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20 In Search of an Education, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
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137 Public schooling in the United States throughout the nineteenth century was by modern standards appallingly inadequate.1 In Connecticut , by the 1830s, schoolhouses typically were dilapidated, the methods and materials of teaching primitive, and teachers more often than not untalented and untrained. Most boys and girls by the age of twelve or fourteen had left school for productive work on the farm or in the factory. Except in the dozen or so larger cities where clusters of African-American families made separate schools possible, the few black children in one-room school houses were treated with disdain, isolated, and inculcated with convictions of their own inferiority . How did this entrenched and virtually universal racism affect the education of Connecticut’s small black population? Most African-American children in antebellum Connecticut received little or no benefit from the common schools. Their parents were not welcome at district school meetings and were systematically excluded from the schools. In 1817 a group of black parents in Norwich protested an initiative by the town to collect poll taxes, which they had not previously paid, nor heard that blacks had ever paid in any town they knew of. The basis of their protest was that “if we must pay taxes the same as white people our request is that we might have the same Privilege granted us as the white people.” The particular deprivation they complained of was “the use of the Publick School Money.” The General Assembly, which they had petitioned , ordered Norwich either to admit the black students to the public schools or stop taxing their parents. The white town fathers chose to stop taxing them. Nevertheless, black children, forty-one of them, continued to attend Norwich’s common school, though apparently taught in separate rooms from white children at the time of the petition.2 Under the labor laws of 1813 and 1873, children could be excused Christopher Collier 20 In Search of an Education, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries 138 1789 to Civil War from attendance if they lacked suitable shoes or clothing to wear to school.3 The compulsory attendance law was loosely enforced in general and with regard to black juveniles not at all. Thus the poorest children—those whose parents could not afford shoes or warm clothes for them, who needed their ten-year-olds at home to take care of the three-year-olds, who needed the income of their twelveyear -olds, those who faced the greatest impediment to education generally—were Connecticut’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century black families. Henry Barnard pointed this out in 1838 when in his annual state-wide student enumeration of those least likely to attend school he listed black children—for whom he urged the establishment of separate schools and the enforcement of truancy laws. That would cost less, he declared, than the expense of the prosecuting and incarcerating all the black criminals apprehended in the state. Negroes’ education, he said, “would be cheaper to the community than their crimes and vices, which are the offspring of neglect and ignorance.” Barnard’s suggestion was widely and deeply unpopular, and he didn’t repeat it in subsequent annual reports.4 Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, some AfricanAmerican parents sent their children—at least until the age of nine or ten—to the district common schools. For instance, James Mars, a ten-year-old enslaved boy, attended a district school in Litchfield sometime around 1800, and enslaved children are known to have attended the district school in Colchester before the Revolution. Black and Native American children attended schools in Griswold, Haddam Neck, Colchester, and Norwich, sometimes with greater regularity than whites. In the last of these towns a segregated building , denominated a “high school,” was established for black children when the town gave up an old district school building in 1803, but when that facility was closed in response to public pressure in 1840, black students were barred from the public high school.5 Even where local custom permitted it, few black parents had the heart to compel their children to attend the district schools. As William W. Ellsworth—who later became Connecticut’s governor— pointed out in 1833, “Of every age and in every district school [black children] are to other pupils, but hewers of wood and drawers of water . . . the objects of taunt, contempt, and ridicule.” In Rocky Hill, a teacher customarily punished his students by making them sit next to the single black child in his school. A black...