Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

introduction: reactions to brown

“The conscience of America has spoken through its constitutional voice. . . . This clarion announcement will also stun and silence America’s Communist traducers behind the Iron Curtain.”¹ These words appeared in an editorial published in The Pittsburgh Courier (Courier) on May 18, 1954, the day after the Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (Brown) ruling, [End Page 370] which declared “separate but equal” public school facilities unconstitutional.² The editors of the Black-owned paper knew that their community needed to be convinced that public school desegregation was a win, not only for Blacks but for all Americans. Therefore, they used the columns of the Courier to advance the notion that the Brown verdict was a positive gain for the Black community and that “idealism and social morality” was solidly situated within American democracy.³

Historians have unearthed details about the history of the Courier when they examined more prominent themes within accounts of the Black experience in Pittsburgh. In his book about Black migration to Pittsburgh during the early nineteenth century, Peter Gottlieb observed that the Courier took an ambivalent tone toward new migrants.⁴ University of Pittsburgh professor Laurence Glasco explained that the weekly paper centered on Pittsburgh’s Black middle-class society and reflected their values in its pages.⁵ In his book, The Untold Story of Smoketown, journalist and editor Mark Whitaker also shows how the Courier accounted for the city’s Black elite when he argued that Pittsburgh, too, had a Black renaissance from the 1920s to the 1950s. In their study about African Americans in Pittsburgh, urban historians Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day reveal that before World War II, the Courier helped grow Black Pittsburgh into a “city within a city.”⁶ As far as labor relations were concerned, Dennis C. Dickerson documented how, during the 1950s, U.S. Steel and other Western Pennsylvania firms used the Courier to “develop favorable public perceptions of their employment practices and commitment to racial justice.”⁷ But perhaps Andrew Buni’s 1974 biographical work on the Courier’s first editor, Robert L. Vann, has provided the most in-depth history of the Courier. Buni argues that Vann used the newspaper as a tool for his political gain, which simultaneously helped the Black community achieve positive social changes over the first half of the twentieth century.⁸

Scholars have examined the political influence of the Courier and its contributions to labor relations, community building, and the social uplift of African Americans. Few, however, have investigated how the weekly newspaper used its pages to educate the Black community about how to interact with the public schooling system in the years immediately following the Brown decision. This essay examines three educational columns that appeared in the Courier between the autumn of 1954 and 1956. This author argues that the editors of the paper created these columns in an effort to shift the Black community away from an educational strategy of racial solidarity and racial consciousness and toward what the author calls a “colorblind universalism” approach to education.⁹ [End Page 371]

Black leaders and intellectuals’ reactions concerning the Brown decision ranged from extreme jubilation to flat-out rejection. In 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the 1954 ruling in his speech to the National Committee for Rural Schools, stating that the Brown decision came as a “joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity.”¹⁰ The New York World Telegram published a photo of euphoric lawyers George E. C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit Jr. with their hands clasped together while standing in front of the courthouse after their May 17, 1954, Brown victory.¹¹

On the other hand, Black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Malcolm X found the ruling hypocritical and doubted that it would have any influence on the racist attitudes of American Whites in the North or South. Du Bois observed, “Many Americans seem to think this [the Brown verdict] solves the problem of Negro Education. There is a sense in which we may say that it merely begins it.”¹² Black folk writer Zora Neale Hurston broke her silence about the verdict in a 1955 editorial to the Orlando Sentinel, where she wrote, “The Supreme Court would have pleased me more if they had concerned themselves about enforcing the compulsory education provisions for Negroes in the South as is done for white children.”¹³ And Malcolm X viewed the case as a “token” political move stating, “They came up with a Supreme Court desegregation decision that they haven’t put into practice yet. Not even in Rochester, much less in Mississippi.”¹⁴

The 1954 Brown ruling left Black students, principals, and teachers in a state of uncertainty about the future of their local schools. “What’s going to happen to our schools. . . . Are they going to tear them down or are they going to become integrated?” asked Leola Williams Brown, the wife of Oliver Brown, the plaintiff for which the Brown case was named. Black educators battled to preserve their schools and careers.¹⁵ Black parents agonized about sending their children to new “integrated” schools. Black students feared having to face White terror and hostility. While many media outlets and politicians focused on how the White community would acclimate to the new desegregation policy, Black people, too, needed adjustment strategies.

