Table of Contents
 

Introduction                                                                                         

Chapter 1: Compromising to Win Black Teachers' Jobs

Chapter 2: Redefining the Local Meaning of Brown v Board    

Chapter 3: Calming the “Migrant Crisis” through Compensatory Education

Chapter 4: Confronting Established Blacks and Whites on Segregation  

Chapter 5: Uniting the Movements for Integration and Black Power

Chapter 6: Negotiating the Politics of Stability and School Desegregation                      

Chapter 7: Transforming Strategies for Black School Reform

Conclusion: Rethinking History and Policy in the Post-Brown Era         

Notes                                                  

Bibliography                

Introduction

            When Americans learn about our history of race and education, or the broader movement for civil rights, popular images of the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision become firmly planted in our minds. For instance, when visitors step into the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the striking images they encounter is a wall-sized photographic mural of attorney Thurgood Marshall and his NAACP colleagues proudly beaming from the steps of the United States Supreme Court. The day is May 17th, when the high court ruled on the five Southern and border state cases and declared the legalized segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional. Images like this one appear in dozens of volumes at libraries and bookstores, on multiple websites across the expansive internet, in history textbooks in thousands of classrooms, and on the television screens of millions of viewers. Several of these historical accounts, such as the widely-acclaimed Eyes on the Prize documentary series, use Brown as a starting point to launch a story about the dawning of the modern civil rights movement. As a result, these unshakeable images of the courageous struggle for school integration have been raised to a nearly mythological status in the American public's historical memory [1].
 

These images tell a crucially important story -- but there is more than one story to be told. Viewing the history of black education solely through the lens of Brown distorts our understanding of the past by focusing only on school integration, when in fact there have been struggles for numerous reforms: hiring black teachers, resettling migrant families, gaining better resources, including black curricula, and exercising community control. In very recent years, while some black advocates continue to press for integration, others have lobbied for Afrocentric schooling, private school vouchers, and in some cases, partially rolling back desegregation orders to return to neighborhood schooling. At first glance, when looking back on the past from today's perspective, contemporary black struggles over race and schooling seem to have abruptly parted from the integration movement. We confront an uncomfortable gap between our understanding of the past and present, particularly at this moment when our nation commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Brown.
 

Historians who seek to connect the popularized history of Brown with contemporary policy debates over race and schooling face a serious dilemma. On one hand, we should strive to make this history more relevant to people's lives. As activist-scholar Vincent Harding reminds us in Hope and History, activists' stories of the civil rights movement bring a special, transformative value to our present-day struggles, especially in times of despair. If we overlook stories like Brown (or worse yet, mistakenly assume that younger generations have already learned them), we risk losing the spiritual power of its moral victory against racism [2]. On the other hand, historians need to exercise caution against uncritical portrayals of Brown. The sum of black educational history cannot be cast as a one-dimensional struggle for integrated schooling. As historians Patricia Sullivan and Waldo Martin observe in Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement, popularized images of the struggle have inadvertently "frozen the movement in time." Yet black activism has not stood still since 1954. Thoughtful historians and educators are obligated to challenge the "conventional or master narratives of civil rights history," which tend to unfold as a straightforward journey toward justice and historical progress [3]. If we fail to challenge these celebratory accounts, then not only will we have misconstrued the past, but we also will have neglected to provide a meaningful historical basis for understanding race and education struggles in the present. Scholarship on the recent era of black freedom struggles -- especially regarding education -- needs an interpretive framework that satisfies both our historical and contemporary needs.
 

This book addresses those needs by tracing the evolution of black-led school reform efforts from the 1930s to the 1990s in one Midwestern city: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The study defines the history of black school reform as an interconnected series of overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) group efforts to gain power over educational policy and practice for the broader goal of uplifting the race. It shares a revised interpretation of African American urban history, which holds that there were "many different civil rights movements rather than a single unified movement dominated by a few elite leaders," and that these movements evolved through historical shifts in national influences, local contexts, and human agency. The book also draws inspiration from some of the best recent scholarly works on Southern black experiences of schooling in the twentieth century, such as David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road and Vanessa Siddle Walker's Their Highest Potential, by exploring how similar themes played out in a Northern urban setting [4].
 

The book's title, More Than One Struggle, operates on four levels of meaning, drawn from broader insights in the recent historiographical literature on race and civil rights. On one level, it examines continuous decades of black activism by looking at a sixty-year span, rather than narrowing its scope to the rise and fall of a specific struggle. This volume presents an interwoven narrative of three successive generations of black Milwaukee activists: proponents of black teacher hiring in the 1930s, of school integration in the 1960s, and of a counter-movement that gave rise to private school vouchers in the 1990s [5].
 

