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49 [It was once believed] that Negroes should have industrial education. The classics would spoil him by causing him to aspire to places designed for whites only. If our association had done nothing else within the past thirty years except to participate in changing this philosophy, it would have justified its existence and support. —North Carolina Teachers Association president Oliver R. Pope, 1934 We didn’t call it black history, as such then, but we just encouraged the children [to think] that, “You can do something, too.” —Former state supervisor of Negro elementary schools Ruth Woodson, 2002 Where formerly there was more or less an aversion on the part of the Negroes themselves to having vocational and industrial courses in their high schools, they are now rather keen that such courses be offered for their children. —State agent Nathan C. Newbold, 1935 c h A p t e r t w o Lessons in Citizenship Confronting the Limits of Curricular Equalization in the Jim Crow South In fighting for curricular equality, African Americans first had to challenge popularly held white assumptions of black intellectual inferiority, assumptions that endured even at the state’s center of white progressivism. Historian Guion Griffis Johnson recalled that when she was acquiring her doctorate during the 1920s at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, esteemed southern historian J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton argued, “As a child, the Negro is very bright and seems to give promise of development , but his mind freezes at the age of twelve. And he never develops beyond the age of twelve.”1 While many whites would continue to believe throughout the Jim Crow period that blacks were best suited for a less academic and more “practical” course of study, state school officials in the 1920s were increasingly willing—for both philosophical and pragmatic reasons—to offer tacit approval for black high schools with the same curriculum found in white schools. By the end of the 1920s, then, the storied industrial/classical fault lines were fading at the level of school policy. The achievement of nominal curricularequalization, however, raised as many questions as it answered. Many black schools lacked the resources 50 / leSSonS in citizenShip or local administrative backing necessary to implement the state’s standard curriculum. For example, even though state law technically required local districts to hold equal-length terms for black and white schools, as late as the early 1930s, it was not uncommon to find officials in rural areas operating longer terms for the white schools. Even in cases where black and white schools operated for equal terms, the economic circumstances of black farming families, especially those who answered to white landowners , often meant that black children had difficulty taking full advantage of school offerings. “It was sad to see school buses filled with white children going to the schools, while truck and wagon loads of Negro children were going to the cotton and tobacco fields,” recalled one Jeanes supervisor. By the 1940s, most districts operated equal terms, but white privilege could still be found in the distribution of curricular resources. Noting the lackof supplemental readers in blackelementary schools, black educator and state board of education member Harold Trigg lamented in 1956, “The Negro college student of today has had a one-reader education .”2 The links between resource allocation and curricular parameters were particularly evident in the state’s early black public high schools, where coursework was more likely to require expensive equipment and facilities than was the case in elementary schools. While much black interest in school curricula centered on the basic equalization of course offerings, two reform movements addressed broader questions about the role of curricula in preparing students for full citizenship. As historian Carter G.Woodson’s black history movement gained ground in the 1920s, some black educators argued that true curricular equality entailed not just access to white-authored courses of study and equal resources but also the right to influence how and what students learned. Lessons in black history, they argued, imparted a kind of cultural citizenship that functioned as a necessary antidote to white assumptions of black inferiority. By the depression era, curricular interest shifted with new urgency to the fundamental relationship between schooling and the achievement of full economic citizenship. In reaction to the narrow range of employment options available to black high school graduates, African Americans pressed for the more diverse vocational programs found at some white high schools and colleges. Many African Americans ultimately questioned...

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