In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

The Black Appalachian educational experience during the civil rights era has largely been obscured by mythologies of invisibility and regional racial innocence. The narrative in this article counters these myths through the stories of Black Appalachians who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s in Jenkins, a southeastern Kentucky coal town. It…

This article examines Black parents' efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the…

This paper examines an "experimental" program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)--who…

Although it is obligatory to mark the anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education," why it deserves to be commemorated is not necessarily obvious at a distance of fifty years. In this article, the author discusses this issue in the light of Richard Kluger's remarkable book--"Simple Justice." He states that, today the widespread existence of…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their students played a pivotal part in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Private HBCUs, in particular, provided foot soldiers, intellectual leadership, and safe places to meet and plan civil disobedience. Their economic and political autonomy from the state enabled the…