In the early 1940s, Madeline Morgan, a Black Chicago Public School (CPS) teacher and Black history activist, created a Black history curriculum for grades one through eight that highlighted the contributions of Black people to the history of the United States. Known as “The Supplemental Units for a Course of Study in Social Studies,” the curriculum was mandatory in CPS from 1942 to 1945. It was the first time Black history was required in a US public school system. This paper explores why Morgan won approval for this curriculum in a highly segregated city over a decade before Brown v. Board of Education. That the curriculum only lasted for the duration of the war, and that the white liberal superintendent of CPS and the Chicago Board of Education were instantly favorable to it, might give the impression that its achievement was a top-down, administrative racial reform concession.Footnote 1 World War II did, indeed, provide an opening; but I argue that none of this would have happened if not for a grassroots, community-based Black history movement that enabled a figure like Morgan to emerge and take advantage of this opportunity. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, Morgan possessed the expertise to research, institutionalize, and promote Black history in schools. She led the effort to institutionalize and expand on the information available in Black history educational materials developed by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), of which she and some members of her network were active members. I specifically focus on her network of Black women educators and librarians who were invested in integrating positive information about Black life in major institutions like CPS and the Chicago Public Library.
This research also demonstrates that the demands for racial tolerance and unity on the home front provided the perfect climate for Morgan to receive approval for the curriculum.Footnote 2 In other words, this article reveals a variation of Derrick Bell's theory of interest convergence. Since slavery, African Americans have connected education to freedom. They have long argued for education that attested to the humanity, intelligence, talents, and contributions of Black people to American society and the world.Footnote 3 Black women educators’ commitment to intellectual emancipation during the 1940s aligned with white schoolteachers and administrators’ interest in promoting interracial tolerance in the US during a war for democracy abroad.Footnote 4
In charting the history of the first mandatory Black history curriculum in a US public school system, my research contributes to the scholarship on the history of Black women educators in the United States. This research generally highlights the dual role of Black women as educators and activists.Footnote 5 Morgan is a part of a lineage of Black women educator-activists owing to her development and advocacy of a Black history curriculum that the CPS system implemented during World War II.Footnote 6 More than an elementary school teacher and Black history activist, Morgan was also an intellectual who documented her thoughts regarding the race problem in the US and how the curriculum she designed could lead to racial unity and progress. As a scholar and advocate of the curriculum she created, she wrote articles in professional journals and newspapers and gave multiple speeches around the country. Thus, this research also adds to new scholarship that recovers Black women's integral role in intellectual history.Footnote 7
Historians that acknowledge the significance of the early Black history movement do not center Black women. These narratives about the early Black history movement are largely male-dominated, focusing on figures like Carter G. Woodson, Lorenzo Greene, and W. E. B. DuBois.Footnote 8 Jarvis Givens and Pero Dagbovie acknowledge that Black women teachers, clubwomen, librarians, and social activists played crucial roles in popularizing the study of Black history along with Carter G. Woodson.Footnote 9 However, the role of Black women educators during this historical moment needs further scholarly attention. The history of the first mandatory Black history curriculum in the United States reveals that Black women successfully navigated racist institutions to assume leadership positions that allowed them to effect institutional reforms.
Morgan's educational reform initiative took place amid deplorable conditions in CPS schools located in predominantly Black neighborhoods. A crisis in overcrowded classrooms characterized Chicago's South Side, or “Bronzeville” schools in the 1940s owing to the rapid influx of new migrants during the Great Migration (1940-1970) and the limited construction of school buildings for Black students. From 1929 to 1943, student enrollment swelled by 88 percent in twenty-seven schools on the South Side of Chicago, with almost one-third of the recent arrivals coming from Mississippi and Arkansas. The flood of students outpaced the hiring of teachers so severely that by 1941, the year the US entered WWII, each teacher had an average of forty-one students in his or her classroom.Footnote 10 Black students had to share their seats with one and sometimes two other classmates. The Depression drained resources for building new schools, and whatever money the school board did have went to the construction of schools for white students.Footnote 11 The president of the Chicago Board of Education, James McCahey, defended these practices by claiming that Chicago schools were significantly better than Black schools in the South: teachers were more experienced, and the expenditures on Black students outranked other school budgets in the country. He did not mention that white schools received 12 percent more funding for their pupils than schools with a Black-majority student body in the city.Footnote 12
Institutional racism in CPS also manifested in the reduction of the length of school days for Black children. George McCray, the executive secretary of the Chicago Council of the National Negro Congress, asserted that “the crying shame of Chicago schools in Negro areas is ‘the double-shift school.’”Footnote 13 Black children attended schools for only a few hours because administrators tried to reduce overcrowding through double and triple shifts.Footnote 14 For some, school days decreased from the required five hours to as few as three hours.Footnote 15 Thirteen of the fifty-five elementary schools that implemented the new schedule in Chicago were in Black communities, with some twenty-five thousand students affected. The Chicago Defender complained about racial discrepancies in shifts, stating that “78% of the Negro children spend 40% less time in school than do children outside of the colored communities in Chicago.”Footnote 16 This was exasperating to Black citizens since there were twenty thousand empty seats in non-Black schools in 1941.Footnote 17 The Board of Education considered redistricting proposals to allow African American children to attend white schools in adjoining areas, but white neighborhood associations, supported by the Chicago Real Estate Board and the University of Chicago, repeatedly blocked them.Footnote 18 City leaders rejected most calls from local school activists to build additional schools for Black children as a solution to overcrowding, which was considered the crisis in education in the early 1940s.
