What did education look like on the White side of the color line in the Jim Crow South?
As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”
But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”
This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.
The essays confirmed that students lacked a formal education on issues related to race — only two of them mentioned any educational institution influencing their ideas on the topic.
The substance of the essays also made clear that most White UGA students had learned nothing in school to challenge white-supremacist assumptions based in myths and falsehoods. Crude stereotypes of Black inferiority pervaded the most strongly segregationist essays: “The Negro has a lack of ambition. He does not have the desire to work and better himself,” read one essay. It also claimed that African Americans did not have “the morals we have,” nor were they “as physically clean as whites.”
Another student noted, “I personally do not desire to associate” with Blacks because they “have a low moral standard.” The student’s “evidence” to support this claim? Stereotypes about how Black Americans had “their brand new Cadillac standing in the yard of their one room tennant [sic] home (neither paid for yet).” The student also cited purported criminality among African Americans to justify their view.