This study uses oral histories from North Carolina to posit that it was not uncommon for former students and educators of color in the late 1990s and early 2000s to judge school desegregation as having wrought significant negative side effects. These interviews — conducted by others, not this author — reveal much nuance and complexity in opinion, as the subjects place positive changes alongside harmful ones. The value of racial integration is lifted up, as one might expect, though this paper does not extensively cover those comments.^[1] It rather seeks to build a more holistic understanding of the perceptions of African Americans and to a lesser extent Native Americans at the turn of the millennium. Of course, talk of bad things about integration and good things about segregation can be as discomforting as it is surprising, at least to those outside certain communities and age groups. But like the scientist whose results betray her hypothesis, the historian is only more fascinated, and follows the truth wherever it goes. And “integration as harmful” can become less counterintuitive rather quickly. After all, desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s suddenly placed children of color under white authority and in dangerous situations. Former students described disproportionate expulsions and punishments for black students.^[2] Black youths faced all manner of racist abuse and nastiness, and some may have dropped out of school completely as a result.^[3] Black communities faced a violent white backlash, causing some individuals to wonder whether integration was worth it.^[4] Perceived downsides to desegregation, whether short- or long-term, should not be so surprising. The changes explored herein concern the relationships, institutions, close communities, and other positives lost to blacks and Native Americans during and after this process.

Historians have documented black views on the benefits of schooling under segregation, including teachers who were extremely demanding but also felt like part of the family.^[5] James Atwater, a black student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from the 1930s to the 1950s, spoke of such connectivity in a 2001 interview. He was asked about Lincoln, the black school described by interviewer Jennifer Nardone as “a very tight knit community” with “a sense of family.”^[6] Atwater explained that “it comes back to the physical”: teachers lived across the street from students, attended church with them, knew parents well, hosted gatherings at their homes, and so on. “So there was,” Atwater remembered, “the kind of relationship that one wouldn’t normally have with a teacher if the teacher had been living in another town, or been living in another part of town.” And as Lincoln was first through twelfth grade, students and educators would know each other long before and long after they shared a classroom. Integration would disrupt these patterns.

Atwater was out of school by the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but had “misgivings” about the desegregation order.^[7] “Would that mean that all schools would simply be integrated or would it mean that black schools would disappear?” This was a question about who ran schools and colleges — a black school was operated by black leaders and educators; it did not merely have a majority black student body. “I think that that was the general fear among many people, many African Americans,” Atwater said. “Does this mean that [there] won’t be any more black university presidents? Does this mean there won’t be any more black principals? And any more black teachers[?]” Integration wrought “mixed feelings” due to concerns that power in and ownership of institutions would simply pass to whites. “Obviously, there’s going to be duplication” of roles when city schools are merged (and, we can add, building closings). “How fair would the process be, in determining who goes and who stays[?]” Many black educators indeed lost their jobs.^[8] Integration would mean black students had fewer black teachers; leaving behind or losing beloved educators was quite painful for children.^[9]

Desegregation resulted in the closing of many black schools. Arthur Griffin, who grew up in Charlotte, believed Second Ward, his high school that shut down in 1969, was a “casualty” of a “desegregation lawsuit,” and urban renewal that forced black families to move to other parts of town.^[10] Significantly, the poorer, unequal condition of black schools like Second Ward — a result of the Jim Crow segregation that civil rights lawsuits aimed to address — spurred integration policies that favored the desires of white families. “You’d have white students from Myers Park coming to Second Ward, and students from Second Ward going to Myers Park,” Griffin remembered, speaking of the potential desegregation plan in Charlotte. “And I think, like in many other decisions back then, [white] folks just said, ‘No, we’re not going to a school that looks like this.’ Because [our] school was not in great repair, didn’t have nearly the things that Myers Park High School had.” Whites insisted their transferred children attend a better school, but one farther away than Second Ward. This transpired, and Second Ward closed down. Griffin felt “a sense of betrayal and loss.” Asked in 1999 why Second Ward had been so special to him, Griffin described the school as akin to “roots” — the older kids had attended, he had never envisioned going anywhere else, the sports tradition was important, he had a wealth of fond memories, etc. Second Ward “was a family”: people came together, cared for one another, and strove for self-improvement. The building itself was like a family member. It was a cornerstone of the community — integration broke many such cornerstones. “Progress,” Griffin said, “caused all of the black schools to close.”

