When University of Illinois professor James Anderson talks about education inequities for black Americans, he sometimes finds his students don’t see the point in examining the past.
“Students often want to look to the future,” said Anderson in his lecture “Struggling Toward Justice in Education.” The Feb. 7 talk at Rackham Amphitheatre was sponsored by the National Center for Institutional Diversity as the final lecture of the 22nd annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium. “But the past timeline is short. It’s not so distant.”
To prove this point, Anderson told the crowd that his great-grandfather was born into slavery, and that his grandmother, who lived with him, was illiterate. His mother only completed school up to ninth grade. It wasn’t until a later conversation with his mother that Anderson realized education past ninth grade was not available for blacks until the time he went to school.
“My generation is the first African-American generation in the American south with access to universal public education,” Anderson said. “That is astounding.
“You can’t create a college-going population from a group of people who were denied access to a high school education.”
Anderson earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1966 from Stillman College. He received a master’s degree in history and social studies education in 1969 and a doctorate in history of education in 1973, both from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As a professor of history and educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Anderson extensively has written on the history of black American education, higher education desegregation in southern states, public school segregation, institutional racism and the representation of blacks in secondary school textbooks. More recently his work has concentrated on the history of public higher education and the development of school achievement for blacks in the 20th century.
“The struggle for education equality is always part of the larger fight for justice,” he said.
America still experiences fallout from literacy laws passed in the 1800s that penalized people who taught slaves and blacks to read, he said.
“The greatest migration out of the South didn’t happen until the 1960s, and that impacted the literacy of the population,” Anderson said.
His book “The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935” won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 1990. Anderson has served as an expert witness in a series of federal desegregation and affirmative action cases, including Liddell v. Missouri, Jenkins v. Missouri, Knight v. Alabama, Ayers v. Mississippi and Gratz v. Bollinger. He also served as advisor to and participant in the PBS documentaries “School: The Story of American Public Education” (2001), “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” (2002), and “Forgotten Genius: The Percy Julian Story” (2007). He is senior editor of the History of Education Quarterly.
When asked to look to the future, Anderson said cultural norms can’t change overnight but he holds hope for change. A couple key issues include providing a good education, including sound building infrastructure, for black students and improving teacher quality by making sure instructors have certificates in the classes they teach.
“Once opportunities exist, people will take advantage of them,” he said.
The talk was co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, School of Education, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Law School, BAMN, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of History and the Department of Sociology.