Segregation also affected the career trajectories of teachers in the CPS system. Teaching was one of the only employment opportunities available to Black women with a college education: over 50 percent of African American college graduates became schoolteachers in 1910. The Board of Education typically assigned Black educators to overcrowded Black schools with inadequate supplies and facilities. Most African American educators worked in elementary schools even if they were qualified to teach at the high school level at higher pay, because there were only two high schools in the city that accepted African American students: Jean Baptiste Point DuSable High School and Wendell Phillips High School.Footnote 19 Most of the teachers that the school board assigned to Wendell Phillips were white, which further diminished the number of CPS positions available to African American teachers. Furthermore, white teachers who worked at these schools were typically the least qualified and accepted the jobs because they had no other options.Footnote 20 This structural discrimination helps explain why 285 of the 321 Black teachers employed by the Chicago public school system in 1934 worked in elementary schools.Footnote 21
White teachers expressed their prejudice toward Black students in numerous ways. Some classrooms resembled warehouses or playgrounds for Black children rather than sites of learning. Historian Dionne Danns recounts Maudelle Bousfield's experience as the first Black principal at Douglas Elementary School in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago:
At 8:45 a.m., she came upon a classroom with noisy children and no teacher at the door. School policy dictated that teachers were to meet students at the door as they entered their classrooms. Bousfield entered the classroom and sat there until the bell rang at 9:00 a.m. The teacher sat at her desk reading the Chicago Tribune and never noticed the new principal's presence in her room, nor did she pay attention to the noisy students playing tag and hide and seek.Footnote 22
A study of sixty white teachers reveals that these problems extended beyond this single classroom. One teacher said, “In a school like [name omitted from source] you're just not expected to complete all that work.”Footnote 23 Another educator concurred, “If you want to take it easy and not work too hard, you teach at a school like DuSable or Phillips. If you really are interested in teaching, then you work at one of these better [white] schools.”Footnote 24 And yet another teacher remarked, “Down at DuSable they just try to keep the kids busy and out of trouble.”Footnote 25 Class prejudice mingled with racial prejudice. A future professor at the University of Chicago, Robert Hess, conducted a research project that exposed the biases of middle-class white teachers toward their lower-class Black students. As one teacher from his study matter-of-factly declared, “They don't have the right kind of study habits. They can't seem to apply themselves as well. Of course, it's not their fault; they aren't brought up right. After all, the parents in a neighborhood like that aren't really interested.”Footnote 26 These white teachers focused on the “pathologies” and “cultural deficits” of Black families while ignoring structural inequalities that may have affected Black children's academic performance. Historian Anne Meis Knupfer details the range of local activism by Black people and white liberals in response to the deplorable conditions, racist practices, and corruption in CPS. One way that Bousfield protested these conditions was by calling for more schools on the South Side of Chicago during her speech before the education department of the Chicago and Northern District Association.Footnote 27 Morgan sought to reduce discrimination and other issues that Black students encountered by creating a curriculum that highlighted Black people's contributions to history, literature, science, education, and the arts.
Figure 1. Madeline Morgan, 1964 [orphaned photograph]. Source: Folder 1, box 16, Madeline Stratton Morris Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Chicago Public Library.
Madeline Morgan's Journey to Correcting “Distortions and Omissions” in the Social Studies Curriculum
Educator, scholar, and activist Madeline Morgan was born Madeline Robinson to John Henry Robinson and Estelle Mae Dixon in Chicago on August 14, 1906. Her mother was an Ohio native, while her father was born in West Virginia. He migrated northwest and worked at the merchandise firm Butler Brothers for forty-five years as an elevator operator.Footnote 28 Morgan spent her early years living in her grandmother's house in Bronzeville with her parents, two uncles who worked as dining car waiters, and her younger sibling.Footnote 29 Her elders would occasionally share oral histories of Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, Howard University, and Dr. George Washington Carver.Footnote 30 By 1920, her father had saved enough money to move his growing family to a separate home.Footnote 31 However, they were still confined to the Bronzeville neighborhood due to racial housing restrictions.