Latrelle McAllister, another African American student in Charlotte, shared the concerns over school closures.^[11] Alumni, she recalled, would still be fundraising for and involved with her high school decades after graduating. One would be involved long before attending as well, as children experienced regular athletics events and band performances. Everyone went to West Charlotte High. “There is a rich heritage. There is a broad base of support for this institution.” McAllister’s “first civil rights protest” was to prevent the closing of her high school in the early 1970s; the “whole community…gathered” to save the school. This is again notable — a civil rights march was necessary to counter the (white-run and -favored) effects of civil rights and integration. Progress had its downsides, given who retained power and oversaw policy changes. “A lot of the historically black schools had been closed,” but activism preserved West Charlotte.

While McAllister saw the benefits of integration, such as equitable funding and greater cultural tolerance, she said in 1998 that “​​there is probably in the black community, and certainly in our household, an ongoing debate about the degree to which integration helps our children or hurts our children,” as students did not have the same caring, lasting, family-esque relationships with teachers that they used to.^[12] The teacher-parent relationships were likewise lost, damaging efforts to keep students on the right path: “if I got in trouble…I could be sure that my mother would know about it or my father would know about it and that something would be done about it. There’s not that type of support [today]. There’s not that village that we talk about that’s important in raising and nurturing and shaping young minds.” (Another student recalled teachers coming to student homes for discussions, rather than waiting on parent-teacher conferences.^[13]) Scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings of the National Academy of Education and the University of Wisconsin notes that the civil rights era freed better-off blacks to move to other parts of town, meaning disconnected, distant teachers regardless of color: low-income, urban students’ “Black teachers are driving in from the suburbs the same way their White teachers are.”^[14] Integration, then, separated people.^[15] Student from teacher, teacher from family. Busing students hours away from their neighborhoods was yet another component of the new divides and dynamics created by desegregation.

West Charlotte was “one big family,” recalled former student Alma Enloe.^[16] Competition and fights between students were rare. Teachers knew everyone’s name, even in such a large school, and made time for students one-on-one. Enloe appears to see the school as an extension of a close, trusting, family-like community: “When we were growing up any parent in the neighborhood could say something to you if you had done something wrong, even spank you, and nothing was said by the parents because they knew if another parent chastised you that way…you had done something wrong.” Teachers and principals were part of this system. Historian of education Vanessa Siddle Walker writes that they operated with “parentlike authority” and “almost complete autonomy.”^[17] Educators were seen as virtual mothers and fathers, students as their own children.^[18] Enloe speaks of teacher strictness alongside their caring attitudes, implicitly linking the two.^[19] Other interviewees did the same.^[20]

Enloe regrets the fights, guns, and other troubles in the public schools of 1998, and notes that some blame integration: “Some people would look at us and say when we were just the blacks by ourselves, at least we knew who the enemy was, saying white people. But now, everybody is together and don’t nobody know who’s the enemy or what, so everybody is just fighting everybody.”^[21] Enloe more blames the decline of “stronger,” sterner parenting, but perhaps leaves room for the notion that segregation fostered such parenting by creating a close-knit, self-reliant community, which was lost after integration and progress on civil rights: “[Now] ​​we don’t have that togetherness. Everybody is just pulling apart…” Scholar James D. Anderson of the University of Illinois recently argued that when teachers no longer lived in the school neighborhoods and knew families intimately, students had less respect for them, less of a connection and desire to please.^[22] We might add that white supremacy and violence surely created an immense pressure on black Americans to set high behavioral and academic standards for children (“Be twice as good” is a well-known mantra^[23]), in order to survive. Teachers battled to create advancement opportunities for students and the community as a whole.^[24] This is not to glorify segregation or ignore the well-established link between the disproportionate poverty wrought by slavery/Jim Crow and today’s troubled schools, children, or neighborhoods, but rather to consider an additional possible factor, one that the individuals in these sources take seriously: integration weakened school-family relationships, community cohesion or closeness, and certain standards and expectations, contributing to social problems. In a similar vein to Enloe, former student Stella Nickerson said that a black high school “was very important. It was a connection. It was something that the communities could say was definitely theirs.”^[25] But, she argues, integration erased a sense of ownership (and generated bad experiences), leading to less parental involvement in the following decades.

Let us now briefly observe the parallels and intersections with the indigenous experience of integration. Native Americans could see influxes of black and white students into their schools as detrimental to a sense of community and therefore optimal learning. This is revealed in an oral history offered by James A. Jones, a principal in Prospect, North Carolina, in the 1970s and ’80s.^[26] In 2003, Jones recalled that the area was formerly “nearly a hundred percent” Native American, like “a little Indian reservation.” “We like to kind of keep it that way,” he admitted. It remained “a very close knit community. There were a lot of family relations, family connections in this Prospect community. And it’s very deep. It goes way back to probably the eighteenth century… Most of the land…has been inherited from our ancestors. It’s just been passed down, passed down, passed down…” Redistricting in the 1970s shuffled indigenous students to different schools and brought increasing but modest numbers of black students to Prospect School, sparking consternation and resistance. The principal before Jones resigned. Troopers accompanied black learners to ensure peaceful integration. More white students enrolled as well. Mergers in the 1980s continued to change where students went to school and how close administrators and educators were to students and their families.

