and usually inferior institutions, such as schools and hospitals.

Institutional Segregation

Institutions foster segregation, in housing for example, through selective enforcement of codes, the provision of services, and urban renewal policies that further isolated communities. Law enforcement and sentencing guidelines, immigration policies, and other actions reach beyond individual actions and make social assumptions a matter of policy.

Two major types of segregation have and continue to exist in the U.S. to the present day. De facto ("in-fact") segregation exists when members of a particular group mutually or under social pressure associate and conduct business and social relations apart from the mainstream. This type is often found in areas with large immigrant or migrant communities in rural regions or urban neighborhoods. De jure (by law) segregation received the sanction and enforcement of law based on the provision of separate-but-equal facilities and an acceptance of a lower level of citizenship and legal rights. Supported by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, public policies based on its provisions were targeted primarily at African Americans. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African Americans provided a lower quality of service than those reserved for whites, both North and South.

Maintenance of segregation came in a variety of forms, from restrictive covenants placed in housing deeds that prohibited particular groups, discrimination in rentals, voting restrictions, institutional separation in the armed forces, and limitations placed on hiring and promotion in employment. Particularly during the period from 1890 to 1930, vigilante violence throughout the U.S. resulted in thousands of reported and unreported lynchings and acts of violence for real or perceived breaches of social customs.

Segregation in the North

The First and Second Great Migrations, from 1915 to 1930 and 1940 to 1970, brought many African Americans to northern cities, where clashes with white people and other ethnic groups resulted in new segregated areas that would offer few avenues for advancement.

Though many immigrant groups eventually found acceptance into mainstream society, African Americans remained the primary targets of social and legal segregation. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, a series of court cases and congressional laws ended legal segregation. These included President Harry Truman's 1948 order to desegregate the armed forces; the Supreme Court cases Shelly v. Kraemer (1948) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended restrictive deed covenants and "separate-but-equal" policies in education respectively; and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Together with federal and state enforcement, these policies ended the most egregious examples of legal segregation. Despite these changes, segregation continues to the present shaped by the movement to suburbs, continued mortgage and lending discrimination (also called redlining), and the unequal provision of education, public services, health care, housing, and employment.

Matthew L. Daley

Daley, Matthew L. "Segregation." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2025, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/2152541. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.