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1.
Estimates indicate that before 2050, racial and ethnic
minorities will be in the majority in the United States. It
therefore behooves universities to provide diverse role
models for an increasingly diverse population (Crichlow,
2017).
2.
Diversity is good for all students. They will be much
better prepared to face a multicultural world when exposed
to diverse individuals and perspectives in the classroom (Paloma,
2014, Cited in Crichlow, 2017).
3.
There are multiple benefits that accrue from increasing
number of professors of color. Among other reasons, such
faculty members play vital roles in the enrollment,
retention, achievement, and graduation of students of color.
Equally, it includes "the necessity for the full and
unfettered participation in American society, by all of its
members, if this nation is to survive economically,
socially, and spiritually.” (Daufin, 2001).
4.
It has been reported that the most persistent and
statistically significant predictor of enrollment and
graduation of Black graduate students is the presence of
Black faculty.
The obvious implications
are that an increase in the presence of Black faculty is
critical, but unless barriers are removed, conditions
improved, and concerted actions taken, the production of
Black faculty will continue to worsen (Daufin, 2001).
5.
The presence of Black academicians involved in research and
development is important for a number of reasons, but four
critical reasons are as follows: (a) to advance scholarship
in general, as well as to focus research on minorities and
the disadvantaged; (b) to provide necessary support for
Black and other minority colleagues; (c) to increase the
number of Black scholars in the field; and (d) through
research and development efforts, to have a significant
effect on policy and programs that may enhance students'
educational attainment and academic development (Daufin,
2001).
6.
Research has pointed out the essential roles of Black
faculty. Among others, it is pointed out that such faculty
value service-related activities (e.g., mentoring students).
They also are instrumental in graduating doctoral students
of color (Parsons et al, 2018).
7.
Advantages of African-American faculty at predominantly
White institutions include the importance of
African-American faculty in adding diversity to the teaching
faculty; the value of teaching courses from multiple
perspectives; the need to conduct research in a culturally
sensitive and appropriate manner; and, the importance of
serving as role models, mentors, and advocates for
African-American students (Phelps, 1995)
8.
The presence of Black faculty on campuses is inextricably
linked to the recruitment, enrollment, persistence,
retention, and graduation of Black students. Black faculty
serve as role-models and mentors, thereby helping to insure
the successful matriculation of Black students.
Unfortunately, Black professors are more likely at higher
risk for non-success in the tenure and promotion process, in
part, because of institutional racism and role expectations
demanded in many white colleges and universities (Spigner,
1990).
9.
The recruitment and retention of faculty members of color
in higher education is paramount to the future of our
nation’s colleges and universities (Stanley, 2007).
10.
The integration of diverse people into K-12 schools, the
workplace, and higher education helps address some of the
history and legacy of racism. Integration, however, is not
limited to the redress of past and present ills. Inclusion
benefits all students. Diversity will help American citizens
be prepared to compete in the multicultural settings of the
future (Garrison-Wade et al, 2012).
11.
The academy often fails to value the diversity of faculty
of color but the presence of diverse faculty provides added
value to institutions of higher education. Faculty of color
help promote the success of students of color in higher
education by providing much needed role models who can help
encourage loftier career goals and improved academic
performance. In addition, faculty of color offer diverse
perspectives to the academy’s knowledge base and research
focus (Garrison-Wade et al, 2012).
Over the past decade,
educational researchers including those cited here have
noted the positive influences that African-American
professors have on African-American students in PWIs, as
well as the positive social and academic effects that having
a diverse faculty has on all students. Despite these
positive effects and the fact that about 13 percent of the
US population is African American (United States Census
Bureau, 2013), in 2011, African-American faculty comprised
less than six percent of fulltime faculty members in US
higher education institutions (National Center for Education
Statistics, 2012). Moreover, African-American female
professors have been underrepresented more in PWIs than
African-American male professors (Jones et al, 2015).
Research indicates that retention rates are dismal because
of issues of isolation, marginalization, non-promotion,
among other reasons. If we are to take on white supremacy in
higher education in a meaningful way, we need to take
seriously these advantages of diversity and enact policies
and practices to bring them to fulfillment.
References
Burke, M. A., Smith, C.
W., & Mayorga-Gallo, S. (2017). The new principle-policy
gap: How diversity ideology subverts diversity initiatives.
Sociological Perspectives, 60(5), 889-911.
Crichlow, V. J. (2017).
The solitary criminologist: Constructing a narrative of
black identity and alienation in the academy. Race and
Justice, 7(2), 179-195.
Daufin, E. K. (2001).