On a second level, the book investigates activists' multiple perspectives within black-led reform organizations. Historians of gender have long argued that activists' roles within civil rights movements deserve closer study, since the official spokespeople who delivered speeches were usually men, and the ordinary participants who did crucial support work were usually women. This volume contends that by studying both elite and everyday activists' perspectives we not only expand the cast of historical actors, but also reach new interpretations about why movements rose and declined during the 1960s [6].
 

On a third level, it probes the contested nature of historical memory in black school reform movements. Each generation of activists created its own version of the history of prior movements, most often to add greater coherence to the struggles faced in its own period. Recognizing the role of memory in a multi-generational study helps explain how different black reformers perceived and reacted to one another [7].
 

Finally, the book offers more than just another case study, by exploring the degree of interaction between local and national history. To be sure, the main narrative focuses on people and events in Milwaukee, but the underlying analysis points to connections (and disconnections) between them and national civil rights organizations, federal government, mass migrations, and news media. It draws comparisons with other Northern cities at specific points to help explain why changes occurred [8]. Framing the interpretation on these four themes allows us to historically examine the relationships between past and present struggles for black education, without being forced to argue that one is a direct descendent (or an abandoned stepchild) of the other.
 

            To be sure, Milwaukee is not the most familiar stopping point on the popularized civil rights trail "from Montgomery to Memphis." Yet Milwaukee's black population, which grew from under 1,000 to over 222,000 during the twentieth century, actively participated in broader movements. Local activists attracted national headlines during the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, school desegregation and fair housing protests in the 1960s, and the coalition for private school vouchers in the 1990s [9]. Black Milwaukeeans did not simply accept the nation's civil rights movement; they adapted it to fit their local conditions. Therefore, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the black freedom struggle as a whole, we need to focus more attention on places like Milwaukee, where the stories are not identical to those in the Southern states, nor in Northern cities with larger black populations (such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit), which have tended to attract the majority of historians' interests [10].
 

            More Than One Struggle is written as an analytical narrative. Each chapter is driven by an interpretive argument about a transitional period in Milwaukee's history, but the overall story is held together by narratives about four leading black activists and their contrasting visions of race and reform across successive generations. Another strand in this story — the Brown decision — touched all of their lives, but activists from various generations interpreted its meaning in different ways, as they encountered changing forms of racism over time.
 

The book begins with William Kelley of the Milwaukee Urban League, who, beginning in the 1930s, fought to gain jobs for black teachers in the all-white public schools rather than pushing for school integration. Given the city's small black population, its weak economic base during the Depression, and lack of political clout, Kelley made a difficult compromise with white officials to hire black teachers in schools only with sizeable numbers of black children. Later, in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, when its meaning was not yet clear for Northern schools, Kelley reinterpreted this student-oriented ruling to serve Milwaukee's job-oriented civil rights movement and eventually won significant numbers of jobs for black educators by the close of the decade. But Kelley's gains came during the peak years of Southern black migration into an increasingly segregated city. The migrants' arrival heightened racial anxieties on all sides and sharply increased the number of predominantly black schools, thereby lowering the status of inner-city schoolteachers' work in white eyes. As a result, the partial success of Kelley's generation of activism also entailed serious consequences for the next.
 

            The key figure of the second generation was Lloyd Barbee, an attorney and state NAACP activist who arrived in 1962 and soon launched Milwaukee's first sustained movement against segregated education. Barbee redefined the local meaning of Brown, insisting that it prohibited "Milwaukee-style" segregation as much as legalized separation in Southern and border states, and thereby joined a growing wave of Northern activism. He changed fellow Milwaukeeans from spectators to agitators in the fight for integrated education, and formed a mass coalition to sponsor the largest and most confrontational black-led protests ever witnessed by the city at that time, and he filed a federal lawsuit to prove his case in court. But Barbee's activists collided head-on with Milwaukee's established black leadership from the previous generation, whose political interests and personal experiences had never led them to condemn all-black schooling as the integrationists did. By examining 1960s activists' motivations for joining (and later departing from) Barbee's coalition against segregated schooling, the reasons underlying the rise and decline of this movement become more complex than just a simple ideological shift from integration to black power.
 

