George Washington argued that education should be lawmakers’ chief concern in his first annual address before Congress in 1790, saying, “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Alongside his contemporaries such as James Madison and Benjamin Rush, Washington believed that education was the best way to build good citizens.
But the founders also knew how important an education was to citizenship because by the time the first signature stained the Declaration of Independence, slave codes in many parts of the colonies had barred enslaved Black people from learning to read. After Gabriel’s Rebellion, a planned slave revolt in 1800, slaveholders across the South barred Black people from reading the Bible as they were wary that it would give the enslaved ideas of liberation. Educating women was an afterthought for almost everyone except Rush. Denying people education meant denying them citizenship. Washington’s idea of civic education was exclusionary by default; it accounted for the experiences of only wealthy, white men.
At nearly every moment when America could have expanded educational opportunity, the nation chose inequality. The 1862 Morrill Act doled out millions of acres of land that states could sell to fund colleges that Black students were almost exclusively barred from attending; discrimination prevented Black veterans from enjoying the spoils of the G.I. Bill which Congress passed to provide World War II veterans money for college, housing and unemployment insurance. At the same time, in America’s public schools, students were being taught an incomplete, revisionist history.
As the long civil rights movement began to bear fruit — through court wins like that in Brown v. Board of Education, and in higher education cases that preceded it, like Sipuel v. Board of Regents — the nation began including everyone’s accomplishments in its story. In 1961, California passed a law forbidding the adoption of textbooks with materials that did “not correctly portray the role and contribution of the American Negro and members of other ethnic groups in the total development of the United States.” That necessarily meant explaining the trials those people had been through. Several states — Oklahoma, New Jersey, Illinois, Nebraska — followed suit. At the same time, colleges and universities — in efforts to recruit students whose entry had historically been barred — began race-conscious admissions programs.
The national reconsideration of how the American story was told in history and popular culture, whose achievements were included in that telling, and strategies to account for all of the years of inequality, were attacked immediately. Some white Americans viewed policies intended to help address a legacy of discrimination against others as a discrimination against themselves, which led to lawsuits. Cases like Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which fought the affirmative action strategy at the university’s Davis School of Medicine, sought to dismantle the apparatus that would enforce the Civil Rights Act. As soon as rights were won, they were disputed.
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