Minority faculty job experience, expectations, and
satisfaction. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator,
56(1), 18-30.
Garrison-Wade, D. F.,
Diggs, G. A., Estrada, D., & Galindo, R. (2012). Lift every
voice and sing: Faculty of color face the challenges of the
tenure track. The Urban Review, 44(1), 90-112.
Jones, B., Hwang, E., &
Bustamante, R. M. (2015). African American female
professors’ strategies for successful attainment of tenure
and promotion at predominately White institutions: It can
happen. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice,
10(2), 133-151.
Murphy, R. (1988).
Social closure: The theory of monopolization and exclusion.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Parsons, E. R. C., Bulls,
D. L., Freeman, D. B., Butler, M. B. & Atwater, M. M.
(2018). General experiences + race + racism = work lives of
Black faculty in postsecondary science education.
Cultural Studies of Science Education, 13(2),
371-394.
Phelps, R. E. (1995).
What's in a number?: Implications for African American
female faculty at predominantly White colleges and
universities. Innovative Higher Education, 19(4),
255-268.
Spigner, C. (1990).
Health, race, and academia in America: Survival of the
fittest? International Quarterly of Community Health
Education, 11(1), 63-78.
Stanley, C. A. (2006).
Coloring the academic landscape: Faculty of color breaking
the silence in predominantly White colleges and
universities. American Educational Research Journal,
43(4), 701-736.
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Segregation in Toledo Schools: The 20th
Century
By Lynne Hamer, Ph.D.
Part 2 of 2
Whereas Toledo schools
entered the 20th century officially
desegregated (see part 1 of this article), de
facto segregation and opposition to segregation
continued throughout the 20th century and
into the 21st. Historians who have
studied segregation in Toledo, namely Williams
(1977) and Musteric (1998) point to segregated
housing patterns as well as actions by the Board of
Education of Toledo Public Schools as the primary
reasons segregation continued, and archival
documents from TLCPL’s local history collection
support their observations. Knowing how segregation
has been perpetuated in the past, perhaps on purpose
and sometime simply out of habit, can help us in the
present to understand the effects of that segregated
schooling on our schools and community today.
Throughout most of the 19th
century, school attendance boundaries were based on
neighborhood boundaries—and still are, though the
rise in charter and private schooling has changed
that to some extent. Musteric (1998) documents that
in 1890, 75 percent of Toledo’s Black population
lived in four of eight wards; in other wards, Blacks
were “residentially concentrated on the fringes of
white neighborhoods” (Musteric, p. 9). |
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Purposeful creation of
communities and neighborhoods within Toledo’s city limits
enhanced segregation: As documented in the local archives
and numerous local histories, in 1915, John Willys led
establishment of Village of Ottawa Hills within Toledo city
limits, and though it was not a separate municipality,
Westmoreland neighborhood was platted in 1918. Musteric
documented, “In 1917, efforts by blacks to move to the
Bulgarian and Birmingham neighborhoods of East Toledo were
met with threats and incidents. Two years later, 146 East
Toledoans filed a restrictive covenant agreement with county
officials, even though the Supreme Court had outlawed such
agreements.” Musteric concluded, “Toledoans were able to
limit their overt racial hostility, so long as their black
neighbors did not move outside of ‘black’ areas; when this
was attempted, white Toledoans erupted with open violence”
(1998, p. 12).
White violence, including
a particularly vicious attack on a Black family in East
Toledo (Musteric, 1998), or threats of violence maintained
strict segregation of housing through the 1920s, and
segregation of schooling resulted. The Board of Education
also acted to engineer segregation. Musteric (1998) told
how, “in 1920 the NAACP accused the TPS Superintendent
William B. Gitteau of ordering segregation of blacks in
certain public schools. At a school board meeting, NAACP
officials charged that Superintendent Gitteau had ordered
the segregation of blacks in the Industrial Heights School.
According to the allegations, all black students in the
school had been placed ‘under the charge of’ Miss Duffy, a
black teacher. Superintendent Gittaeu denied the charges and
said that it was the policy of the schools to ‘place all
backward pupils under one teacher.’ Members of the Board of
Education supported this contention and Board president W.
C. Carr added that board was not aware of ‘any segregation
other than this’” (p. 13).
With the Great Migration
in the 1930s, Toledo’s black population grew and housing
available for Black families became scarcer and poorer in
quality. Musteric describes “a distinct ghetto of 11, 000
blacks existed close to the downtown central business
district” (p. 10) as a result in part of restrictive
covenant agreements and in part simply a housing shortage
and poor-quality housing. Having migrated for railroad
work, some Black families ended up living in boxcars on
railroad sidings. The US Congress funded low income
housing, officially segregated with the designation of
“Negro houses” and “white houses”; in Toledo Black families
were mostly “in the Pinewood area, south of downtown Toledo”
(Musteric, p. 14).
