The first two decades of the 20th century breathed a spirit of progressivism into American life. This freshened sense of possibility extended few social and political benefits to Southern African Americans and their impoverished schools. Several Northern influential philanthropists and their foundations initiated and funded multi-year programs in…

"Race, ethnicity, and poverty are poor excuses for low expectations" (Monroe 1997, 111). Negro educators who forged an academic haven for secondary students in the early twentieth century held as strongly to this belief as did Monroe, an urban Black educator, a century and a half later. Whereas the American high school movement gained…