While entering this unchartered phase of social reality, Black people needed stable leadership and looked to Black institutions and organizations for guidance. Unfortunately, Black leadership lacked stability since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) “fired” W. E. B. Du Bois in 1948 for his objections to its president, Walter F. White, accepting a position as a consultant to the United Nations (UN) under the Truman Administration.¹⁶ Du Bois felt that the interests of Africans [End Page 372] worldwide were at odds with Truman’s agenda, and therefore White, as the leader of the NAACP, should not be associated with the Administration.¹⁷ Interestingly, the situation was a bit of “de ja vu” for the NAACP because Du Bois had resigned his editorship at the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine in 1934 under similar circumstances. He felt strongly that Black institutions should remain separated from White institutions, which conflicted with the opinion of the then NAACP president Arthur B. Spingarn, who thought that integration was best for the Black community.¹⁸

By 1950, Black leadership was in “crisis,” according to some scholars in the Black community, like sociologist and iconoclast Oliver C. Cox, who described the status of Black leadership as the “clash between the protest leader and the radical leader.” He further explained that a “radical leader” sought “the fundamental transformation of the social system.” While on the other hand, a “protest leader” pursued “the unrestricted inclusion within the system” whose values they respected. Cox situated the NAACP’s Walter White as a protest leader, whom the ruling capitalist class of the time viewed as a “respectable oracle on Negro affairs.”¹⁹ Walter White and other like-minded leaders would set an agenda for desegregation and integration in the years leading up to the 1954 Brown case. Using the Black press as an educational apparatus was a part of their strategy.

the 1952 national conference on “the courts and racial integration in education”

In April 1952, roughly 320 delegates representing forty-eight organizations hailed from twenty states and the District of Columbia for Howard University’s National Conference on “The Courts and Racial Integration in Education.” The three-day National Conference provided a space in which Black scholars could offer “critical consideration” of the problem of segregation.²⁰ Attendees heard speeches and discussed papers about the legal history, current status, and prospects of school desegregation from noted intellectuals and attorneys such as Horace Mann Bond (historian of education and president of Lincoln University), Martin D. Jenkins (sixth president of Morgan State College), William R. Ming, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall (both lawyers for the NAACP). Most participants believed that desegregation in educational spaces was inevitable because of the recent victories in court cases regarding the matter.²¹ [End Page 373]

At this conference, representatives from the NAACP and the National Urban League (NUL) proposed using media, such as newspapers, to keep the Black community up-to-date and engaged in the school desegregation process as the press had previously attracted readers during their coverage of the Sipuel, Sweatt, and McLaurin cases. In his presentation, the NAACP’s Walter White informed listeners that newspapers were a “vast and relatively untapped area of public education” that should be used to “remind the public” about the fight for equal status in schools. While Thurgood Marshall also asserted that the reason that Black students were able to be admitted into colleges and universities without incident was in large part due to a general public that had received an education from widespread “newspaper coverage and discussion in [the] daily press, the weekly magazines and college newspapers.”²² Legal experts and community leaders touted the significant role that Black newspapers played in the education of the Black community about the desegregation process a full two years before the Brown verdict. Therefore, Black educators were well aware that Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier could significantly impact the implementation of any agenda following an affirmative decision from the courts on desegregation.

after the us supreme court decision: what?

By the spring of 1954 (immediately prior to the Brown decision), Charles H. Thompson, longtime editor of the Journal of Negro Education (JNE), had apprehensions about school desegregation because Black organizations did not have clear objectives about how to move forward after the verdict was rendered. In his “Editorial Comment,” he remarked, “most people are agreed that the first six months after the decision is rendered will be the crucial period which will determine its implementation for years to come.” Thompson also emphasized that state and local communities would need to be engaged in a “campaign of popular education” immediately after the Brown decision to fulfill its potential promise. Black leaders of the educational community needed to quickly implement a plan that could use the momentum of the Brown outcome to prepare Blacks for desegregation. In June 1954, the members of the Black press gathered at the famed Hotel Theresa in New York for a conference themed, “The Negro Press and the Conscience of America—The Significance of the Negro Press in a Fully Integrated Society.” In attendance was the most [End Page 374] influential educator of the era, Mary Mcleod Bethune, who had authored hundreds of columns for Black newspapers and had been a financial contributor to The Pittsburgh Courier.²³ One cannot understate Bethune’s prominent position in the Black community or her proximity to government officials and agencies such as the United Nations. After the death of Carter G. Woodson, she led the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) and, in 1940, started her tenure as the NAACP vice president, which lasted until she died in 1955. Bethune, known as “advisor to the presidents,” held a position on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Black advisory committee (also known as the “Black Cabinet”) during the Great Depression, and Harry S. Truman selected her to attend the 1945 founding conference of the United Nations. When Mary McLeod Bethune spoke, everyone listened.²⁴

