In this article, inspired by Toni Morrison's evocative description of places that are "never going away" and events that "will happen again," the author explores the historical legacies of racism, law enforcement, and educational inequality in Covington, Kentucky. The author argues that these legacies can best be understood by…

When examining the efforts of African Americans to create and operate viable primary and secondary schools from 1865 to 1870 in Kentucky, it is difficult to not contemplate what potentially might have been had national support for the Black transition from enslavement to freedom not waned. W.E.B. Dubois and several subsequent historians concluded…

Indigenous slavery was a critical aspect of New Mexican life and culture during the Spanish, Mexican, and early American (Territorial) periods. Aside from the labor and military support provided by indigenous slaves for the expansion of the province, the genetic contribution to the population growth was enormous. Ramón Gutiérrez (1991) speculates…

The Civil War ended slavery but not the pernicious inequality of power and status that still characterizes relations between black and white America. As soon as they could, with the help of presidents bent on appeasement and the benign neglect of northerners who had fought the war to preserve the union but not necessarily to invite former slaves…

At a time when most other institutions of higher education in the country excluded ex-slaves from admission, the University of Kansas conferred degrees upon sixty African Americans by 1910. However, while the university did allow ex-slaves to matriculate, these students still experienced a degree of exclusion and encountered barriers of racial…

In "Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980," education historians David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot (1982) offer a model for understanding the evolution of U. S. public school leadership from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The authors assert that prior to 1890, common school…

Recent studies of G. Stanley Hall's opus, "Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education" (1904), have highlighted one of the book's most problematic implications: if young people were thought to be the developmental analogues of "primitive" or "savage," then the treatment…

Congressman George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts introduced a bill "to establish a system of national education" on February 25, 1870. This bill, and others that followed, opened an acrimonious political debate that lasted for twenty years. The opening salvos of that debate, and the regional issues of ethnicity and religion that framed…

The once all black Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, has had a long and interesting past. For more than a century, the high school attempted to maintain a strong academic core amidst pressure from the white community to become a vocational or "industrial" school, following the Tuskegee model. In this article, the author…