Historically Black colleges and universities are a unique institutional cohort in American higher education. These colleges have been celebrated for their achievements and critiqued for their composition at differing points during their collective history. This article addresses contemporary ebbs and flows of their relevance and reputation in the…

Historians of education have probed into the involvement of Social Reconstructionists' with issues of racial justice and have argued explicitly that Social Reconstructionists, while "interested" in racial problems during the Depression, actually did little to carefully study the role of race or race relations in America. The authors found that…

The anti-slavery ministry of Rev. John G. Fee and the unlikely establishment of Berea College in Kentucky in the 1850s, the first college in the southern United States to be coeducationally and racially integrated, are examined to further understand the conditions surrounding these extraordinary historical events. The Berea case illustrates how…

This article examines how African American scholars during the early twentieth century employed the genre of curriculum writing to challenge existing discourses of race. Drawing from the findings of a qualitative document analysis of textbooks created by Carter G. Woodson and Charles H. Wesley, this article illustrates how these authors used texts…

This article applies the paradigm of Black insurgency and social uplift to the teaching of the Greek and Latin classics at Black colleges and universities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It demonstrates how study of the classics helped construct the tools of Black agency by imparting three important lessons: the knowledge that…

The state of New South Wales has, over a period of two centuries, tried policies ranging from indifference, segregation and protection, through assimilation and compensatory programs to the present era where some believe self-determination and self-management will provide answers to education problems due to lack of consultation, inappropriate…

The inability of American colleges and universities to produce teachers for America's urban classrooms has reached epidemic proportions. This article seeks to describe the legal effects of policies and laws designed to create conditions for highly qualified teaching professionals. Issues germane to the topic of urban teacher preparation and…

This article explores the ways in which race is implicated in efforts to address the achievement gap in U.S. schools. Through an analysis of the theoretical and historical issues that have framed the relationship between race and intellectual ability, the author explains why the effort to close the achievement gap is politically and socially…

This article reported accounts of educational jeopardy in ABC Secondary School (pseudonym) in eastern Ethiopia. The data were collected through school and classroom observations and from the reflections of schoolteachers, school administrators, school pupils, and University student teachers. The critical ethnographic research approach used in this…

The authors present findings from an oral history of the all-Black Douglass School, which existed in Parsons, Kansas from 1908-1958. The oral history of the school is significant for several reasons: (a) it adds to our understanding of segregated schools outside the South and northern urban centers, (b) the school was razed in 1962, and very…

This article examines the specific historical experiences of minority students at the University of Michigan from 1970 to the late 1990s, in order to provide a context for understanding and appreciating the ways in which affirmative action remedies should address patterns of past discrimination.

This study critically examines the influence of philanthropic foundations on the educational development of African Americans, especially from 1932 to 2007. Attention is given to the positive and negative motives of philanthropists as well as to the ways African Americans utilized funds and leveraged the provided opportunities. In addition, the…

This article is a retrospective analysis of a commentary we published in "The Journal of Negro Education" 25 years ago in which we discussed the interrelationships between and among the interpersonal, institutional, community, and African American achievement variables before and after the historic 1954 "Brown" decision. We discuss in this piece…

This article examines the education of African American girls and women. It begins with a look at scholarship on African American girls and women published in "The Journal of Negro Education" from its inception in 1932 to the present. Subsequently, a historical overview of the long, hard-fought struggles of educating this population for…

It was an honor for Faustine Jones-Wilson to be the first female editor of "The Journal of Negro Education", a highly respected publication. In addition to the scholarly work involved in this role, there were many challenges to be met and overcome. Most of these challenges were not related to her gender, but to changes within the University.…