Jones directly connects this familiarity with academic and behavioral success. Prospect produced doctors, lawyers, and managers — “I attribute this to the fact that our teachers, most of the teachers knew every parent… I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids’ parents, because I taught…a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, ‘Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?’ ‘No, Mr. Jones. No.’ That eliminated the [need for] discipline right there…”^[27] But the changes of the 1970s and ’80s had altered that arrangement. Jones blames higher truancy and dropout rates on the new disconnect between teachers and families. Further, Native American students sent to other schools did not feel like they belonged, violence and fears of it grew more common, and so on. “Crossing the lines” and “racial issues” had taken a toll, and not “left [the] Prospect community happy.” Jones’ interviewer, Malinda Maynor, remarked that “all the ways that children have benefited from greater access and inclusion” occurred alongside the serious new problems Jones described. Clearly, blacks and Native Americans shared concerns that racial integration had caused teacher-family segregation, leading to negative outcomes for students.

To conclude, schools were of massive importance to communities of color, and integration could represent a serious threat. Vanessa Siddle Walker cites instances of direct opposition to desegregation among African Americans.^[28] Four decades later, some former students and educators of color remembered desegregation as a mixed bag. There was discrimination and mistreatment. Schools were closed and jobs were lost. At formerly all-black schools, integration changed or pushed aside school traditions.^[29] Institutions no longer felt like cornerstones of communities. Teachers no longer lived with and knew families intimately. That lack of familiarity and trust, and perhaps the end of white supremacy in general, changed discipline and how hard students were pushed to excel. The bonds of community were loosened. Social ills followed. Determining, in some empirical way, the full truth of these last perceptions is beyond the scope of this study. There are many factors that could explain changing relationships, behavioral norms, academic success, social problems, and so on, and broad changes have also occurred in predominantly white communities and the nation as a whole over the decades. But there is fertile ground for historians and sociologists to explore these observed effects of desegregation, and should causal veracity be established, we need not be so surprised.

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^[1] See for instance Oral History Interview with Burnice Hackney, February 5, 2001, interview K-0547, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0547/K-0547.html. Hackney praises the better facilities black students had access to.

^[2] Ibid.

Oral History Interview with Arthur Griffin, May 7, 1999, interview K-0168, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0168/K-0168.html.

^[3] Oral History Interview with Sheila Florence, January 20, 2001, interview K-0544, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0544/K-0544.html.

^[4] Shifting from North Carolina to Arkansas for a moment, Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2007) is a fine source for both the mistreatment of black students in integrating spaces and for the hesitancy about integration among blacks in the South. There was intense worry that the attempt at integration would cause a white backlash against African Americans in Little Rock, which indeed occurred, with worsening violence, vandalism, firings, and exclusion from public spaces. Melba Beals, one of the nine integrating students, is deserted by black friends and given the cold shoulder by some black neighbors — the Little Rock Nine are “meddling children” (p. 218) who should never have created such an explosive situation. Beals’ friend, expressing fear of coming to her house, which might be targeted, summed up the reaction: “You gotta get used to the fact that you’all are just not one of us anymore. You stuck your necks out, but we’re not willing to die with you” (p. 145). What the Nine did brought danger to everyone else, against their will; the Nine endured some criticism and exclusion in the black community as a result. Other black residents of course supported integration and were proud of the students and their bravery. The point is that there existed differing views on whether integrating Central High was a wise or worthwhile thing to do.

^[5] Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3.

^[6] Oral History Interview with James Atwater, February 28, 2001, interview K-0201, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0201/K-0201.html.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Interview with Burnice Hackney.

^[9] Gloria Ladson-Billings and James D. Anderson, “Policy Dialogue: Black Teachers of the Past, Present, and Future,” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 1 (February 2021): 95-96.

^[10] Interview with Arthur Griffin.

^[11] Oral History Interview with Latrelle McAllister, June 25, 1998, interview K-0173, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0173/K-0173.html.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Oral History Interview with Nate Davis, February 6, 2001, interview K-0538, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0538/K-0538.html.

^[14] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.

^[15] Interview with Latrelle McAllister.

^[16] Oral History Interview with Alma Enloe, May 18, 1998, interview K-0167, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0167/K-0167.html.

^[17] Siddle Walker, 3.

^[18] Ibid., 134-135.

^[19] Interview with Alma Enloe.

^[20] Oral History Interview with Stella Nickerson, January 20, 2001, interview K-0554, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0554/K-0554.html.