After the Brown ruling, Bethune understood that the Black press had a responsibility to reshape its primarily Black readership’s attitudes about the way they interacted with Whites. Moreover, she believed Black institutions needed to move away from being racial watchdogs and begin to foster and facilitate an integrated colorblind democracy. In her weekly Chicago Defender column published two months after the Brown verdict, Bethune articulated what the goals and objectives of the post–Jim Crow Black press should be when she instructed,

Our leaders in the Negro press may find that this is the time for refinement or restatement of goals. They will eliminate those things which tend to exploit race relations. They will report accurately the attitudes and feelings in our group always seeking to harmonize the two groups in our society rather than playing one group and its interests against the interests and ambitions of the other. It will redefine its activities in terms of meeting the goals of the harmonious achievement of integration in our society.²⁵

Bethune, the Black press, and other middle-class organizations such as the NAACP were staunch integrationists who aimed to break racial solidarity and replace it with a colorblind universalism, especially in education. Bethune not only insisted that the Black press report the news in ways that promoted a harmonious existence between the two races; she believed that Black identity should not be focused on as a subject of the news but should only be referred to if it was absolutely necessary. [End Page 375]

the pittsburgh courier: popularizing desegregation

Before Brown, Black education had been propelled by racial uplift and self-determination, racial pride, and race-first ideology, especially during the Reconstruction and Nadir periods. In 1896, elite Black educators like Mary Church Terrell and Margaret Murray Washington felt so strongly about improving the lives of Black women of the lower classes they helped establish the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), and adopted the motto “Lifting as We Climb.”²⁶ Educator Booker T. Washington, through self-determination, had lifted himself “up from slavery” and used the Jeanes Fund to train hundreds of teachers who taught in segregated schools.²⁷ In the first two decades of the twentieth-century Black educator-historians such as J. A. Rodgers and Carter G. Woodson published literature that circulated throughout the Black community that helped instill racial pride.²⁸ And the primary form of protection against White terror, dispossession, and disenfranchisement was the race-first ideology widely promoted in the 1920s by educator-organizers Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison.²⁹ All of these tactics that the Black community used to encourage and ensure the survival of its tradition of education amounted to racial solidarity in education. Integrationists like Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune called on popular media outlets such as the Courier to change African American educational goals from racial solidarity into colorblind universalism, which they felt could uplift all American society and democracy as a whole.

Accepting Bethune and other integrationists’ call, the Courier would do its part to promote integration by ensuring that learning desegregation was considered contemporary and sophisticated by Blacks in the community. The publishers upgraded its trendy sixteen page-magazine section that already featured eight pages of color comics with a new page titled “Young Moderns.” Adhering to Bethune’s earlier recommendations, “Young Moderns” began as a racially integrated page showcasing columns written by Black and White journalists. Mary Lou Chapman, an automobile interior stylist for the Chrysler Corporation, penned the column “Women Behind the Wheel,” which catered to modern women drivers who were fashionable, independent, and wanted to become automobile savvy; yet the column was not concerned with education or children. Renowned teacher-trainer Dr. Marguerite Cartwright authored two columns, “The Tender Years” and “A Teacher Talks,” which gave cutting-edge advice and information about what education should resemble in the post–Jim Crow era. The page displayed a headshot of each journalist [End Page 376] so that readers could clearly discern that Chapman was a White woman and Cartwright was Black. Starting in October 1954, the “Young Moderns” section created an integrated space within the Courier that targeted middle and working-class Black women, yet the entire Black community could benefit from the information provided. Cartwright’s columns, in particular, sought to teach the Black community to quickly embrace desegregated schools as a pathway to a true universally colorblind democracy.

