Segregation History

Lawmakers did not let African Americans get any formal systems of education, both public and private after 1831 in North Carolina. After 1831 lawmakers put a state ban on teaching African Americans how to read and write.

In 1866-1868 funds for education were cut and neither whites or blacks were getting a good education. Some American citizens and leaders started deciding schools were needed for white children after a civil War but lots of people didn't think education was important. African Americans thought education was important and saw an education as investment. Black leaders and northern White philanthropists and missionaries began to make some schools for African Americans.

In the 1870’s and 1880’s North Carolina’s first African American schools opened in Greensboro, Raleigh, Washington, and Charlotte. In 1877, the state colored education convention and the 140 delegates from the forty counties discussed how to make black American learning better so men and women could improve their prospects and better themselves. African American schools received no state money and not much support from locals but then after 1910, the state legislature began making funds for African American schools. African American schools relied on donations from local citizens, leaders and parents and from philanthropists and churches. But they weren't as good and were inferior to the white schools.

The 1920s saw a specific effort to bring together small rural schools to make 1 very big school.They improved the roads by joining them together. Students began riding to more bigger improved schools and not walking to the nearest school house. Now there are hundreds of new brick school buildings. They also closed thousands of small school buildings. Most counties didn’t provide transportation for African American students. White students got picked up in buses which rode to the large brick schools and African American students had to continue walking to small rural schools.

The work of the Division of Negro Education with philanthropic funds allowed African American schools to expand in urban areas but the African American schools still lagged far behind the white counterparts. African American schools often remained dependent on private money to subsidize of public education dollars.

As the school buildings were getting better for African Americans and they started populating in schools so they gained more and they skyrocketed from 310 statewide in 1922,1923 to two thousand in 1927, 1928 and over 1477 African Americans were enrolled in public high schools and 600 hundred were enrolled in private institutions.

After some of the progress in 1920s the education system didn't change much for African Americans until the 1950’s. Like many southern states, North Carolina maintained a completely segregated schools until 1954 Brown vs. Board of education when the supreme court decided and declared the practice of segregated schools was unconstitutional.They started with sending 12 african americans to different white schools in North Carolina and slowly desegregated all white schools.

The state wanted to end desegregation so they decided to send African Americans to a white school they sent the African Americans in 1960 but it didn't completely work segregation ended in 1971 and that's a 11 year difference.

Source: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for Washington Graded & HS, 2005