^[21] Interview with Alma Enloe.

^[22] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.

^[23] Interview with Stella Nickerson. “We’ve always had to work harder and prove ourselves more…”

Interview with Burnice Hackney. “You still have got to work harder at whatever you do. You still might come in second.”

^[24] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95, 97, 100.

^[25] Interview with Stella Nickerson.

^[26] Oral History Interview with James Arthur Jones, November 19, 2003, interview U-0005, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/U-0005/U-0005.html.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Siddle Walker, 4.

^[29] Oral History Interview with John Love, February 17, 1999, interview K-0172, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0172/K-0172.html.

When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring, whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that arose in the late 1980s and came to full force in the 1990s and early 2000s. You know, the George Strait, Reba McEntire, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Brooks & Dunn, Toby Keith, Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, Shania Twain, and Brad Paisley era. Luke Combs and other younger artists help keep the style going, though it has evolved a bit under the influence of other genres.

As someone who consumes copious amounts of folk and hip-hop, and enjoys rock as well, this dominant brand of country is fairly torturous. This despite enjoying it when I was a teenager (I was a religious conservative surrounded by many fans of country, and had somewhat limited exposure to certain genres). This also despite trying to appreciate art in all its forms. I try to appreciate young country for what it is, but most songs can only be “enjoyed” ironically, hate-screaming I’d like to check you for ticks, she thinks my tractor’s sexy, my love affair with water, and we’ll put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way!

Of course, there’s plenty of dumb, low-brow nonsense in hip-hop, pop, and so on as well. For my personal tastes, country suffers from a content problem and a sound problem. Now, the content can be absurd, but the major themes aren’t all fundamentally bad. I reject blind patriotism and nationalism, but farms, trucks, beer, small towns, cowboy boots, dancing, that’s all good stuff to sing about. But the musical style is largely grating to my ear, like death metal or some pop. Christmas music is a good parallel — I like snow, decorations, presents, lights, and holiday feasts, but find the sound of such songs annoying and childish.

All that said, all genres have their bangers. Country is no exception. That’s why I’ve created a “Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers” playlist. Most songs, of course, don’t come from the young country branch. Just a couple. Others are more 1970s and ’80s — a far superior style — and some are newer songs but influences from other forms have clearly taken them a step away from Kenny Chesney. Finally, these are predominantly mainstream songs you’d hear at a country bar. This was to prevent me from simply finding the “good country” outside popular, contemporary tastes. You won’t see many alternative country artists like Lyle Lovett or rockabilly legends like Johnny Cash, both of whom are of course incredible and represent my favorite artists of the genre.

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In the 1940s and ’50s, Americans engaged in an intense debate over the content of school textbooks, particularly social studies texts. Fears of communism and socialism spurred a conservative backlash against anything that smacked of collectivism or unpatriotic criticism of the United States.^[1] Dangerous books were poisoning the minds of schoolchildren, turning them into Reds, and had to be removed from classrooms.^[2] Study of the controversy sparks an interesting question. How did contemporaries understand the relationship between citizenship and dissent? Could one remain a good citizen if engaging in critique of American society? The answers to this question diverged along political lines. Those who might answer no tended to be conservative, with the hypothetical yes associated with leftists. However, how most citizens — left, center, and right — felt remains open to interpretation.

Textbooks and series accused of “subversion” included American Government (Frank Magruder), Building America (National Education Association), and Man and His Changing Society (Harold Rugg).^[3] Alongside George Counts, William H. Kilpatrick, John Dewey, and others, Rugg was a social reconstructionist and progressive reformer who believed education could build a better society. Reconstructionists engaged in leftwing critiques of capitalism and other realities. Rugg’s widely used series included 1931’s An Introduction to Problems of American Culture. In the introduction, student attention was drawn to ideas like conflicting reports in newspapers, censorship, influence of environment and exposure on belief, job loss from automation, a rapidly changing society, poverty, who controls the government and the press, and more.^[4] Youth were asked to “study the needs and try to learn how to improve the community in which you live.”^[5] The book went on to explore the booms and busts of the capitalist economy and associated miseries: “even in times of prosperity millions are out of work.”^[6] “Why,” Rugg asks, “should there be unemployment and starvation in the richest country in the world?… There are many reasons, but the most important ones can be summed up in one phrase — LACK OF PLANNING.”^[7] The U.S. needed a “national plan of producing goods and providing jobs for all.”^[8] Rugg uses multiple chapters to lay out his vision, shifting from facts concerning the state of American society to unabashed editorializing of a flair ranging from New Dealist to socialistic. He advocates for public ownership of select industries, wealth redistribution, and other methods of State intervention to solve the “outstanding problems of American civilization and culture.”^[9] While he does not call for the nationalization of all industries, which would have placed him more firmly in the communist or socialist camp, Rugg nods approvingly at the Soviet Union’s centrally planned production, and in sections on politics is sure to include Socialists alongside Republicans and Democrats as potential candidates for elected office.^[10]

