A history of African-American public school education in Louisville, Kentucky, 1840-1956
Date
2017
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation examines African-American public school education in Louisville, Kentucky, beginning with the free black community’s creation of private schools for their children in the 1840s and concluding with the desegregation of the city’s public schools in 1956. Throughout this period, the local black community’s primary obstacle in securing improvements to black education in Louisville was the local white community’s belief in the superiority of their city’s black schools relative to public schools for African-Americans elsewhere in Kentucky and the rest of the South. ☐ The comparative strength of Louisville’s public schools for black students was demonstrable. As discussed in chapters two and three, my research found that the Board of Education of Louisville spent more money on their black schools than almost anywhere in the South. These schools had an entirely African-American faculty led by black administrators. This faculty also enjoyed wages seven times higher than those paid to black teachers elsewhere in Kentucky. Over the years, the Board built a number of fine facilities for African-American schools. However, while Louisville whites prided themselves of these facts, the local black community fought a continuous battle to achieve equality for their children with what the city’s white children received. ☐ My historical analysis shows how throughout the existence of separate schools for African-American children in Louisville, black citizens’ ability to exert influence over local politics directly correlated with their ability to affect change for black public schools. This accounts for the school board providing the same curriculum for white and black elementary schools and allocating white citizens’ taxes to help pay for black public schools from the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment through a restructuring of school board elections in 1910 that rendered the black vote nearly obsolete. As examined in chapters four and five, once the black community’s political influence over the Board of Education waned, dramatic fissures in spending and curriculum emerged between white and black schools at all levels. Fortunately, national party shifts led to a revival of black political relevance in Louisville as Republicans fought to keep the loyalty of black voters who had begun absconding for the Democratic Party in the 1930s. Chapter six observes how Louisville’s African-American citizens used this opportunity to force the Board of Education to include black school facilities in their bond issues and, most impressively, to equalize black and white teachers’ salaries in the final years of the Great Depression. ☐ The seventh and concluding chapter of this study examines the 1956 desegregation of public schools in Louisville. Although nationally heralded by the press and politicians as a success, my research highlights the limits of this desegregation. The few white students in formerly black institutions and the Board of Education’s resistance to faculty desegregation served as indicators that the Board’s primary concern was not achieving racially-equitable schools, but was instead creating a desegregation plan palatable to the city’s white citizens. ☐ This dissertation is the first comprehensive exploration of the history of African-American public school education in Louisville, Kentucky, prior to desegregation.
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Keywords
African-American, Desegregation, Education, Kentucky, Louisville, Schools