Effects Of Jim Crow On African American Education

Jim Crow’s Affect on African American Schooling in the South

Many African-American children today are still affected by racism and oppression. Especially those in low-income areas. Jim Crow laws were any state or local laws that enforced or legalized racial segregation. These laws were implemented from the post-Civil War era until around 1968. Their purpose was to legalize the marginalization of African-Americans. The lasting impact can still be felt in schools today.

The conditions of Black schooling during the Jim Crow era south were poor. Many children did not have equal education to those of their peers. Their schools were overcrowded, many had only one room, most teachers were not qualified, and they had outdated books. “Southern schools

After the Plessy court case changed it all for African Americans, more began attending school. “By the 1930s, some three decades after the Plessy decision, more black children attended school in the Jim Crow states,” Irons. The Plessy court case helped many more children go to school. But there were still some problems for them. Illiteracy. “Forty years later, in 1930, the reported literacy rate for blacks had doubled, to just over 80 percent, while more than nine in 10 white adults were literate. In some of the Jim Crow states, the black literacy rate shot up dramatically between 1890 and 1930, from 30 to 74 percent in Georgia, and from 28 to 77 percent in Louisiana. But these seemingly impressive figures masked a serious problem. Asking people if they are literate is not the same as testing their reading and writing skills, and possessing the rudiments of literacy will not prepare anyone for more than manual or domestic work. Among the 80 percent of black adults whom the Bureau reported as literate in 1930, only a few stayed in school beyond the primary grades and virtually all had attended inferior Jim Crow schools,”

Their efforts made schools with more students of color have less funding. They also had more redlining and gerrymandering between schools. But more schools with more black and Hispanic students have more socioeconomic struggles. “This return to segregation is a return to the original problem: separate and unequal. More specifically, the problem is not that predominantly Black and Hispanic schools exist, but rather that predominantly Black and Hispanic schools continue to face economic, social, and structural challenges that predominantly white schools do not. Most schools serving majority nonwhite student populations are in low-income areas. Due to funding systems that rely on property taxes to finance education, these schools receive much less money,” School of Education. This shows the difference between White and African American