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3. Blacks in Higher Education Employment
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Blacks in Higher Education Employment The education of blacks has always been a major and controversial issue throughout American history. During the slavery era, many laws existed to restrict their ability to receive an education. After the Reconstruction Era, numerous laws were passed in the South to restrict black access to education by providing “separate but equal” schools, resulting in the segregation of blacks. The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 officially ended state-supported segregation in educational facilities, but numerous court decisions and court challenges to busing showed that this issue was not to be easily surmounted through the legal system. Prior to Brown, various court challenges had been made by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) to overturn the Jim Crow laws that had maintained the segregation system in the South. In the area of higher education, one significant early step in 1938 was Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the admission of a black student, who had been denied equal protection under the law, into the state’s law school.1 Nevertheless, such decisions did not end segregation in colleges and universities, as efforts to inhibit and obstruct black educational opportunities continued. While historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) offered blacks an opportunity to receive a college education, public hbcus were often established by states to maintain segregation in higher education . As Julian B. Roebuck and Komanduri S. Murty note, “public hbcus were created by the southern state governments for three reasons: to get millions of dollars in federal funds for the development of white land-grant universities , to limit black education to vocational training, and to prevent blacks from attending white land-grant colleges.”2 Later efforts such as the Higher Education Act of 1965, which made available a number of grants to students who were severely disadvantaged, provided many black students with the opportunity to attend higher education institutions; nevertheless, segregation still existed in the late 1960s. In 1970, the naacp Legal Defense and Educational Fund went to court to open up educational facilities by arguing that the Department of Health, Education , and Welfare (hew) had failed to constrain state-supported segregation by not discontinuing funding to segregated colleges and universities as required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.3 The Adams v. Richardson (1970) case was a response to a report made by hew that had found segregated colleges and universities in ten states and had attempted to secure voluntary compliance to end higher education segregation. In 1974, Judge John H. Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that action be taken against any of the ten states that did not develop desegregation plans. However, the same justice dismissed the case in 1987, stating that the Department of Education was not directly responsible for the problem and that the withdrawal of federal funding was not an adequate step for redressing the injuries . Pratt’s decision was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989. This case, which involved numerous attempts to develop desegregation plans, would be overshadowed by a more important Supreme Court decision in 1992. The latter case, which began in 1975, concerned the role of the state of Mississippi in ensuring equal higher education institutions and reached the Supreme Court in 1992 as U.S. v. Fordice. The Court ruled that “even after a State dismantles its segregative admissions policy, there may still be state action that is traceable to the State’s prior de jure segregation and that continues to foster segregation.”4 Thus, efforts must be made to eliminate any policy that is a product of past discrimination. The difficulties in eliminating segregation in higher education remain, as suggested by the extensive time required for both the Adams and Fordice cases to work their way through the legal system. Only recently have black faculty established a foothold in white institutions. Such a notable as W. E. B. Du Bois was unable to find employment in a prominent university, except for a brief stay at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1890s, and ultimately he was employed by a black institution, Atlanta University .5 There were a few past examples of blacks finding employment in white institutions, such as Charles L. Reason, who taught at the abolitionist New York Central College in the 1850s, and...