Private School System In The 1800's

Senator John C. Calhoun’s words,” the South! The poor South!” was allusive to the rising segregation and the Great Depression that would prove to be the downfall of the South. In the 1930’s, schools were racially segregated and there was little emphasis on expanding the learning progress. Equal opportunity for African-Americans in the classroom was not offered and many of them could not read or write even in their adult years. The little emphasis in the classroom was because of the turn of the economy called the Great Depression. The shortage of money and taxes in the United States, caused teachers and students to cut school short and some children had to drop out of school early to help work on farms. Alabama in the 1930’s, was a difficult time for many children to continue their education. New laws have enforced the attendance of children to schools

During slavery, most black slaves were denied proper education and many laws were passed in the South prohibiting slave literacy. Even free blacks in the century before and after the Civil War were limited in their access to quality education and career training.

Education of African American people was not supported in Southern States, this was because white people believed that if they permit their slaves to learn to write, speak and talk in English, they would eventually become rebellious to their masters and become disobedient. This fear led them to think that fundamentally African American people were unable to absorb education.

Education before the Civil War in the South was not as important as in the North. In the South, states did not stress over education and thought it was a private matter. They believed the education should be given in a house where the values of society would be taught.

Public schools before the 1830s weren’t technically public because education was not open to the general public. At the time, the “public” schools were made up of a majority of white children, because their parents were wealthy enough to pay for their education. While some schools in both the North and the South allowed African Americans to attend, a lot of the African American families still could not afford to send their children. On top of not being able to afford school, in the South most schools did not believe in educating slaves. The monetary problem holding kids back from getting an equal opportunity to access education was what sparked the movement to reform the public schools.

In the South, it was very well known for slaves to be working in plantation fields. The often would work cultivating cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Tobacco was a very popular cash crop, but died out due to the harsh conditions it would give the soil. Moreover, southern states were referred to as Cotton Kingdom. The reason being is because in the southern states, cotton was the major cash crop they grew. In addition, more than 50% of the cotton was grown in the south. Additionally, the culture in the South was quite different compared to the slaves that were in the North. The southern slave states culture was determined by plantation owners and families. The slaves were not authorized to be educated, and only the plantation owners had the right to be educated. They were not allowed to attend school and their culture revolved around the plantations. To add in, their economy revolved around the agricultural plantations. The southern grew cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar cane, and indigo. Many of

The southern states were a slave society, and were known to being the way of life. It was the root to everything in the south, and southerners were very protective about it. In the south southerners “feared that without slavery’s expansion, the abolitionist faction would come to dominate national politics and an increasingly dense population of slaves would lead to bloody insurrection and race war” (The American Yawp, Chap.13), and southerners did not want to jeopardize their way of life. The south would press on the notion that racial mixing and racial wars would break out, and that blacks were a threat to white supremacy. Besides the racial fears the south would speak out on, they also stressed that slaves were property, which entitles them to their owner. People in the south also used the bible to justify slavery because it was present in the bible. The southern states believed in the ‘mudsill’ theory. James Henry Hammond speech on the ‘mudsill’ theory explained the theory. Hammond and other pro slavery southerners defined slavery as a good thing. Paternalism was another justification, to influence their belief that slavery was a caring establishment. That south argued that they took care of their slaves, and that the north did not treat their workers with such

The education of Blacks in Mississippi was a very volatile issue for Whites. It was generally believed by Mississippi’s whites that the education of blacks was a waste of time and money because blacks would never be given jobs where they could use their minds. Those who supported education for blacks usually favored what they called “the right kind of education” which taught blacks how to become better laborers. Blacks who could read or showed any traces of an education were viewed with contempt by many White Mississippians who believed education made blacks resentful of the Jim Crow system under which they lived. As a result, black schools were extremely under funded by the

Prior to the civil war, Education in the south was limited to private tutors and church classes. Only white

The growth of factories and mills in the North, drew more people to move to the cities for work. During this time, many immigrants arrived from European countries, mainly from Ireland and Germany. These immigrants became a workforce in factories in the cities. As Northern cities grew, cities became centers for trade. It was a time when reformers worked on providing education for all citizens, as well as fighting for women’s rights.Many in the North were opposed to slavery, but still discriminated against the African Americans. In the South, slavery was part of the Southern culture. Most people lived in rural areas and on plantations. The textbook states that,” a small group of plantation owners in the South-about 12% of the population-held more than half the slaves.” Education in the South was very limited. Only the wealthy sent their children to private schools and others living in rural areas did not have access to education. It was also against the law for African Americans to get an education. While the culture of the South was plantation life, the African American slaves had their own culture from Africa that they tried to keep alive with storytelling, music , and religion. Both region had very different types of beliefs about education and slavery, and had very different groups of people that provided the

When ex-slaves demanded a formal public schooling, they were really asking the South to develop and embrace a relatively new philosophy of education. Effectively, they were having white southerners pay for the education of people they once “owned” as property, and had the right to receive what most whites in the region hadn’t had available previously.

Slaves went through a lot of struggles they worked, they didn't get to go to school so that meant they didn't get their education.

There were social developments in the South during this time period as well. Since slavery was an extreme moral issue, there were many people arguing either for or against it. The southern whites came up with many different reasons to defend slavery. One way they defended it was by saying that the Bible did not condemn it. They argued that the Bible said it allowed the enslavement of Heathens, which the south believed African Americans to be. They also said that many other societies depended on slavery, like they did. They believed that some of the greatest empires, like classical Greece and Rome, depended on slavery and would not have existed without it. Slavery defenders reasoned that African Americans didn’t have the ability to care for themselves and that they were an inferior race, in which needed someone to care for them. They argued that slaves in the South lived better than the factory workers of the North. Masters cared for the slaves; while northern workers had no claim to their employer. They thought that the manner in which the slaves were treated was much more humane than how the workers in the factories were treated.

There were several classes of whites in the Antebellum South. The first class is what you call your elite or high class which were the wealthy, high society, grower gentry who were land rich. The first class possessed at least 20 or more slaves and accomplished their wealth from the development and sale of the cash crops, cotton and rice. The children of the upper class were often educated by personal tutors or at private schools in South Carolina and abroad. Next, there was the middle class of white people. The middle class consisted of tradesman, merchants, sharecroppers and etc. When the economy stayed steady, it allowed the middle class people to make a living. Their children were taught to read and write, basically learn the

The struggle for education for the african americans was like a crime. Not only weren't african americans allowed to go to school with the whites but they didn't have many school utilities like the whites did. The whites had many textbooks that were up to date and they had clean rooms and enough seats while schools for the african american were like prisons. They didn't have enough seats or books and sometimes they only had enough teachers to teach since white folk didn't want anything to do with african americans. Before the end of the civil war the education was a real struggle for the african americans. Even though there was effort to make schools for the african americans only a few could go to school since there was no money and they simply