The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois

4. Exclusion at the Local Level

4 Exclusion at the Local Level In any consideration of the interplay between statewide imposition by General Assemblies and local freedom of decisionmaking by district officials, it should be remembered that the Illinois school laws applying to the entire state did not prescribe or proscribe public schooling for blacks or require either racially integrated or segregated public schools. What the state school laws did do was use the restrictive word "white" to link the amount of state school tax apportionments for a district to a count of the number of "white" children of school age residing there. A district could, if it wished, incur the financial expense of admitting black children into its public schools provided that its freedom of choice on the matter were not narrowed or eliminated altogether by local injunctions. Clauses in town or city charters, ordinances passed by municipal councils, and rules and regulations by school boards might forbid the admission of black children or admit them to "colored schools" only or admit them generally according to formal directives making no mention of race at all. Rather naturally a question arises as to how many school districts did admit black children into the local public schools on a segregated or nonsegregated basis during the antebellum and bellum years. Quantitative data are lacking for the early period, but statistics bearing on the issue were offered by the blacks themselves at their third state convention, held at Galesburg on October 16, 17, and 18, 1866. The call for delegates had announced that the object of the convention was to lay plans for securing the rights of suffrage, access to the courts, and a share of public-school "privileges." In connection with the latter the convention's committee on education told the delegates that it 44 Exclusion at Local Level had found in the state 8,000 black boys and girls eager for learning but that less than 100 were "in" the public schools.1 State Superintendent ofPublic Instruction Newton Bateman was more optimistic in his biennial report for 1865-66. The information he collected from the county superintendents of schools in 1865 showed 743,226 white children and 4t444 black six to twenty-one years of age in the state. Dissatisfied with gaps in the returns on black children, Bateman in his next year's inquiryordered the county superintendents to be sure to have the township treasurers answer the question about the number of blacks of school age in their districts. For 1866 the figure was 4,931. Still dissatisfied, Bateman made some calculations that he thought would yield a more accurate statistic. He assumed that the percent of black children between six and twenty-one years of age to the total state population of blacks would be the same as that for whites, or 35 percent. Taking 35 percent of 17'}40, the total state population of blacks in 1865, he arrived at the sum of 6,069 blacks of school age. Of these, he estimated that at least one-half were, as he ambiguously phrased it, without the "means" of a public-school education.2 The convention's judgment that less than 100 black children were in public schools was certainly too low. Bateman's calculations were literally correct but convey an impression that black public-school enrollment or attendance was far higher than it truly was. Various reliable sources reveal that in the mid-1860s black children were being admitted to public schools in Alton, Chicago, Decatur, Galesburg, Jacksonville, Peoria, Quincy, and Springfield. In Chicago 97 blacks were attending public school in 1865; in Galesburg 87 were attending in 1867; in Peoria 23 were attending in 1862; in Springfield 60 were attending in 1866. If 33 more were being taught in the schools on the preceding list and in others accepting blacks for which no quantitative records are available, the total number of black children attending public school during those years would be 300 (5 percent) out of some 6,000 blacks of school age. Bateman's returns for 1866 indicated that the total number of pupils "in attendance" at all public schools was 614,659. To be on the generous side, double the number of 300 black pupils and add 59 and say that 659 were attending Illinois public schools in 45 Black Struggle for Public Schooling 1865-66. Then the percent of blacks "in attendance" at public schools would be approximately...