In a 1940 article in The New York Times, Rugg, perhaps feeling the pressure of a fierce attack on his books, vehemently denied that he was a communist or socialist, saying he supported “free discussion,” insisting education create “citizens who understand the forces at play in our own land and abroad, and who are concerned to do something about them. I feel sure that they can solve America’s problems and build a magnificent civilization…”^[11] This was key to making “the American way work.”^[12] A good citizen recognized national faults and worked to fix them. In the aforementioned textbook, Rugg connected his proposed right to a job with the American way. The Constitution vowed to “promote the general welfare” and the Declaration of Independence spoke of “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — these are inalienable rights! What can guarantee them more securely than to provide a job for everyone?”^[13] George Shuster, president of Hunter College, wrote that Rugg’s textbooks pushed the idea that America has “changed and must necessarily go on changing…”^[14] Reform was an American tradition. Progressive education made “young people interested in helping to make their world a better world,” which of course required understanding (That Men May Understand was Rugg’s book-length response to critics) and acknowledgement of social issues — like “economic problems” that might be addressed by government intervention.^[15] Others agreed that introspection and criticism were healthy, such as a committee of school officials and citizens in Michigan that castigated textbook censorship, declaring, according to historian of education Jonathan Zimmerman, that “textbooks should examine ‘accomplishments and failures’ in American history, so that students would develop the analytical abilities that democratic citizenship demanded.”^[16] 

To critics, Rugg’s content represented “Treason in the Textbooks,” to quote the headline of a 1940 article by journalist O. K. Armstrong.^[17] Planning meant “strict government control of individual and group activities,” Armstrong wrote. Collectivism was the “bitter foe” of democracy, the birthmother of totalitarianism. The “insidious destruction of American ideals by way of the minds and hearts of American boys and girls” had to be stopped.^[18] For many conservatives, good citizenship required an uncritical, flattering approach to American society and history. Zimmerman writes, “In the white-hot politics of the Cold War, the suggestion that America needed any reform was ‘subversive’” to some observers, aiding the communists and their cause.^[19] Some California lawmakers explicitly called for “a constructive, positive approach” with a focus on the “good things” the United States had to offer.^[20] The American Legion, a veterans’ organization and a leading crusader against subversive textbooks, published “A School Program for Positive Americanism” in its magazine, written by the superintendent of Chicago’s public schools in 1941.^[21] “Sinister” ideas had to be purged from school materials and replaced with those that “inculcated” a “love of country” and a “loyal desire” to serve “the best interests of the community, State, and nation.”^[22] (Note the contradictory tension between opposing collectivism and stressing that the individual must put community and country first, a common feature of this period, alongside condemnations of indoctrination by those intent on utilizing it for different purposes.^[23]) The “teaching of patriotism” and “respect” for the American way of life was needed for “true American citizenship.”^[24] Students must study and celebrate American institutions, heroes, founding documents, flags, patriotic songs, and so on.

This approach of course was already a big part of public education. The Chicago superintendent reported proudly that his commissions were finding no subversive materials in his schools, which somewhat undermined the threat and framed education as already serving his function (“We have found no material that…seeks to cast doubt upon the importance of the patriotism of our American heroes and their services to mankind”).^[25] Indeed, widely used readers for young students produced in the 1930s featured patriotic songs, drawings of children carrying flags, and stories of dutiful and loyal Americans.^[26] Using possession to indicate importance and stress obedience, one basic reader explained that a citizen is a “person who lives in a country and belongs to it.”^[27] There were obligations of service in exchange for liberty. The United States “protects you and gives you many things to make you happy. But your country cannot be great and free and happy unless its boys and girls do their part,” do “what your country needs…”^[28] Another book left the value and benefit of machines unquestioned, quite different from the concern over automation leaving workers unemployed.^[29] Although it should be noted these texts were for younger readers than Rugg’s Problems. The point is that patriotic texts were a major presence in public schools, alongside those that addressed the pain of the Depression and other social ills.