            By the 1970s, Milwaukee's black population had grown and diverged, giving rise to two strands of black education activism in two distinct neighborhoods. In the predominantly white, west-side Washington High School area, activist Marian McEvilly developed a small but influential black and white constituency to pursue school reforms that would stabilize their racially transitional neighborhood. McEvilly worked alongside Barbee during the lengthy school desegregation trial, and when the judge finally ruled in their favor, she had won election onto the white-dominated school board to negotiate the politics of desegregating schools. The most feasible plan, in McEvilly's eyes, called for the closure and conversion of the all-black North Division High School, a brand-new facility that inner-city community supporters had fought hard to win as a means for stabilizing their neighborhood. Activist Howard Fuller rallied to save the black-majority high school, bringing together a  diverse coalition of integrationists, black cultural nationalists, and long-term neighborhood residents. They redefined Brown yet again for Milwaukee, by arguing that placing the burden of desegregation on black shoulders was a form of racism in itself. By 1980, Fuller's coalition had displaced Barbee's generation as the prevailing voice of black school reform and had opened a subsequent era of activism for private school vouchers in the concluding decade of the twentieth century.
 

            Generations of black activists did not simply grapple with each other over politics; they also struggled over historical memories of "the movement" for civil rights. In the early 1960s, during the rise of the coalition for integrated schools, Lloyd Barbee and his colleagues ignored the established leadership's role in mobilizing for black jobs in the 1940s. Similarly, when black activism split along the lines of the Washington and North Division High School movements in the 1970s, each group created its own historical interpretation of 1950s-era black schooling. One side supported the legal case that segregated schools were inferior, while the other side celebrated the positive memories of a tight-knit black community. These conflicting histories confirm that black activists not only fought to change educational policies in the present, but also struggled to shape collective memories of race and reform in years past.
 

            This study draws upon multiple sources of historical evidence: primary documents located in official archives as well as activists' attics; reports generated by white Washington bureaucrats and black Milwaukee organizations; news stories published by the white-owned and black-owned presses; and visual collections of photographs and videotapes. In addition, I conducted over sixty oral history interviews with black Milwaukee school reform activists and educators and, when possible, compared them to similar interviews conducted years earlier. To organize this story, I focused greater attention on black Milwaukeeans than on the white majority and their ethnic groups, or other racial minority groups in the city. Furthermore, it concentrates on elementary and secondary education more than on early childhood and higher education. While the book examines sustained black-led efforts to influence educational policy and practice in Milwaukee, it does not attempt to chronicle every single event; the episodes are too numerous to wrap coherently into one narrative. Finally, the book highlights the politics of education, and only occasionally examines the world inside black students' classrooms, or the complex relationships between black parents and their children's teachers. These rich and diverse experiences do not always mirror the broader struggles surrounding them, and their history awaits to be recorded and written.
 

            Just as important as historical source materials are the questions that historians bring to them. When first beginning this research in graduate school, I initially focused my attention on 1965, the peak year of Milwaukee's school integration movement, when defiant activists confronted racism by organizing protest marches, civil disobedience, Freedom Schools, and federal lawsuits. From my perspective as a young white student who was born that very year and had neither lived through the movement nor learned a great deal about it in my predominantly white schooling, I tried to read and understand as much as possible. Attempting to think historically, I began to look through archival documents from previous decades for earlier signs of the integration movement, but very few appeared. Puzzled, my first research question was: Why didn't black Milwaukeeans raise their voices against segregated schools before the early 1960s? Likewise, when I tried to catch up on contemporary educational policy and began reading through black Milwaukee newspapers from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I asked myself a second, related question: Why did present-day black Milwaukeeans abandon the 1960s integration movement? Over time, it gradually dawned on me that both of these initial questions were seriously flawed, because of my misguided effort to connect all generations of activism directly to the integration movement of 1965. Months later, after meeting black activists from various time periods and listening carefully during interviews, I finally settled upon a richer and more historically appropriate research question for this study: How did different groups of black Milwaukee activists define struggles over race and schooling, on their own terms, from the 1930s to the 1990s? [11].
 

            The book's conclusion, "Rethinking History and Policy in the Post-Brown Era," takes up these and related questions. First, it assesses how various historians have interpreted the transformation of black educational activism and policy since the 1954 decision. Second, it examines why history and policy are interdependent. Thoughtful policy-making does not occur without rich historical awareness, and conversely, the best historical writing on recent eras contributes to our understanding of how we arrived at present-day policy crises. When attempting to make sense of black educational policy since Brown, it becomes important to recognize that the victories, compromises, and contested memories of each generation frame the settings for future debates. By looking more closely at how sixty years of race and education played out in Milwaukee, as well as in other locations, perhaps we can make wiser decisions about education for all children in the decades to come.

Notes for Introduction

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