The editors of the Courier could not have chosen anyone better than forty-four-year-old Marguerite Cartwright to educate the Black community about what colorblind schooling should resemble. Cartwright, a native of Massachusetts, earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Boston University, then moved to New York, where she attended New York University. In 1948 she completed her EdD in Social Studies and began teaching courses at Hunter, Mills, and Brooklyn Colleges. When the Courier offered her correspondent work in 1954, Cartwright was already an experienced journalist and prolific writer, having pieces featured in publications such as the JNE, Phylon, and The Journal of Educational Sociology. She also served on the editorial board of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH)’s Negro History Bulletin during Mary McLeod Bethune’s presidency.³⁰ And she had recently been rewarded a grant by the Ford Foundation’s adult education fund to study human relations in US cities.³¹

teaching desegregation 1954: “the tender years” and “a teacher talks”

The Courier began publishing Marguerite Cartwright’s two educational columns on October 2, 1954, a mere four and a half months after the Brown ruling. Although she does not explicitly state her column’s purpose, Cartwright initially used “A Teacher Talks” to define and explain the changes and new encounters that Black teachers, college students, and other adults returning to school post-segregation could encounter while moving them away from a racial solidarity stance on education. “The Tender Years” informed parents of preschool and primary school-aged children about progressive methods and White standards of education that everyday mothers in the Black community may not have previously come across in segregated schools. Since both columns generally appeared on the same page, the information circulated to a broader audience in the Black community, often providing [End Page 377] overlap where readers could glean information about how to both teach and learn during the desegregation process.

In one of her first articles, Cartwright addressed the Black educational system’s most vital component: the Black teacher. Black teachers were not only crucial to Black education but the backbone of the Black community. School desegregation disproportionately affected Black teachers and principals more than their White counterparts.³² However, Cartwright argued that “desegregation will be more difficult for the White teacher than for the Negro teacher,” not necessarily because it was true, but because she tried to offer an optimistic view. She suggested that White teachers found desegregation more arduous than Black teachers because White teachers’ attitudes of prejudice could no longer manifest legally in public schools as “segregation and discrimination.” After Brown, White teachers’ bias was “under attack” in public and now would have to remain a “private affair.”³³

Although Cartwright felt that the “more democratic form of behavior” brought about by desegregation would cause considerable problems for White teachers, she also challenged Black teachers’ notions about segregation. She understood that many Black teachers had accepted segregation because they believed that Black culture and White culture were incompatible and that the different morals and values of White ethnic groups would “inevitably conflict” with those of the Black community. She assured her readers that “the end of segregation need not mean the loss of cultural identity.” Cartwright never explains why or how cultural identity could be maintained, perhaps because the Brown ruling specifically applied to schools, not other public or private institutions. In 1954, the Black community still had its institutions intact, where cultural education could occur outside school hours.³⁴

The cultural identity embodied by the Black community originated from the traditions of Black education, Black schools, and Black teachers. White people, in conjunction with American democracy, had created the “Negro” identity, which was a “problem” or, at best, a “dilemma.” Cartwright recognized how difficult it would be for Black teachers to relinquish racial solidarity, as it provided a source of power that they controlled. She demanded in stark words,

Pride in profession must be substituted for pride in racial group. Instead of ethnic solidarity, there can be emphasis on solidarity as Americans and as teachers. Teachers will be free to face the basic and fundamental problems together in the spirit of cooperation and mutual trust. [End Page 378]

With those words, Cartwright revealed the primary purpose of her column, “A Teacher Talks,” to persuade Black teachers to move away from racial solidarity and toward an integrated colorblind democracy where there would be a “cooperative effort on the part of all teachers.”³⁵

Cartwright used her columns to help readers envision what a desegregated society should look like, and the role education played in creating it. She emphasized that in a desegregated society, education focused on the individual (self) and how one could improve the society at large. Education, as traditionally defined in dictionaries, was too formal and out-of-date for Cartwright. One of her goals was to redefine and update the meaning of education for Black teachers and parents. She asserted that most notions of education were obsolete and “an attempt on the part of the older to shape the development of the young in accordance with their own customs and morality.” Cartwright presented her readers with a broader, more informal definition of education, which she derived from the nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill: “everything which helps shape the individual.”³⁶ In addition, she contended that modern education must “fit the needs of the individual and society.”³⁷ Here Cartwright used her new interpretation of education: everything that helps shape the individual to fit the needs of society; to pivot her readers away from the conventional meaning of Black education, which was collective and included race consciousness in addition to racial uplift. Educating Blacks in 1954 to “fit the needs of society” meant educating Blacks for inclusion in the lowest levels of desegregated American society.