Clearly, the meaning of good citizenship tended to differ by political ideology, with staunch conservatives far less likely to tolerate questioning and dissent as a component of citizenship compared to staunch left-wingers, who saw no contradiction. But perhaps these are the extremes — whether most Americans of the period saw proper citizenship as incompatible with criticism is debatable. On the one hand, Rugg’s books were wiped off the face of American education.^[30] Education historian Adam Laats notes that Rugg’s books sold 152,000 copies in 1940 but only 40,000 the next year, with many cities and school boards eliminating them.^[31] The conservative “attacks took their toll.”^[32] “Significant numbers of Americans” opposed subversive material and sought “to make schools and society more patriotic, more friendly to capitalism,” achieving real “success.”^[33] However, Jonathan Zimmerman argues that while Rugg’s books were largely defeated, conservative activism failed to topple most other accused texts.^[34] He writes that multitudes of citizens, veterans, school boards, businesses, and committees, as well as Congress and “almost every legislature” that took up the issue, refused to support content censorship.^[35] Despite widespread opposition to communism and support for patriotism, a distinction was made, Zimmerman suggests, between the former and much critical material.^[36] Perhaps a mix of nuanced thinking, disdain for censorship, fealty to familiar or beloved books, memories of the Depression, and other factors contributed. Laats suggests the Rugg controversy was more about the man than the books.^[37] Indeed, far-left teachers may have had it worse than texts.^[38] Zimmerman concludes: “By 1954, if not earlier, both the critics and the defenders of American textbooks declared that the campaign against the books had failed.”^[39] Given the inconsistency of textbook fates, historians must continue to study the period and its controversy, seeking new ways to measure general American sentiment.

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^[1] Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002). See chapter four.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Zimmerman, 83-84, and Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2015), chapter three.

^[4] Harold Rugg, An Introduction to Problems of American Culture (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1931). See the introduction.

^[5] Ibid., 14.

^[6] Ibid., 181.

^[7] Ibid., 185.

^[8] Ibid., 195.

^[9] Ibid., 217, 594, 595-598.

^[10] Ibid., 3-4, 265, 596-597.

^[11] “Rugg Defends His Textbooks, Long Attacked,” New York Times, April 5, 1940.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Rugg, 196.

^[14] George Shuster, “Dr. Harold Rugg Replies to His Critics,” The New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1941.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Zimmerman, 95.

^[17] O. K. Armstrong, “Treason in the Textbooks,” The American Legion Magazine 29 (September 1940): 8-9, 51, 70-72.

^[18] Ibid., 72.

^[19] Zimmerman, 85.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] William Johnson, “A School Program for Positive Americanism,” The American Legion Magazine 31 (September 1941): 12-13, 50-52.

^[22] Ibid., 12.

^[23] Irene Corbally Kuhn, “Your Child is Their Target,” The American Legion Magazine 52 (June 1952): 18.

^[24] Ibid., 13.

^[25] Ibid., 13.

^[26] “Little American Citizens,” William Elson and William Gray, Elson-Gray Basic Readers Book Four (Boston: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1936).

^[27] Ibid, 68.

^[28] Ibid.

^[29] “Workers and their Work,” William Elson and William Gray, Elson-Gray Basic Readers Book Five (Boston: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1936), 276, 306.

^[30] Zimmerman, 78-79.

^[31] Laats, 75.

^[32] Ibid., 75, 119-120.

^[33] Ibid., 76, 121.

^[34] Zimmerman, 79.

^[35] Zimmerman, 101-103.

^[36] Ibid., 101.

^[37] Laats, 121.

^[38] Zimmerman, 83.

^[39] Ibid., 101.

In the late nineteenth century, the United States government funded and created boarding schools to purge Native American children of their tribal identities and cultures.[1] Such children, through enticement or force, were transported hundreds or even thousands of miles from their reservations and deposited at institutions like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first of its kind (opened 1879). With the United States now spanning the continent, officials and advocates saw federal boarding schools as a method by which a rogue element within American borders – indigenous nations – could be eradicated, removed from their land, absorbed into mainstream society through re-education. The mission, write historian Jacqueline Fear-Segal and sociologist Susan Rose, was “to impose ‘civilization’ through total immersion” and “prepare Native youth for assimilation and American citizenship.”[2] While this was the intention, it can be argued that students generally did not learn to be “Americans” as defined by white visionaries, but did see value in the skills and knowledge attained at these institutions, highlighting a tension between utility or intellectual, technological growth and cultural preservation.

