An early break in Harold Washington's political career came via a 1955 speech he delivered on equality of educational opportunity. Leaders of Chicago's Roosevelt University invited the popular alumnus (Washington was the first African-American class president) to speak at the tenth anniversary of the school's founding. The young Assistant State's Attorney shared the platform with such notables as former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and newly elected Mayor Richard J. Daley. In his speech, Washington remembered the university as “an experience in democratic living.” He viewed equal educational opportunity as the school's “cornerstone” because its admissions policy relied on objective examinations. At Roosevelt, Washington found “at all levels… people reaching out to fill whatever gaps [less privileged students] may have had in their backgrounds, which might retard them in their efforts… to be more useful citizens in our greater democracy.” Daley loved the crowd-pleasing speech and began grooming Washington to become the next Cook County prosecutor. Washington's career path, however, led elsewhere.

The community of Oberlin, Ohio, located in the northeast corner of the state, holds an important place in the history of the education of Black Americans. In 1834, one year after its founding, the trustees of Oberlin College agreed to admit students, “irrespective of color.” They were the only college, at that time, to adopt such a policy. Oberlin's history as the first college to admit Black students and its subsequent abolitionist activities are crucial to the discussion of Black educational history. Opportunities for education before the Civil War were not common for most of the American population, but for Blacks, these opportunities were close to nonexistent. In the South, it was illegal for Blacks to learn to read or write. In the North, there was limited access to public schooling for Black families. In addition, during the early nineteenth century there were no Black colleges for students to attend. Although Bowdoin College boasted the first Black graduate in 1827, few other colleges before the Civil War opened their doors to Black students. Therefore, the opportunity that Oberlin offered to Black students was extraordinarily important. The decision to admit Black students to the college, and offer them the same access to the college curriculum as their white classmates, challenged the commonly perceived notion of Blacks as childlike, inferior, and incapable of learning.

The educational history of Hispanic Americans is not a “new” history. Hispanic peoples began exploration, settlement, and even schooling in North America in the sixteenth century. A more appropriate metaphor is to think of Hispanic educational history as a rich, unearthed site awaiting the work of archivists and researchers. There is no doubt that the large post-1965 immigration of Latinos to the United States renewed interest among scholars in the history of these peoples. Yet contemporary social, political, economic, and educational issues raise the troubling question of why Hispanic-American history has remained neglected for so long. This essay is a beginning towards understanding the relationship between historians and the educational history of Hispanic Americans during the last century. Specifically, this historiographical inquiry examines some barriers that have dissuaded scholars from exploring the history of Latino influences in North America, assesses current writings, and recommends new directions for scholars wishing to pursue inquiry into the field of Hispanic-American educational history.