America’s public school system has its roots in the early 19th century. Educational reformers sought to expand and standardize schools through curriculum, teacher training, and robust management and oversight. Their efforts sparked the common school reform movement, which promoted common social values, common religious principles, and a common language for children and youth that would bind the nation together. Yet as historians have argued, race played a major role in the emergence of the common school reform movement (Melish 1998; Minardi 2010; Douglas 2005; Moss 2009). North of the Mason-Dixon line, African American children were often excluded or denied access to public schools as more and more white children were ushered into classrooms. In cities like New York City and Philadelphia, conflicts emerged as many white parents bristled at even the suggestion that their children would be schooled alongside African American children. In fact, legal scholars have long argued that separate but equal originated in the cradle of liberty—Boston, Massachusetts, citing the 1849 Robert v. City of Boston school integration case as evidence (Levy and Jones 1974; Theoharis and Woodard 2003; Archer 2020). But that is not the full story. This paper argues for an even earlier date of 1834. Archival sources such as petitions, city documents, letters, and newspaper articles take us north of Boston to the seacoast city of Salem, which was once a major trading port and one of the ten largest cities in the United States. There, in 1834, the Salem school committee boldly asked the city’s lawyer: “What are the rights of colored children as to admission to the several public schools in town?” The city’s lawyer claimed that the school committee could create separate schools for African American children so long as it provided an “equal means of instruction.” To date, this opinion is the earliest known recorded reference to separate but equal, a doctrine that would take on a life of its own, moving from local to national policy by the end of the nineteenth century. This paper explains the context that triggered the making of separate but equal as educational policy in 1830s Massachusetts and its winding path thereafter. It traces how African Americans responded to this policy by focusing on a group of brilliant and energetic African American youth who issued a powerful and successful challenge through the democratic tradition of petitioning. In 1844, the city of Salem became the first municipality in the United States to desegregate its public school system. This paper concludes by analyzing how the arguments and protest strategies of African American youth from the 1840s shaped American jurisprudence a century later in the 1954 landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which finally overturned separate but equal (Beermann 2012 and Luxenberg 2019).

In the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, school leaders sought to shape teachers as cogs in a rationalized system, casting teacher professionalization as adherence to administrators’ directives. Historian Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz (2020) argues, “gendered and racialized assumptions about the nature of women workers and Whiteness as Americanism converged to yield a brand of Progressive Era professionalization reforms that, on the surface, promised stature and order, but in practice degraded teachers and their work” (p. 45). In segregated southern schools, white philanthropists, school boards, and superintendents demanded that Black teachers conform to white cultural standards and teach a white-supremacist curriculum. While all teachers variously accommodated, adapted, and found ways to resist administrator control (Rousmaniere 1998; D’Amico Pawlewicz 2020), Black teachers’ resistance (Givens 2021; Fairclough 2007) was a strike against what scholars and activists in the late 1960s would call “domestic colonialism.” Allen (1969) argued that, during and as a legacy of slavery, Blacks in the U.S. existed as a colonized people. This paper explores how Black teachers in the early twentieth century acquired tools to challenge colonial subordination. In his compelling 2021 book Fugitive Pedagogy, Givens argues that Black teachers eluded white surveillance through “fugitive tactics” first developed during slavery. These tactics enabled them to incorporate Black history and combat antiblackness in their classes throughout the Jim Crow era. Givens focuses mainly on how Carter Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH; est. 1915) developed an insurgent curriculum and how teachers enacted it in their classrooms. My more specific look in this paper at how teachers gained the content knowledge of fugitive pedagogy illustrates approaches to underground dissemination of tools and practices of colonial resistance within the education system. Teachers’ institutes and associations, which were racially-segregated in southern U.S., provided forums for underground dissemination. While white administrators supported and occasionally spoke at Black institutes and state association meetings, Black attendees spread information informally, and, by the 1910s, the ASNLH openly exhibited teaching materials. Founded in 1904, the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools’ (NATCS) summer meeting functioned as a national institute. Woodson appeared frequently on the NATCS podium, and programs included talks on Black history and the state of Black education (Perkins, 1989). Black teachers especially shaped fugitive-pedagogical approaches through attending summer sessions at Black colleges and universities in the 1910s-1930s. In addition to the courses in industrial education that white philanthropists required as a condition of their support, these summer schools offered courses in Black literature and history, such as one at Missouri’s Lincoln University that endeavored “to integrate the Negro into the stream of modern world history” (Lincoln 1939, p. 19). Such fugitive knowledge armed Black teachers to carry out the NATCS’s resolution “That our colored teachers be urged to introduce the systematic study of the history and literature of the Negro race .. in order that our youth will acquire pride of race” (Digest 1920, 3) as a means of combatting domestic colonialism.

In the context of the United States, travel and transportation has played a critical role in the perpetuation of societal inequalities and, conversely, as a catalyst for social change. First taking shape in the antebellum period, segregated transportation systems and services became manifested in the “separate but equal” doctrine ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 (Bay 2021). This court ruling marked the peak of sanctioned racial segregation since it affirmed the laws installed in several southern states calling for transportation companies to provide separate facilities for Blacks and whites. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing during the Civil Rights Movement, activists challenged racial segregation, with aspects of mobility and transportation forming one of the key points of intervention. This paper seeks to illuminate the negotiations and interventions that unfolded between the Civil Rights Movement activists and transportation, demonstrating how the movement served as a catalyst for reshaping the accessibility and inclusivity of public spaces, particularly in the context of school transportation.In terms of facilitating equal access to schools, how students actually get to school plays an immense role in their access to education and educational opportunities. Along with other prerequisites for equal education, such as (public) funds specifically allocated to education purposes, legal affirmation that all children can (or should) attend an institution intended for schooling, a profession dedicated to instruction, and administrative structures providing for and maintaining a system of education, school transportation greatly affects allocation processes. One of the central modes of transportation in this context are motorized vehicles, usually in the form of school busesorganized by local school authorities. Although the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) ruled in favor of school integration, many school systems still maintained segregated facilities (see e.g., Metcalf 1983). School transportation seemed to be a pivotal mechanism to provide African American students with equal access to integrated schools. Aside from the role of federally or state-mandated busing (see e.g., Mills 1973; Mills 1979; Dimond 2005) and other affirmative action programs, Black communities, and especially parents, formed highly active advocacy groups that fought for the integration of schools through school transportation. By examining archival materials from the NAACP Papers collection, particularly the materials from different chapters’ school committees, this paper analyzes how Black parents navigated the contested arena of school transportation as a means of securing racial integration and thus an improvement of their children’s education as an alternative to the unassertive judicial rulings intended to end (school) segregation (see e.g., Moran 2004). Thus, this paper contributes to scholarship on school integration and specific forms of intervention such as busing (see e.g., Orfield 1978; Delmont 2016) by focusing on the role of local activists. Highlighting these parents’ voices and arguments helps us to gain further insights into the role of a specific stakeholder in the struggle for desegregation and shows how – both in urban and rural contexts – the school bus was elevated to the role as a “vehicle of school integration”.