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Race and Segregation in St.Paul’s Public Schools,1846–1869 William D. Green Education,especially public education,has been valued since the early days of the American Republic.William Green discusses St.Paul’s commitment to public education from 1846 to 1869 and its decision to segregate black school children by the mid-1850s even though the“white” public schools continued to include mixed race (Indian) children.After achieving territorial status in 1849,citizenship increasingly became tied to white male suJrage.As St.Paul’s population grew,race lines became more distinct.Most white arrivals from the east came from states already practicing segregation in education; increasing black migration up the Mississippi fueled racist fears in St.Paul.However,after the Civil War,the movement for black suJrage grew as part of Reconstruction. While Minnesotans voted down a state referendum in both 1865 and 1867,in 1868 black suJrage was passed in Minnesota,two years before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified.By March of 1869,St.Paul’s brief experiment with segregated education (definitely separate and not equal) was over,long before the 1896 Plessy v.Ferguson and 1954–55 Brown v.Board of Education decisions dealt with those issues nationally. For early St. Paul residents, the city’s venture into racially segregated schools was new. Before 1857,when the town’s board of education first decided that black children should attend separate schools,it was not unusual to find them seated next to white,Indian,or racially mixed students.Thomas S.Williamson, a physician-missionary seeking a teacher for his St.Paul school,wrote in 1846 that the person “should be entirely free from prejudice on account of color,for among her scholars she might find not only English, French and Swiss, but Sioux and Chippewas,with some claiming kindred with the African Stock.” Unlike other places in the antebellum North where blacks lived in rigid segregation ,territorial Minnesota was a virtually integrated community.In 1849,in fact,the newly seated legislature guaranteed funding for public education without reference to skin color.Antiblack sentiment was probably impractical in a place where bitter winters made mere survival a challenge, where one’s 335 success at farming and hunting was unpredictable, and where relationships with the native populations were uncertain.1 Racial intermingling had been commonplace in pre-territorial Minnesota. In 1837 schoolmaster Peter Garrioch recorded in his diary that his school at St. Peter’s (Mendota) opened “on the heterogeneous system” and included students of “Negro extraction.” Historian J. FletcherWilliams commented on St. Paul’s “curious commingling of races, the old Scotch, English and French settlers having married with the Crees and Chippewas, and crossed and recrossed until every shade of complexion, and a babel of tongues,was the result .” People of color clearly predominated in the community in 1845 when, Williams continued, “by far the largest proportion of the inhabitants were Canadian French, and Red River refugees and their descendants. There were only three or four purelyAmerican (white) families in the settlement. . . . English was probably not spoken in more than three or four families.”2 Racial mixing and acceptance, however, began to decline after Minnesota attained territorial status.In the fall of 1849,the first legislature embarked on a series of measures that incrementally limited civic participation to white males only. First, the body restricted suJrage to white males. Subsequent enactments used suJrage rights as the basis for such activities as serving as jurors and referees in civil law cases and holding village oIce.Race thus became a determinative factor in public life, and in this way the territory came to resemble most of the northern states that chose to deny black residents theircivil rights.3 The same legislators distinguished the new territory, however,when they enacted their“most important measure,” one which declined to exclude black children from being educated with white students.The act to establish and maintain common schools provided for a fund “for the education of all the children and youth of the Territory,” ages 4 to 21 years,and authorized a state tax of one-fourth of one percent, to be supplemented when necessary by a tax voted in each school district. In other words, this law required taxpayers to finance education for all children, including those whose parents were in the process of being disenfranchised.4 The author of the common-school bill was Canadian-born Martin McLeod. McLeod had been raised in the Red River settlement,where the majority...

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