With its findings that socioeconomically integrated classrooms could improve the academic achievement of minority students, James S. Coleman's 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity augmented federal support for school integration. While we know a great deal about how scholars, politicians, and educational activists have debated the meaning and implications of the Coleman Report for the past fifty years, we know much less about how this report influenced debates over school integration in northern black communities after 1966. This paper investigates how black northerners responded to the Coleman Report and the federal support for school integration that it inspired. I find that the Coleman Report coincided with a growing skepticism among northern blacks that school integration could advance the freedom struggle and that, as a result, it fueled a heated debate over the question of which would better serve the black freedom struggle: racially integrated schools or separate, black-controlled ones.

This paper is part of a larger project that investigates the long history of northern black debates over school integration, stretching from 1840s Boston to the present day. While impulses for both integration and separation are evident from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, I argue a discernible pattern exists where either integration or separation dominated the political discourse of black educational activists during specific eras. Black educational activists included not only individuals who worked for civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League, but also intellectuals, social scientists, parents, teachers, and students who chose to speak out or take action in support of either racially integrated or separate, black-controlled schools. These activists were united in their belief that public education offered a powerful tool for racial uplift and economic and social justice, but they were divided over whether school integration was the most effective strategy to realize these ends.

The publication of the Coleman Report coincided with a shift in northern black educational activism in 1966. After a period of robust support for school integration that erupted throughout the North during World War II, black northerners began to question whether school integration would deliver the objectives that civil rights activists imagined, including equal educational opportunities, improved academic achievement, higher self-esteem for black students, and a reduction in antiblack prejudice by whites.Footnote ¹ Drawing on a range of published sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, government reports, and academic scholarship, I contend that the Coleman Report helped fuel a backlash against school integration by black northerners frustrated by the mediocre results of school integration by 1966. As such, this research makes an important contribution to scholarship in civil rights, educational history, and educational policy by considering how the Coleman Report influenced the enduring debates over school integration among a diverse cast of black educational activists in the North.Footnote ²

Hailed by the Washington Post as “the nearest thing to an educational bombshell to come out of the Federal Government in a long time,” the 737-page Coleman Report represented the largest, most comprehensive, and most expensive social science investigation of racial equality in American public schools ever conducted.Footnote ³ Coleman and his research team surveyed more than 570,000 students and 60,000 teachers, and collected detailed information on the facilities available in more than 4,000 schools over a two-year period. Required by a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the purpose of the study was to ascertain whether racial minorities had equal educational opportunities in the public schools.Footnote ⁴ While no one was surprised by Coleman's findings that black, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and Native American children suffered educational inequality and intense racial segregation, the report nevertheless stunned social scientists and the public with its finding that the key factor in students’ academic success was the background of pupils and teachers—not the school and its material resources. “In effect, the report says that pupils do more to educate each other than does the school as such to educate the pupil,” surmised the Washington Post.Footnote ⁵ The Boston Globe was even more succinct, concluding, “the Coleman Report means that better schools do no good.”Footnote ⁶

In fact, Equality of Educational Opportunity offered more nuanced observations about the causes and consequences of racial inequality in American public schools, but the study was so enormous that journalists, scholars, and educational activists were able to cherry-pick findings that suited different agendas. Black and white liberals focused on Coleman's discovery that a child from an impoverished home benefited from attending school with large numbers of middle-class peers. What is more, middle-class children showed no decline in academic achievement in socioeconomically integrated settings, suggesting that school integration had the power to uplift poor children while leaving middle-class students unharmed. Liberals used this to argue that school integration would solve racial inequality in education, a claim that conflated Coleman's finding about the value of socioeconomic school integration with racial mixing. Nevertheless, it was also true that mixing large numbers of black youth with middle-class peers would require a significant amount of racial integration, since there were not enough black middle-class students to ensure socioeconomic integration in majority-black schools.Footnote ⁷ Writing in the Journal of Negro Education, scholars Harrell Rodgers and Charles Bullock determined, “The importance of these findings is that many black children can be placed in a middle income milieu only in an integrated environment.”Footnote ⁸

Figure 1: African American children on the way to P.S. 204 in Brooklyn, New York, pass mothers protesting the busing of children to achieve integration, September 13, 1965. (LC-USZ62-134434, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.)

