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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 43. Institutions - 4. The Negro School and Negro Education
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946 An American Dilemma
treated differently than are white students.® The main reason why the
average Negro gets an education inferior to the average white in the North
is that poverty and disease keep him out of school more and force him to
leave school at an earlier age. The rising legal minimum age for leaving
school—all Northern states having some sort of compulsory attendance law
since the Civil War—and the lack of employment opportunities, especially
during the depression of the 1930% have tended to reduce this differential,
except at the college level. The school, outside of the activity of educating
the young, is not important in the life of the Northern Negro community
—a general characteristic of all schools in Northern cities where Negroes
live. Only one aspect of Northern education for Negroes requires special
attention: like white students, Negro students in the North are inculcated
with the American Creed and with the traditional American virtues of
efficiency, thrift, ambition, and so on. But employment opportunities—and
to a lesser extent, some of the other “good” things of life—are so closed
to them that these school-bred attitudes create special conflicts in their
minds and cause them to become especially cynical with regard to them.**
But this cynicism is by way of defense, and their deprivations cause the
Northern Negro youth to place the highest value on the American Creed
and the American virtues.
The situation in the South, however, is different. While the federal and
state constitutions require equal educational facilities for Negroes and
whites, and the pretense is kept up that the constitutional requirements are
met by “separate but equal” school systems: actually, however, the educa-
tional facilities for Negroes are far inferior to those for whites except at a
few universities supported by Northern philanthropy or by the federal
government. To a great degree this is inevitable where two parallel segre-
gated school systems must be maintained.*^ The richer Northern commu-
nities, with a smaller proportion of Negroes, find it a drain on the budget
to support a single decent school system, much less two. The insufficient
support of Negro schools in the South is reflected in a complete lack of
schools in some rural areas, an insufficient number of schools in other areas,
a grave lack of equipment, a lack of enforcement of the truancy laws for
Negroes, an inferior quality of teacher training, differential payment to
teachers, and miserably poor standards all around. The situation has been
so bad that Southern Negroes have lost much of the faith in education
they once had.
In the rural South the one-room school house for Negroes is fairly typical,
with the whole range of elementary grades taught by a single teacher in a
* Except at the graduate level, when instructors in the social sciences expect Negro students
to study Negro problems.
“See Chapter 36.
•Sec Chapter 15, Section 35 and Chapter 41.
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