Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. This talk examines how race and education shaped the political economy of white supremacy in urban America during the 200 years preceding Brown v. Board of Education. Moving from the kidnapping and enslavement of seven-year-old Marie Sirnir in western Africa in 1764 to six-year-old Ruby Bridges’s desegregation of a New Orleans elementary school in 1960, it proposes an alternate spatial and temporal framework for understanding the development of the modern segregated metropolis. To illuminate that framework, the talk traces Sirnir’s rise to educational prominence in nineteenth-century New Orleans and the centrality of schools to antebellum understandings of race, citizenship, and community development. It also provides street-level views of grassroots and policy battles over schools, land, and resources in the twentieth-century Crescent City. This history reveals how segregated schools created segregated communities in conjunction with housing policies that reinforced school segregation. That reciprocal relationship between schools and housing complicated the pursuit of educational equity and laid a foundation for the persistent wealth gap between black and white Americans. By considering the city at the forefront of the national charter school movement, this talk also raises questions about the intents and consequences of contemporary market-based reforms.
Walter Stern is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He earned his BA from Yale in American Studies and his Ph.D. in History from Tulane University. His research focuses on the historical intersection of race and education in the urban United States. He is the author of Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764-1960. The book explores the critical role that schools played in the development of the modern segregated metropolis. His teaching and research interests developed out of his experiences teaching public high school in Mississippi, covering education for a daily newspaper in Georgia, and working as a consultant for multiple education initiatives in Louisiana.