Cartwright aligned all things “modern” with desegregation and framed “old” educational strategies with segregation. In a November 1954 article titled: “What They Teach,” she addressed some of the Black parental resistance to desegregation. She recounts that “an old-school parent” ranted, “I don’t know about these modern methods—just what are they teaching the children?” She does not explicitly identify the “they” as White teachers or the “old-school parent” as a Black mother, however she proceeds to list New York Public Schools’ curricular objectives in order of importance. Instead of race-first ideology as former Harlemites Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison endorsed, the desegregated New York school system placed “character first.” Second, Cartwright resumed, was “our American heritage,” which meant that students would be taught to have “pride and faith in American democracy,” not necessarily racial pride. Another objective of the desegregated school system was “social relationships,” which included the “appreciation of the inter-dependence of all people.” By addressing genuine issues that Black [End Page 379] parents had, Cartwright assured Black parents that their children’s character meant more than their race in the new modern desegregated school system.

Character development was undoubtedly crucial for younger children. Therefore, Cartwright focused the first five weeks of 1955’s “The Tender Years” column on informing Black mothers about preparing their preschool and kindergarten-aged children for success in the desegregated classroom. The journalist had already assumed that “parents will know little about the schools their children attend and how these schools differ from the ones they attended.”³⁸ This was a departure from what Black parents knew about schools built and governed by Black teachers and principals before the Brown decision. According to Vanessa Siddle Walker’s case study on the segregated Caswell County Training School in North Carolina, the Parent-Teacher Association’s (PTA) monthly meetings were both social and informative. At PTA meetings, Walker observed, “the school principal and teachers supplied the parents with information about the school and parents asked questions to achieve clarification or express concerns.”³⁹ And since the Black PTA’s membership doubled in 1954, Black parents would have had access to Black teachers.⁴⁰ Without explicitly saying it, Cartwright was preparing Black mothers to send their children into desegregated schools that White principals and White teachers controlled.

White resistance to desegregation manifested on a variety of levels by 1955. At the state level, the Delaware State Supreme Court ruled that the school board in Milford admitted Black students to its local (previously all-White) high school illegally. The court contended that the Milford school board did not submit its “desegregation plans” to the State Board of Education; therefore, Milford was in violation.⁴¹ White voters in Mississippi voted 2-to-1 to abolish the state public school system, imitating some other Southern states like Georgia and South Carolina.⁴² Whites even began tightening segregation practices outside public schools in places such as transportation facilities, eating places, and waiting rooms.⁴³ Black parents and Black students experienced bias at the classroom level, which consequently, Cartwright’s columns began to reflect.

A ten-year-old girl Cartwright spoke with on a bus ride experienced some resistance from her teacher at the classroom level. Cartwright narrated that the girl, her friend’s daughter, whom she referred to as “Betsey,” said that she hated her teacher after her mother pointed out her “new school.” When asked why, Betsey responded it was for various reasons, but mainly because she was “mean to children.” The sixth grader had so many reasons that she [End Page 380] ended up writing a letter to Cartwright, which she received just a day later. Cartwright changed the teacher’s name to “Miss Fischer” and published Betsey’s letter in two parts, allowing the little girl to speak directly to teachers. She described a teacher who did not like her job. Betsey said that Miss Fischer “sometimes comes late” and “her excuse is a bad cold.” Betsey went on, “She goes to the board to see which children were talking. When she finds out she gives them a failure. Miss Fischer does the same thing to the people who are late, and again does the same thing when you forgot or didn’t do your homework.” Cartwright pointed out that the most significant part of Betsey’s report about the teacher was that the little girl expressed “indignation over the injustice and lack of fair play.”⁴⁴ Although Cartwright did not disclose the race of her friend, Betsey, or the teacher, the journalist’s use of the words “injustice” and “lack of fair play” lets one read between the lines. Cartwright was not trying to make race the focal point of her columns, but her goal was to inform Black teachers and parents about what to expect in the desegregated school system. As Betsey’s story continued the next week, on March 5, 1955, she detailed a Black parent’s worst nightmare: a two-faced teacher that screams at her students. The sixth grader’s letter continued, “Miss Fischer has a reputation of being one of the nicest teachers in the sixth grade. This is because her outside behavior . . . she is nice when she is in the assembly or when somebody comes into the room or when she meets another teacher, but with us children she is dreadful.” Rather than exposing the aggressions that Black children could suffer at the hands of White teachers as a result of desegregation, Cartwright framed Betsey’s experience as a lesson about how teachers should not behave, especially around children in what she described as the “middle childhood” or “latency period.” Betsey’s story was sure to occur repeatedly throughout the late 1950s and beyond.

