When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and…

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits federally funded programs, activities, and institutions from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. In its current form, Title VI remains largely unchanged since its adoption. Unlike the Civil Rights Act's better known and more heavily litigated provisions, Title VI is concerned…

When the New Orleans school board appointed E. J. Edmunds, a light-skinned Afro-Creole man, the mathematics teacher for the city's best high school in 1875, the senior students walked out rather than have a "negro" as a teacher of "white youths." Edmunds's appointment was a final, bold act by the city's mixed-race intellectual…

Six years after "Brown v. Board of Education", Atlanta reluctantly complied with the order to desegregate its school system rather than risk having schools closed due to noncompliance. Out of 132 students, nine black high school seniors desegregated four of Atlanta's all-white high schools. The purpose of this study is to explore and…

As the anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education" decision arrives again without any major initiatives to mitigate spreading and deepening segregation in the nation's schools, the Civil Rights Project adds to a growing national discussion with a research brief drawn from a much broader study of school segregation to be published in…

The enduring condition of racial and ethnic segregation in schools and housing in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut, is rooted in historical and contemporary racial discrimination and in practices and policies that exacted disparate harm on Black and Latinx people. School segregation both reflects and reinforces segregation in housing that was…

This article examines corporal punishment in U.S. public schools, proposes a national conversation regarding its use, and advocates for a national policy to promote nonviolent discipline methods and prohibit corporal punishment of children in educational settings. The United States remains one of the few postmodern societies without a national…

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided "Brown v. Board of Education," a case that is known throughout the US and around the world for its strong statements about equality and about the importance of education. The years since the "Brown" decision have been filled with many changes in US law and society. From the…

In the 1960s, "Muhammad Speaks" and "Black Panther" were widely known for their sensational rhetoric and calls for radical social reform. Yet they also served as a distinct voice in Black communities, providing critical and creative perspectives on a range of social issues--from education reform to police reform--that received…

When viewing the landscape of learning and literacy, politics and policy often intersect. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy is one skill that progressives sought to expand and others historically used to restrict access to immigration, jobs, and civic participation. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century,…

On June 25, 2007, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in "Morse v. Frederick", a long-awaited ruling regarding student speech in public schools. For nearly twenty years, the Supreme Court had been silent on the issue while lower courts attempted to apply the rules announced in previous Supreme Court decisions. It is…

This essay revisits an iconic yet now languishing phrase in United States political culture--"Forty Acres and a Mule"--to clarify the meaning of freedom and to assess the contemporary meaning of its betrayal by the U.S. government immediately after the Civil War. Among the few citizens for whom the phrase still retains a semblance of…

This article documents the efforts by Mexican Americans to challenge school segregation in Arizona in the first half of the twentieth century. As in Texas and California, although state law never formally mandated the segregation of Mexican American students, school districts in Arizona often established separate "Mexican Schools" for…

With the increasing number of undocumented workers entering the United States and the costs associated with educating their children, bilingual education may soon become the target of opponents of illegal immigration. Furthermore, recent leftist shifts in Latin American governments have provided an impetus for an educated biliterate population…

Eminent African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his book "The Miseducation of the Negro," published a generation before the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, concerned himself not with the racial composition of classrooms and schools, but with the curricula taught both in the schools and the larger culture. Certainly Woodson…