The situation was
exacerbated by lack of employment opportunities and brutal
segregation tactics when employment was available. Musteric
reports that “in industrial work, blacks accounted for only
two percent of the total work force. Of those Blacks
employed, all were in semi-skilled or cleaning/janitorial
positions” while there were no active Black firemen and only
three or four Black policemen employed. By 1937, After four
years of New Deal, because of blatent and unapologetic
discrimination, Blacks were unemployed at 33 percent while
whites were unemployed at only 10 percent (Musteric, p. 15).
Parallel to segregation and discrimination in housing and
employment, the Toledo Board of Education also practiced
segregation, though always with an excuse that what looked
like racial segregation was actually due to some other
need. In 1937, TPS Superintendent E.L. Bowsher was charged
with segregating Black students by transferring Black
students from Washington Elementary to Gunckel Elementary;
he said that the transfer was due to Washington school being
overcrowded and Board backed this as reason for decision.
However, in 1938, two
schools were cited for overcrowding: Robinson and Gunckel.
This seemed to draw Bowsher’s 1937 stated intentions to
alleviate crowding into question, but the transfers stood (Musteric,
1998). During this time, Black teachers continued to be
assigned to Black schools, creating a segregated teaching
force and ensuring that white children were never under the
authority of Black adults. It was not until 1944, when
Emory Leverette was named assistant principal of Gunckel, by
then identified as the Black school, that TPS had any Black
administrators: Leverette was the first in TPS (Blade,
1998).
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled In Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas that “separate is inherently unequal” and proclaimed
state-sanctioned segregation of public schools violates 14th
Amendment. Some Toledo schools were already integrated, with
the population of Scott High School being approximately 50
percent Black ad 50 percent White. Musteric reports that
“when Scott High School crowned its first black homecoming
queen…, whites burned her in effigy” (p. 24). The New
York Times picked up the story as nationally significant
(see photo). (13 years later, when “Toledo University”
crowned its first Black homecoming queen, she was presented
with wilted flowers.)
Washington Township, which
had been incorporated in 1840 but had always been part of
the Toledo Public Schools, created their own Washington
Local Schools, thus creating a nearly entirely white student
body surrounded by an increasingly diverse Toledo public
schools (Messina, 2004).
The 1960s saw passage of
the US Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and found Toledo experiencing suburbanization,
or white flight, leading to a more profound pattern of
racial segregation. In response to the changes at the
national scene, white “violence broke out in sections of the
city of Toledo. Looting was widespread and several cases of
arson.”
In the 1960s, TPS changed
from Gunckel being “the” Black elementary school to having
several predominantly black schools: Washington, Pickett,
Lincoln, Warren, Robinson, King, Stewart, and Fulton. While
in the spirit of the time a school board could have worked
on creating integrated schools, Musteric (1998) observes,
“The Toledo Board of Education did not deliberately
integrate its schools in the 1960s. Instead, the board
maintained segregated schools either by limiting the choices
of students, or …by making no effort to reverse the effects
of residential segregation, or both” (p. 23). Indeed, TPS
made affirmative decisions to maintain segregation in 1962
when the district opened Bowsher and Start high schools and
redrew existing school boundaries for all district high
schools except Scott: Scott High School was not involved in
redistricting and became the Black high school.
Students became leaders
demanding change. Musteric (1998) documents that in 1962,
Woodward High School students were suspended for protesting
about having “too few Negro teachers, no suitable history
course on Negro life, no Negro cheerleaders, and only a
token representative on the … athletic coaching staffs… At
Scott HS, 300 students who supported the demands by Woodward
students for a ‘Negro’ curriculum by boycotting classes were
suspended by black principal Flute Rice.”
They received response in
the form of the establishment of Woodward High School’s
“Negro History Week” (emphasis added), which was
immediately protested by the newly active white students’
group, United Citizens Council of America: “This is only the
beginning of more intolerable situations that will occur
unless we unite in a common cause for preservation of the
civil rights of white students” ” (Musteric, pp. 24-25).
Meanwhile, the TPS Board
of Education published their official position on school
integration on May 23, 1966: “The public schools will work
cooperatively with all community agencies in constructive
efforts to eliminate artificial separation on the basis of
race, religious, or economic conditions.” Despite these
intentions, a 1968 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare study found TPS system non-compliant with civil
rights laws pertaining to integration of students and staff
in multiple areas (Musteric, 1998).