brown v. board of education ii: “with all deliberate speed”

The desegregation process and the Civil Rights Movement in general suffered a series of significant setbacks in 1955. First, the man who led the NAACP for a quarter of a century, Walter F. White, died on March 21 at the age of sixty-one. Two months later, on May 18, Mary McLeod Bethune, educator of educators and matriarch of the Black masses, collapsed and died from a heart attack. However, despite these two untimely losses, arguably the [End Page 381] most devastating blow to the movement was the Brown II ruling. Because the Supreme Court did not specify how to desegregate schools or select a specific date that segregation had to end in the Brown case, the court gathered to hear arguments about how to implement desegregation in April 1955.⁴⁵ Several attorneys general from Southern states argued for “an indefinite period of time in which to accomplish desegregation.” The counsel for a school board in South Carolina ironically remarked, “it might take 100 years to desegregate schools in South Carolina . . . you can’t push the clock forward abruptly to 2050 or 2055.”⁴⁶ Lawyers from the NAACP, including Thurgood Marshall, recommended that the court issue a “clear declaration that existing state laws violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” They also requested that the court assign a specific date for the completion of the desegregation process.⁴⁷ On May 31, 1955, in the case that became known as Brown II, The Supreme Court handed down one of the vaguest rulings in its history and decided that desegregation should happen “with all deliberate speed.”⁴⁸ The ambiguity of the Brown II decision left the Black community deflated and confused, while pro-segregationists nationwide were emboldened.

The mood in the Black community soured as the realization that the first Brown ruling was just the beginning of a new oppressive struggle. The JNE’s editor Hurley H. Doddy reported that Black teachers were not being reappointed to integrated schools and that “likely under the present minority-majority relations they will certainly suffer more than white teachers.” Doddy’s report opposed Marguerite Cartwright’s 1954 assertion that desegregation would be worse for White teachers. Black students realized that White schools did not accommodate their hobbies or extracurricular activities. The JNE observed that “Negro students were not finding in their new schools Negro newspapers and periodicals, and books of special interest to them.”⁴⁹ And then, on August 28, 1955, two White men brutally murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till and threw his body into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River.

As the hope of school desegregation began to fade, Maguerite Cartwright’s columns began to take a more race-conscious stance in that she started to discuss racial topics explicitly. For example, she devoted three weeks of her “A Teacher Talks” column in March 1955 to discuss her “American Negro Culture” course that she had taught at Hunter College for the past six years. She expressed disappointment that the course she taught centered on Blacks was “considered unimportant, a voluntary half-year course, tossed into a corner of the evening session.”⁵⁰ If people in the United States were serious [End Page 382] about improving intergroup relations and American democracy, Cartwright argued that courses like hers should be mandated as a part of public education. That June and July, her two articles on “Anti-Semitism and the Negro,” addressed what she believed to be false accusations from Blacks that Jewish people were essentially slumlords. She asserted that “social power” existed when the two racial groups formed strategic alliances.⁵¹ And in a series of articles titled “Africa in our Schools,” published between October 8 and November 19, Cartwright took a close look at New York City fourth graders’ knowledge about Africa. She determined that even after the students reviewed the “Africa Unit,” they learned very little. After initially promoting colorblind universalism in education in her articles, in 1955, Cartwright began to encourage racial consciousness and alliance creation with other oppressed groups.