With Native American youth cleaved from their homes, families, and traditions, white educators implemented their curricula to “kill the Indian” and “save the man,” to quote Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle school, in 1892.[3] We know from Pratt’s writings that teaching English, industriousness, and self-sufficiency was highly important. This would cure Native Americans’ “chronic condition of helplessness” and enable them to live and work alongside whites.[4] His school sent youth “out into our communities,” Pratt explained, “to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored.”[5] This is a reference to the “outing” program, which entailed sending students to work as farmhands, maids, and so on during the summers (children often did not go home for many years).[6] Students, Pratt declared, in “joining us and becoming part of the United States,” should also be made “loyal to the government… Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large.”[7] “Teaching American citizenship” was crucial.[8] White customs, habits, and life purposes beyond nationalism and the world of work should likewise be inculcated. Pratt uses the terms “civilize” and “assimilate,” so necessary to end indigenous people’s (albeit environment-based, not innate) “savagery.”[9]

In 1890, the U.S. secretary of the interior handed down guidelines for indigenous boarding schools, stating Americanization required “training of the hand in useful industries; the development of the mind in independent and self-directing power of thought; the impartation of useful practical knowledge; the culture of the moral nature, and the formation of character.”[10] Students experienced a highly regimented environment — “military-style,” to quote Fear-Segal and Rose.[11] The secretary wrote that pupils should be forced to attend religious services and punished for using any language but English. “Grave violations of rules” resulted in “corporal punishment or imprisonment in the guardhouse.”[12] Donald Warren of Indiana University writes that the curriculum featured reading, writing, and speaking English, arithmetic, and U.S. history and government.[13] Schoolwork also included industrial training, farming, mechanics, housekeeping, singing, and mastery of instruments.[14] Proper personal care, hygiene, and dress (they wore uniforms) were important, as were manners and etiquette. “They should be taught the sports and games enjoyed by white youth,” the secretary continued, from baseball to marbles.[15] “The girls should be instructed in simple fancy work, knitting, netting, crocheting…”[16] Each boarding school was to display the American flag daily.

Primary sources left by Native Americans illuminate reactions, including what students rejected or took to heart. Zitkála-Šá of the Yankton Dakota, a student at Carlisle, wrote of “unjustifiable frights and punishments” and “extreme indignities” like having her hair shorn, being tied down, teachers striking students, and incomprehensible rules.[17] Originally excited to journey east to attend school, once there her “spirit tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom,” and she “rebelled.”[18] She broke rules, ran and hid from teachers, did chores improperly, and tore frightening pictures of the devil in a Christian story book. When tuberculosis swept through Carlisle, Zitkála-Šá grew suspicious of both the quality of care sick youths received and the religious rites (“superstitious ideas”) pressed upon the dying.[19] To Zitkála-Šá, the strict routine of this “civilizing machine” was a “harness” causing “pain.”[20] She was “actively testing the chains which tightly bound my individuality.”[21] After three years, she returned home to South Dakota and felt lost, in “chaos,” being “neither a wild Indian nor a tame one” after her experience.[22] She wept seeing young people on the reservation wearing white America’s clothing and speaking English, and wanted to burn her mother’s bible.

Resistance to assimilation, despair over cultural erosion, and crises of identity were common among Native American youth who attended federal boarding schools. Fear-Segal and Rose write that “some found [Carlisle] traumatic and begged to go home or ran away; others completed their Carlisle schooling but lived with stress and disturbance upon their return.”[23] Only seven percent of students graduated from this school; most were discharged. “The vast majority did not assimilate into mainstream society,” the scholars write, but returned to their nations, often feeling as Zitkála-Šá did.[24] The researchers cite the example of Plenty Horses of the Sicangu Lakota — “When I returned to my people, I was an outcast among them. I was no longer an Indian. I was not a white man…” — but also note that indoctrination could work, at least for a time, as with Sun Elk from the Taos Pueblo: “After a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances.”[25] Native American children could be made ashamed of who they were. Nevertheless, with most returning to reservations, and with accounts of resistance and “feeling caught between two cultures,” one can posit that students largely did not learn to be so-called true Americans, who would leave their reservations and integrate with white society.[26]

Yet students recognized the advantages of skills and experience they gained at boarding schools. There was much use value in certain knowledge and practices – which may have made some lifestyle changes feel less threatening to the larger culture. Despite her painful experiences, Zitkála-Šá wrote that after graduating, “I was the proud owner of my first diploma.”[27] She then went to college, against her mother’s wishes. Zitkála-Šá, then, both lamented cultural erosion or transformation and continued participating in its mechanisms. Perhaps there was a distinction between entering the white world to be educated in new ways (more acceptable) and bringing white ways of living, speaking, and thinking back to the reservation (less acceptable). But Zitkála-Šá’s mother may reveal a different tension. She is deeply suspicious of whites, with their “lies” and violent conquests, but is “influenced…to take a farther step from her native way of living” by replacing her wigwam with a log home.[28] Perhaps the difference was in fact that certain things added to indigenous life were generally more palatable (knowledge, diplomas, forms of shelter) than others. Individuals would of course have different views on what was agreeable, with a mother pushing a bible and a daughter wanting to burn it. There was, Donald Warren writes, little “agreement on the need to choose between tribal and white cultures” – some were more open to mixing than others – but there was “growing acknowledgement that learning English and preparing for employment in the U.S. economy banked useful assets…”[29] Some pursuits and practices from white society were judged to be sensible, or even matters of survival — Zitkála-Šá “will need an education when she is grown,” her mother mused when deciding about Carlisle, “for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces.”[30] The gun may be the best example of a novelty too practical to ignore. Ohíye S’a of the Santee Dakota wrote of hating the idea of wearing white America’s clothing, but this was long after he started using a gun![31] Usefulness may have impacted the degree to which practices and technology were seen as threats to tradition.

