Students will:

1. Analyze the evolution of American racial attitudes and their impact upon Black education.

2. Demonstrate familiarity with the most important historical literature on African-American education, ranging from the classic works of W.E.B. DuBoise, Horace Mann Bond, and Carter G. Woodson, to the latest scholarship.

3. Assess this literature and the major debates concerning African-American history and education, a skill to be learned through writing a series of critical book reviews on assigned authors.

4. Study and assess the political, legal, and intellectual foundations of the Jim Crow educational system in the South, and the discriminatory patterns in the North.

5. Compare the pre-and post-Brown struggles of African-Americans and their white allies to challenge segregation and educational inequality on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line (so as to learn the history of de facto as well as de jure discrimination).

6. Identify and analyze the major leaders and institutions responsible for promoting Black education in the U.S., as well as the achievements and problems of African-American educational institutions.

7. Engage in archival research, through work on assigned research papers (requiring the use of primary sources) on the history of race relations in local educational institutions.

8. Identify, describe, and apply relevant theoretical perspectives to the examination of selected issues in race and education.

9. Examine ways that material covered in this course can help them in their work as public school teachers to teach African-American history more effectively.

1. Slavery and Freedom: Introduction to African-American History and Race Relations in the U.S., 1607-1865.

2. Race, Education, and Social Change: Freedmen’s Schools and the Crusade for Black Education During Radical Reconstruction.

3. Separate and Unequal: The Rise of Jim Crow Education.

4. Education for Servitude or Leadership? The DuBois-Washington Debate and African-American Higher Education.

5. Race and Gender: The Educational Experience of African-American Women.

6. Black Nationalism and African-American Education: The Black Student Revolts of the 1920s and the 1960s.

7. A New Deal for Blacks? African-American Education During the Great Depression.

8. From Plessy to Brown: The NAACP and the Struggle to Desegregate American Education.

9. Case Studies: Desegregation and Race Relations in Georgia’s Educational History.

10. Resegregation? Race and Education in the late 20th Century.