Ironically, the Coleman Report engendered political support for school integration at the very moment when many black northerners had come to reconsider it as both a strategy and a goal of the larger civil rights movement. Self-identified black nationalists rejected liberal claims that the Coleman Report warranted more aggressive school integration, instead pointing to other aspects of the report they believed proved the benefits of separate, black-controlled schools. Of special interest was Coleman's finding that student attitudes had an enormous effect on academic achievement, regardless of the quality of educational facilities. For instance, Coleman found that, overall, black students felt in control of their fate “much less often” than whites. However, he also found that black pupils who felt they shaped their own lives had higher levels of academic achievement than white students who did not. Coleman concluded:

Black Power activists seized upon this finding to insist that only separate, black-controlled schools cultivated black students’ determination to overcome obstacles. Floyd McKissick, national chairman for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was one of many educational activists who bridled at the implication that black children must attend school alongside whites in order to succeed. “We are told that Negroes must be integrated into middle-class (and that means white) schools,” McKissick chided in the New Republic in the winter of 1966. “We are told that something called student culture really makes the difference. In other words, mix Negroes with Negroes and you get stupidity.”Footnote ¹⁰

McKissick was part of a group of younger, more militant Black Power activists who challenged the integrationist and assimilationist strategies of an older generation of civil rights warriors. He concluded that academics had only just discovered what black people in the urban North already knew: white parents would sabotage school integration by either moving out of district or transferring their children into private schools. He added, “It is difficult to live with this conclusion: that the Negro will have educational opportunity only with racial integration when it is quite clear, as [Christopher] Jencks notes, that ‘white America is not ready to do what would have to be done to integrate the Negroes.’” McKissick concluded that school integration was not an effective strategy for improving black academic achievement and that community-controlled schools offered a better way to guarantee that black youth received the education they needed to advance socially, economically, and politically.Footnote ¹¹

Speaking at a colloquium alongside Coleman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the fall of 1967, New York City teacher Preston Wilcox concurred, “I don't subscribe to the view that a black kid must sit next to a white kid to learn,” he told the packed audience. “The report is based on the myth of white supremacy. Schools improve only when educators become advocates of their students and not the system.” John Alexander, president of the Board of Education in Orange, New Jersey, made a similar point later that same day: “As far as I am concerned the Coleman Report provides a diversion from the urgent task at hand—the education of children. It gives aid and comfort to those who do not want to see black children educated.” He explained that, in Orange, mixing children of different races in school “did not correct the deficiencies that black children brought with them to school.” Alexander concluded that school integration alone did little to address the academic challenges of impoverished black youth, and that new solutions were needed.Footnote ¹²

The frustration and anger expressed by black educational activists like McKissick, Wilcox, and Alexander was palpable throughout the urban North by 1967, as evidenced by a series of urban uprisings that culminated with violent clashes with the police in Newark and Detroit.Footnote ¹³ The following year, the Kerner Commission concluded one major source of urban unrest was the widespread belief that public schools in majority black neighborhoods failed to provide students with a quality education. The Kerner Report determined, “The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts.”Footnote ¹⁴ Black Power activists believed they could harness the northern black masses’ growing frustration with public education and turn it into a positive force for social change. Calling for Black Power, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton stressed that control of “ghetto” institutions would enable blacks to reverse institutional racism and develop an effective base of political power to challenge racist structures of the city as a whole.Footnote ¹⁵ In New York City, Wilcox and other activists fought to seize community control of schools in majority black neighborhoods like Harlem and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. By this time, school integration efforts had failed to produce satisfactory results, and racial segregation and inequality had increased, to the tremendous anger and distress of black residents. As in many northern cities, school integration in New York City was undermined by an intersection of complex factors, including white parent resistance, white and middle-class flight, a rapid increase in the black and Latino school-age population, residential segregation, and political intransigence from white politicians and the local teachers union. In the fall of 1967, the US Commission on Civil Rights reported that racial segregation in American public schools continued to increase in the nation's twenty largest cities and that scholars expected this trend to continue for the foreseeable future. The Commission concluded, “With the continuing influx of Negroes into major cities integration is not possible unless school districts are completely revamped to provide huge educational parks taking in both urban and suburban students.”Footnote ¹⁶

While civil rights leaders doubled down on school integration efforts in the face of these dire warnings, many black parents, students, and community members were ready to consider a new tactic. Drawing on Black Power critiques of white institutions, they called for community control over school administration, curriculum development, student discipline, and teacher hiring. Although the prominence of this political strategy was new in 1967, Black Power activists situated themselves in a tradition of black protest stretching back more than a hundred years in the North.Footnote ¹⁷

As economist Robert S. Browne explained in 1968, “It was the black masses who first perceived that integration actually increases the white community's control over the black one by destroying black institutions, absorbing black leadership and making its interests coincide with those of the white community.”Footnote ¹⁸ For Black Power activists, community-controlled schools were not simply an alternative way to achieve the same goal as civil rights activists. Instead, black-controlled schools offered a radical vision for how public education could augment black autonomy and political power in a hostile and inherently racist society. The Coleman Report's finding that black students with positive attitudes and a sense of determination did better than their despondent peers provided objective scientific evidence that community-controlled schools could work to the benefit of black students. As Alvin F. Poussaint and Carolyn O. Atkinson confirmed in their study, “Negro Youth and Psychological Motivation,” “Participation in all-or-predominantly-black structures may well not be self-destructive if the black individual chooses rather than is forced to participate in them. For if he chooses, he is asserting control over his environment.”Footnote ¹⁹ Unlike integrated schools, community-controlled schools promised to preserve black institutions, protect the leadership roles of black teachers and administrators, and ensure that educational objectives aligned with the needs and aspirations of black citizens.