Also, in 1955, the Courier shifted their focus from desegregation to Africa’s decolonization and international politics. That same year, Cartwright became an accredited correspondent to the United Nations (UN). Thus, the editors of the Courier contracted Marguerite Cartwright to write another weekly column starting March 5, entitled “Around the United Nations.”⁵² By April 1955, in addition to demonstrating race consciousness, her educational columns “A Teacher Talks” and “The Tender Years” also began to reflect her domestic and international travels. The subject matter of nearly one in every three of Cartwright’s articles focused on her travels. She discussed her trips to the US State Department, Pittsburgh, and historically Black colleges and universities like Lincoln, Hampton, and Morehouse.

milton s. j. wright’s column: “advice to students”

At the same time, the editors of the Courier also made significant changes to the “Young Moderns” section, seemingly in response to the Brown II verdict and the overall shift in the attitudes of the Black community about desegregation. It was time for the Courier to enact crisis management since the tide had turned so quickly and dramatically. The editors enlisted Wilberforce University professor of political science and economics Dr. Milton S. J. Wright to create another educational column called “Advice to Students.” Wright earned his MA at Columbia University in Sociology and his PhD in Economics in 1932 from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Readers of the Courier would have been familiar with him from historian J. A. Rodger’s [End Page 383] 1942 article, which gave vivid details of Wright’s surprising 1932 conversation with Adolph Hitler.⁵³ Wright was known to have a good temperament, which made him “a most noteworthy ambassador of inter-cultural good-will.”⁵⁴

The column instituted a definite change in disposition for the “Young Moderns” portion of the magazine because Wright’s presence meant that the page now targeted both males and females. More importantly, Wright’s addition symbolized the racial solidarity that historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) offered because he taught at Wilberforce and earned his BA there. Furthermore, Wright offered a broader perspective of the African American experience in the United States and abroad because he was born in Georgia and attended universities in the Midwest, New York City, and Europe. Marguerite Cartwright offered an elite northeastern middle-class perspective, which sat well with traditional Courier readers. Wright would allow them to take the pulse of a younger, premarital, sans children audience. The format of the “Advice to Students” column also offered more engagement with readers because of its informal question-and-answer style.

October 1 marked the start of a new look for the section. That week, Mary Lou Chapman’s “Women Behind the Wheel” column did not appear on the same page as Cartwright’s two columns. Also, unlike Chapman’s and Cartwright’s columns, Wright did not have a headshot associated with “Advice to Students.” While Cartwright continued her discussion from the prior week about the “diplomatic losses” the US suffered during the 1955 Asian African Conference, Wright directly addressed Black students with domestic problems.⁵⁵ The first letter Wright published came from “M.J.,” a female who had recently graduated from high school in Birmingham and wanted desperately to attend college and become a teacher. However, her family did not have the money and she did not qualify for scholarships. Wright’s response harkened back to the traditional values of Black education without mentioning race. He commended “M. J.” for her “SELF HELP” attitude and advised her to reach out to her local Parent Teacher Association, YWCA, and church.⁵⁶ He also recommended that she write the president or deans of The Alabama State College, Tuskegee Institute, Talladega College, Alabama A and M College, and Miles Memorial College, all Black institutions of higher learning. On day one of “Advice to Students,” Wright invoked Booker T. Washington’s motto of “self-help,” called upon Black community organizations to uplift one of their own, and urged Courier readers to attend Black universities that would give them “the chance you seek” and build racial solidarity.⁵⁷ [End Page 384]

Wright’s readers confronted problems similar to those of Cartwright’s readers, except Wright’s audience’s problems originated at the secondary, college, and post-graduate levels of education. A graduate student who passed for White covertly mailed her letter to Wright from New York. She had been attending a graduate school away from her hometown, where she worked. She attended classes with all White students and teachers. She recounted, “Two of my teachers always refer to all Negroes as ‘niggers.’” I have spoken out against the narrow, unacademic philosophy, in and out of classes.” The faculty at the “Southern university” shunned her, and her reputation for standing against segregation made it back to her hometown employer. She was afraid of being outed as Black and losing her job as a schoolteacher. Wright sympathized with the reader and advised that she transfer but remain at her current teaching position so that she could “eventually, help the local board of education, the students, and the community see the light of real education and human progress.” Wright goes back to racial solidarity tactics and points out to his reader that racial uplift is human progress. White resistance to desegregation was manifested at the graduate level, ruining lives and careers.⁵⁸

Black students throughout the country wrote Dr. Wright about seemingly minor issues that were probably occurring at regular frequencies. On February 11, 1956, “Advice to Students” appeared at the bottom of page three of the Courier Magazine beneath an article titled, “Are They Rushing Floyd Patterson Too Fast?” Post-Jim Crow education strategy had become an afterthought for the editors of the Courier Magazine. Yet, a high school senior who called himself “J.D.M.” needed help coping with desegregation in the Eastern part of the United States. Even though his school was desegregated, all of his teachers were White. “J.D.M.” wanted to be a diplomat in the foreign service. He disclosed, “But my teachers tell me that I should decide on some other field. They say that Negroes will never become diplomats for the United States, so I should try to become a preacher, teacher, doctor, or lawyer.” “J.D.M.’s” White teachers had flat out lied to detour him from daring to dream. Wright responded, “Currently there are many Negroes in the foreign service . . . in the years to come there will be a greater demand.” Obviously, a desegregation strategy was still needed, as students in all regions of the US suffered racist dilemmas and wanted guidance from a reliable source.⁵⁹