Musteric notes the insight
provided by Toledo’s local African-American newspaper, the
Bronze Raven, in a 1971 editorial, saying that it
perhaps best summarizes the impact of the 1960s upon the
schools: ‘During the last decade there has been some
improvement in integration in the Toledo Public Schools, but
no there are actually more schools that are predominantly
black than there were then [in the early 1960s]’” (Musteric,
p. 23).
In the 1970s, whites in Toledo increasingly sent their
children to private parochial schools, while the public
schools became increasingly overcrowded, with the
predominantly Black Pickett, Fulton, and Cherry schools most
seriously packed. Only two Black men had been on board of
education; only one Black administrator in a predominantly
white school; and while only one school did not have at
least one Black teacher, staff were lodging complaints
lodged with Ohio Civil Rights Commission about
discrimination (Musteric, p. 91-92).
In 1972 in Toledo, of 61 elementary and junior highs, “seven
had a black student enrollment of over 90 percent… Three
other schools had a black population of more than 80
percent…. 22 schools had no black enrollment” (Musteric, p.
87). In 1974, investigating TPS, the NAACP found “eleven
schools had all their black students in programs such as
special education, effectively creating a segregated ‘school
within a school’….” (Musteric, p. 87). Students and staff
were segregated by design, and acts of white violence
supported the design: the Bronze Raven reported many
incidents of violence and degradation against Black students
by the white teams and schools they played. When disruptions
occurred, it was the Black students who received punishment,
not the white (Musteric, p. 93).
In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Swann vs.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that busing
could be used to achieve racial balance: both Blacks and
Whites opposed busing, but districts across the nation
experimented with it anyway—including TPS. But TPS made
what has been described as a half-hearted attempt at
integration using bussing.
Gregory Johnson recalls his experience “getting integrated”
when as an eighth grader, along with all his classmates and
four of their teachers, he was “shipped out” from Pickett
School to McTigue Junior High in the name of “integration”
(Johnson, 2009). Up until then, Pickett had been K-8.
Johnson describes having enjoyed school at Pickett, where
teachers practiced what we would now call reality
pedagogy (Emdin, 2016)—a pedagogy based in strong
relationships between teachers and students, the practice of
basing lessons in the real world, often through field trips,
and the belief that all students should be included.
At Byrnedale, it was all “the book,” and Johnson recalls
both the teachers and the students transplanted from Pickett
suffered culture shock—with many of the students also
suffering failure and being held back. When they did
graduate from eighth grade, Johnson recalls, the Black
students were “shipped back” to their choice of Scott or
Libbey high schools, while the white students, many of whom
had become their friends, were sent to Bowsher or Rogers.
Clearly, there was no intention of true integration with the
bussing experiment.
Johnson sums up: “I still don’t understand why we were
shipped out like that. The only reason I see why they
destroyed Pickett School like that was that the program was
going too well…. It doesn’t make any sense for them to have
shipped us out there and then shipped us right back…. The
only thing I can think of is ‘divide and conquer’” (2009).
The history of segregation continues to this day, with work
by Toledo’s African American Parents’ Association and others
challenging it and pushing us as a community toward
providing equitable, quality, antiracist education for all
students. This has been only a bit of the history, but
enough to provoke the questions: Why has Toledo Public
historically supported segregation? What has been the role
of “TU,” now the University of Toledo? How have segregation
and inequitable, racist practices affected us all, Black and
white, in creating and maintaining a racist society? What
are we doing about those effects and continued practices
now?
References
Johnson, G. (2009).
Getting integrated? A personal history of public schooling.
Pathways: The Literary and Art Journal of Owens Community
College. Rossford, Ohio.
Messina, I. (2004, Dec.
20). Washington Local, TPS Split Still Stirs Debate.
Retrieved from
https://www.toledoblade.com/local/education/2004/12/20/Washington-Local-TPS-split-still-spurs-debate/stories/200412200033
Musteric, M. (1998).
Perpetuating patterns of inequality: School segregation in
Toledo, Ohio in the 1970s. M.A. Thesis, BGSU.
Snyder, S. & Tavel, D
(1992). To learning’s fount: Jesup W. Scott High School,
1913-1988, the first seventy-five years. No place, no
date.
TLCPL Local History
archives.
Anti-Racism Teach-Ins: Understanding the Present through the
Past
Anti-Racism Teach-Ins: Critical Reflection for Change
Anti-Racism
Teach-Ins: Confronting Racism in Our Curricula
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