Racism and Dissent Over Desegregation in the Milwaukee School District, 1960-1968

Abstract

The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 rendered racial segregation in public education illegal. The obvious solution to racial segregation – desegregation – was widely posited as a way of addressing not only educational inequality but also racial discrimination. Black-led activism against continued school segregation increased due to the languishing responses from local School Boards in the wake of the decision. This activism suggests that the Black community strongly supported racial desegregation in schools and felt it was the solution to Black educational struggles. Jack Dougherty contests this assumption in his 2004 book More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee. Dougherty argues that support for the school reform movement in Milwaukee was ambivalent and that many activists did not agree with Black leadership that school desegregation was the best solution for the education of Black children. Dougherty collected 66 oral histories which included parents, students, educators, as well as activists who were involved at all levels in the desegregation movement in Milwaukee. This thesis utilizes these oral histories to expand on Dougherty’s research by specifically focusing on how racism – both institutionalized and grounded in personal experience – fueled skepticism over school desegregation. Specifically, it argues that individual experiences with both interpersonal and especially institutional racism in the Milwaukee Public School System (MPS) negatively shaped attitudes toward school desegregation among Black Americans in Milwaukee. The oral interviews reveal, in fact, that Black Americans were particularly conscious about the effects of institutional racism on education. This thesis not only contributes to our understanding of the impact of racism on school reform, but it provides a grass-roots perspective on the detrimental impact of institutional racism.