Not only high schoolers experience difficulties, but Black graduates from desegregated colleges and universities endured obstacles as well. The second to last “Advice to Students” column appeared underneath a short story titled, “Living Dangerously,” which featured a drawing of a blushing [End Page 385] young woman handing a beverage to a man dressed in a suit standing while seductively leaning over his desk. Needless to say, the story had absolutely nothing to do with education or desegregation. This time a Black MBA graduate called “Disillusioned” wrote to outline his experiences with the job market. Although he had graduated from “one of the best known universities in this country,” he was rejected time after time. He claimed that each of the twenty-five companies that he had applied to seemed interested, until “it was discovered” that he was not White. After the fact, he found out that at least five of the companies had hired “several white boys who were only high school graduates.” In response, a sympathetic Wright replied, “Your problem has been experienced by thousands of Americans.” He took matters into his own hands and sent “Disillusioned” a letter containing names and addresses of people and a firm who could and would get him placed. Black networking was still needed to combat racist habits during the desegregation process.

By November 1955, the “Young Moderns” section of the Courier Magazine was inconsistent in its presentation, which signaled the breakdown of the editors’ initial campaign for teaching desegregation. The section no longer targeted women specifically, and its first columns appeared sporadically alongside comics or other articles and stories that were not educationally themed. There was no longer a banner at the top of the page that marked the “Young Moderns” section. Pieces that discussed desegregation in education were scattered throughout the Courier, and there was no longer a clear message about desegregation being articulated.

conclusion

Although Maguerite Cartwright carefully crafted her articles initially to teach desegregation using a colorblind universalism ideology similar to what integrationists such as Mary McLeod Bethune and the NAACP promoted, White resistance to integration and its effect on the mood of readers thwarted her efforts. In response, Cartwright brilliantly changed the topics of her columns to address some of the racial problems in desegregated schools, like the lack of a multicultural or culturally relevant curriculum. Milton S. J. Wright’s student advice column helped alleviate some of the stresses the Black community’s high school and college students felt during the desegregation process. “Advice for Students” never adhered to colorblind universalism and used the traditional techniques that Black educators had used since the Reconstruction Era to mitigate many of the circumstances created by [End Page 386] desegregation. Although Wright’s column did not explicitly encourage race consciousness and a race-first ideology, it promoted self-help, racial solidarity, and racial cooperation.

Cartwright’s change of posture in her educational columns did not go unnoticed by George F. Brown, who had just recently rejoined the Courier Magazine as editor. In January 1956, Brown wrote to Cartwright, “In checking over your more recent ‘A Teacher Talks’ columns, I note that the material has gone far afield from the original intent. I suggest that you confine them to teaching techniques and advice along those lines.”⁶⁰ Brown wanted the Courier Magazine to pivot away from advocating for social rights, telling Cartwright, “we do need material other than the same old stock attacks on race bias and preaching.”⁶¹ Brown wanted the Courier Magazine toward engaging in “world affairs,” which he speculated could have more socio-political appeal to a larger integrated audience. Brown suggested that Cartwright stop the “Tender Years” column and focus perfecting her other columns, like “People You should Know,” which focused on international political figures. News about Black people from abroad garnered optimism among readers because many African colonies were on the brink of gaining independence from world imperial powers such as Spain and Great Britian. While news from around the US about Black civil rights was bleak.

Eventually, the Courier discontinued all three educational columns in 1956 because George F. Brown felt that the magazine should “retool . . . to meet the modern challenge” rather than continue being a “paper full of exposes of race prejudice and fuzzy evangelism.” The modern challenge Brown spoke about was, in fact, desegregation and the subsequent integration process. Both “A Teacher Talks” and “Advice to Students” last appeared in the March 31, 1956, edition of the Courier Magazine, while “The Tender Years” lasted until June 23, 1956. [End Page 387]