Figure 2: Doolittle East Elementary students participate in Crispus Attucks Day Commemoration in Chicago, March 5, 1968. (CULR_04_0199_2257_001, Chicago Urban League Records, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.)

Growing interest and support for black-controlled schools after 1966 prompted grave concern from the mainstream civil rights community. Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark had not only provided key social science data that convinced the US Supreme Court to outlaw school segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he had also led the school integration movement in New York City since 1955. Clark was a passionate integrationist who was appalled at the growing support for separate schools among black northerners. In 1969 at Haverford College, he brought together a group of prominent black intellectuals—Mamie Phipps Clark, Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, William H. Hastie, Hylan Lewis, J. Saunders Redding, Bernard C. Watson, Robert C. Weaver, St. Clair Drake, and Adelaide Cromwell Gulliver—to challenge Black Power and to reassert the moral and political supremacy of school integration. They called themselves the “Hastie Group” and organized annual meetings to discuss their shared conviction that “racial integration was essential to racial progress and justice in America.”Footnote ²⁰

Acknowledging that none of them expected the 1954 Brown decision to “function as a magic wand and immediately eliminate all past vestiges of racial cruelty and oppression and leave in its place an interracial Garden of Eden,” Clark admitted that the struggle for racial equality was even harder and more complicated than the black elite had anticipated. He believed that “rigid walls of racial segregation had left very deep anxieties in many Negroes concerning their ability to compete in the larger society on a single standard of achievement.”Footnote ²¹ This psychological interpretation was echoed by others, including Ellison, who wrote that black separatists were “frightened by the existence of opportunities for competing with their white peers on a basis of equality which did not exist for us. They suffer traumatically from the shock of sudden opportunity.”Footnote ²² Hastie added that while blacks were unhappy with segregation and discrimination, they often became accustomed to it nonetheless. “This is one of the evil consequences, perhaps the worst, of a long-endured caste system,” wrote Hastie. “When old restrictions of caste are relaxed, it is hard for the oppressed to throw off the ways of thinking and acting that their oppression has inculcated.”Footnote ²³

In case black nationalists failed to recognize these subtle critiques, Clark spelled out his distaste for the Black Power movement in a book entitled Black Separatism. Clark maintained that the black separatist movement in American education represented a deplorable combination of ignorance and cowardice. He pointed to high school and college campuses nationwide where black students were demanding black history courses and black student unions. He elaborated, “One dared to hope that eventually black students would become suspicious of how readily white college administrators granted their requests for separate facilities. It should have been obvious that the almost obscene haste with which these racially segregated facilities and courses were established under the guise of racial progress was quite consistent with residual racism.”Footnote ²⁴ Taking this critique a step further, Gulliver castigated young black militants for failing to learn from the lessons of their forefathers and foremothers. She wrote, “For all their separateness and proclaimed uniqueness, the young blacks of the sixties imbibed from their white peers many values, not the least of which was a culture of youth which saw no relevance in age, in experience, or in knowledge.” Gulliver was disappointed that young black militants seemed unaware of the long history of the black freedom struggle and, in particular, the ways that black intellectuals like herself had played a vital role securing full and equal access to formerly segregated institutions, including public schools.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, Watson chastised black separatists for giving up too easily when the fight for integration became bitter and fraught with unintended consequences. He despaired, “To this black American, it appears obvious that a withdrawal or a retreat—partial or complete—from the struggle for equality and full participation in all aspects of the society is a denial of our history.” Watson encouraged black youth to fight on for a more just and righteous goal: “To continue to struggle for integration in a pluralistic society without sacrificing, compromising, or losing our unique identity as a people is a difficult, but worthy and necessary undertaking.”Footnote ²⁶

As these examples illustrate, the Coleman Report provided fodder on both sides of the escalating debate in northern black communities over school integration versus separation after 1966. It provided solid social science evidence to support aggressive school integration, but it also suggested that separate schools could increase black students’ academic achievement by improving students’ self-esteem. This objective aligned with the emerging Black Power movement, which emphasized black control of key public institutions as a way to augment political and economic power.

In other words, even though most academics and many politicians believed that the Coleman Report provided incontrovertible support for school integration, a growing number of northern black parents, students, and teachers believed it offered persuasive evidence of the benefits of black-controlled schools designed to meet the needs of a majority black student body. By the end of the decade, northern black conceptions of school integration ranged from hopeful visions of political equality to angry fears of cultural annihilation. As such, it is crucial to understand how black educational activists conceived of school integration and separate, community-controlled schools as two viable strategies for advancing the black freedom struggle during the height of the civil rights and Black Power eras.