African American Education In The 1930s

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The end of the Great Depression and we can see that school boards have merged together and accept children of all nationalities into their schools. However as nice as this might sound, they did not do this out of their good will, but rather for money. In the 1930s schools are having an extremely difficult time finding corporations to find the school and its workers. In addition there was a huge boom of funds for schooling in the 1920s, letting schools introduce subjects such as physical education, music, art, etc. Who knew all of them would be taken away so soon just to save money? Many teachers got fired, and a majority of the teachers salaries are cut. “Between 1929 and 1934, average teachers' pay fell from $1,420 to $1,227 annually, a drop …show more content…

To add to the segregation, in most schools boards African Americans are not represented, so they are not able to push for better funding for their neighbourhood schools. Equally important, most of the schools that are built are elementary schools; a high school for African Americans is virtually unheard of.Only 19 percent of blacks aged fourteen to seventeen are enrolled in high school, compared to 55 percent of all white students, In some states, such as Mississippi, nearly nine times as many white students attended high school as did black students ~—despite the fact that black teenagers constituted the majority of the secondary-school-age population in that state.(Gale). Lastly, due to the school boards belief that African Americans are incapable of learning, the designed a program for them for industrial education that is to take place instead of high school. Industrial education was meant to teach African Americans how to do low-wage jobs such as carpentry, auto mechanics, bricklaying, sewing, laundry working, or cooking. “The Times Picayune explained that industrial education alone would ‘render the Negro youth more efficient in their chosen …show more content…

Yet the state of black education is not that grim. “Black colleges prospered during the decade, beneficiaries of donations by northern white philanthropists who weathered the Depression without difficulty. New Deal agencies, especially the National Youth Administration, provided African Americans with instruction in academic subjects, industrial arts, and domestic services.”(Gale). The highlight of this time however, is that northern cities that African Americans used to budget cutbacks of the Great Depression as a way to disintegrate segregation. In cities such as Philadelphia, black educators argued that school systems could conserve some financial resources by strengthening the separate black and white school systems. African Americans had made several plans and techniques to challenge the segregation in american schools. “In 1932 African Americans created the Educational Equality League of Philadelphia. The league had three main objectives: desegregation of schools, the hiring of black teachers, and the appointment of an African American to the Philadelphia school board. By 1940 they had substantially accomplished all three goals.”(Gale). And furthermore lawsuits which are supported by the NAACP (National Association of Advancement of Coloured People) challenged segregation on national court. Progress started being seen. In 1934 the school board in a Philadelphia town desegregated its schools. In May

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