Letters, alumni surveys, and other primary documents suggest other students saw utility in education at white institutions. Vincent Natalish became a civil engineer in New York, took courses at Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later sought to enroll his son at Carlisle.[32] Elizabeth Wind became a nurse in Wichita, Kansas, and also tried to send her boy to Carlisle.[33] Mary North, writing to the alumni association in 1912, praised “dear old Carlisle” which “taught us so many useful things [and] helped us so much in our living and working on our farm, which we love better than living any other place.”[34] Her family tried “to live like the good white people live.”[35] Martha Napawat reported to the school later in life that she wanted “to be a good example of Carlisle. You tell the white people that it does pay to educate the Indian… I am trying to keep a house like a white woman.”[36] “Great improvement in Indians” could be seen, for example the transition from teepees to houses.[37] Writings to school officials and former figures of power are open to questions of sincerity (did former students simply tell boarding schools what they wanted to hear?), but voluntarily sending one’s child to Carlisle is indicative of the perceived value of such an education, at minimum for survival in an increasingly white world, an idea scholars have touched upon.[38]

In sum, the experience of indigenous children in federal boarding schools was complex. Cultural erasure, oppression, trauma, resistance, interest in learning, and cultural adaptation all occurred together. Pratt’s mission to “release these people from their tribal relations,” “citizenizing and absorbing them” into the larger American society through education did not succeed. The most important thing students were to learn – that Native American societies had little value and should be abandoned – went largely unlearned. Still, white schools offered training and knowledge that students found useful and engaging; such learning was brought back to reservations, and to a lesser extent turned into careers beyond the reservations. Boarding schools, among much else, did change students and indigenous nations. The field should continue to refine its understanding of the degree of this change, and explore whether new ways of living were viewed with hostility in inverse correlation to utility, which could reveal a new layer of Native American agency.[39]

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[1] Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan Rose, eds., Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). See the introduction.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Richard Henry Pratt, Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271. Online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[7] Pratt, Official Report.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “Rules for Indian Schools,” U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1890), cxlvi, cl-clii. In Sol Cohen, ed., Education in the United States: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1977), 3:1756.

[11] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[12] “Rules for Indian Schools,” 1759.

[13] Donald Warren, “American Indian Histories as Education History,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2014): 263. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24482179.

[14] “Rules for Indian Schools,” 1757-1760.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Zitkála-Šá, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” American Indian Stories (Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921), 47-80. Online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/school.html.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle; Pratt, Official Report.

[27] Zitkála-Šá, “School Days.”

[28] Zitkála-Šá, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” American Indian Stories (Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921), 7-45. Online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/impressions.html.  

[29] Warren, 269.

[30] Zitkála-Šá, “Impressions.”

[31] Ohíye S’a (Charles Eastman), Indian Boyhood (New York: McClure, Philips, and Co., 1902). Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/337/337-h/337-h.htm#link2H_4_0031. See chapter 12.

[32] Superintendent to Vincent Natalish, December 17, 1915, and Vincent Natalish to Oscar Tipps, December 14, 1915, in “Vincent Natalish (Nah-tail-eh) Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/vincent-natalish-nah-tail-eh-student-file. See pages 21-25 of the PDF.

[33] Superintendent to Mrs. Paul B. Diven, January 3, 1911, and Betty W. Diven to Moses Friedman, January 26, 1914, in “Elizabeth Wind (Ro-nea-we-ia) Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/elizabeth-wind-ro-nea-we-ia-student-file. See pages 10 and 17 of the PDF.

[34] Mary L. N. Tasso to Officers of the Alumni Association, February 1, 1912, in “Mary North Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/mary-north-student-file. See pages 10-11 of the PDF.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Mary Napawat Thomas Returned Student Survey, in “Mary Napawat Student File,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, accessed March 1, 2024. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/martha-napawat-student-file. See pages 6-7 of the PDF.

[37] Ibid.

[38] For more on survival and education, see Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “Culture, Place, and Power: Engaging the Histories and Possibilities of American Indian Education,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2014): 395–402. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24482187.

[39] Warren’s “confining binary” of “victims or agents” may be further eroded if perceived usefulness impacted decisions about encroaching white cultural elements. See Warren, 261.