Morgan's experiences with educational inequality in secondary and postsecondary school motivated her Black history activism. The CPS that Morgan attended had a predominantly white student population and an all-white faculty. She encountered the “distortions and omissions” in textbooks, which implied that African Americans were “nobodies,” “savages with no cultural background,” and “docile people.”Footnote 32 However, Morgan defied these negative stereotypes by acquiring an advanced education from elite universities. She earned a teaching certificate from Chicago Normal College. In 1933, she began her thirty-five-year tenure as a CPS social studies instructor for sixth through eighth grades at Emerson School, where her supervisors rated her teaching abilities as “Superior” in 1937 and each subsequent year.Footnote 33 Her supervisors, district superintendents, and the superintendent of CPS, William H. Johnson, sent her letters of commendation for her pedagogical prowess working with African American children on topics ranging from poetry to basic accounting.Footnote 34 Morgan continued her training at Northwestern University, where she received both a BS and an MA in education in 1936 and 1941, respectively.Footnote 35 She augmented her credentials by taking graduate courses in a variety of subjects at the University of Chicago intermittently between 1942 and 1961.Footnote 36 Her younger siblings would also follow her example: four out of five of them received a college education.Footnote 37 Morgan possessed the expertise to research, design, and promote Black history in schools.
The 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago served as one important source of inspiration for the curriculum. Created to educate people about African American contributions to the US and Chicago in the seventy-five years since emancipation, the exposition was lauded as the “first real Negro World Fair in all history” and covered a variety of themes.Footnote 38 Visitors could read about the slave trade in Africa and the first African Americans decorated for bravery in France during World War I. There were three hundred paintings and sculptures by artists, including Henry O. Tanner and William E. Scott—“the greatest collection of Negro art ever assembled”—as well as exhibits on schools and a half-hour film, “Negro Life and Education.”Footnote 39 Morgan's multiple visits inspired “dream[s] and hope[s] for the time when Negro boys and girls would be given an opportunity to read about the achievements of our leaders.”Footnote 40 Morgan turned her dream into reality.
Brainstorming about a Black history curriculum occurred in community with other Black women educators. At first, Morgan considered leveraging her ranking as a “Superior” teacher in the CPS system by writing a personal request to the Board of Education.Footnote 41 She decided, instead, to call two meetings with the Mu Chapter of the National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa to discuss her vision with fellow Black women teachers in Chicago.Footnote 42 They invited esteemed historian Carter G. Woodson to the second meeting. After discussing the potential for a Black history curriculum and consulting reference materials, the women collectively composed a letter to Superintendent William H. Johnson in February 1941.Footnote 43 The celebrations of Negro History Week were not enough, Morgan argued. Children needed to learn more about Black life throughout the school year. A Black history curriculum, she argued, would result in improved race consciousness and pride among African American students. Superintendent Johnson replied, but the content of his response is unknown.Footnote 44
Morgan credited a conversation about the inadequacies of the existing curriculum with her principal, Elinor McCollum, as a turning point in the ultimately successful curriculum proposal. McCollum arranged a meeting between Morgan and Superintendent Johnson on March 31, 1941, approximately one month after Morgan's initial letter to him. Influenced by World War II-era national attempts to advance democratic ideals, including racial tolerance, Johnson “readily accepted” her detailed plan to blend African American achievements with the existing social studies curriculum in all CPS elementary schools.Footnote 45 He then granted Morgan and her chosen collaborator—fellow African American teacher and sorority sister Bessie King—an eighteen-month leave of absence from teaching to execute the plan. Johnson established an interracial group of women to oversee the project, including two white elementary school principals—McCollum and Lois C. Morstrom—and the only Black principals in CPS at this time, Ruth Jackson and Maudelle Bousfield. Morgan recalls that Johnson gave the group “all the freedom . . . necessary to carry on the research work.”Footnote 46 Three Black social studies teachers reviewed the curriculum as well, including Black history activist Samuel Stratton, whom Morgan later married.Footnote 47
“All the Freedom . . . Necessary to Carry on the Research Work”: Black Women Collaborating to Develop a Black History Curriculum
Morgan and King conducted the bulk of their research at the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library. Their time there put them in contact with two other important Black women who were actively involved in the local Black history movement in Chicago. Vivian G. Harsh and Charlemae Rollins worked together at the Hall Library for twenty-six years sharing knowledge about African American culture and literature with thousands of patrons. Harsh was appointed as the founding head librarian and expert of the Special Negro Collection, while Rollins worked as the children's librarian.Footnote 48
The curriculum owed its life to the grassroots Black archive that Harsh dedicated herself to building. She was appointed to head the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library in 1932. This new library was built in the Bronzeville section of Chicago to serve the growing African American population. Thus, Harsh believed it should include a Special Negro Collection and started this “distinctive feature” of the library by assembling books, pamphlets, clippings, and photographs she received from her friends in ASNLH.Footnote 49 Like Morgan, she was an active member of ASNLH. Charles Bentley, a distinguished dentist and civil rights activist, willed the first collection to the library. It contained approximately three hundred books on African American history and literature. Harsh had known him since her youth because she frequented his events and attended functions held by friends they had in common.Footnote 50 Harsh utilized her personal connections and money from CPS to grow the collection to over two thousand items by the time of her retirement in 1958, making the Special Negro Collection the largest Black archive in the Midwest. Although remembered as being stern and somewhat aloof, Harsh's legacy was her dedication to creating a space for emerging writers to share their work and compiling a collection of materials by Black people about African American culture and history.Footnote 51 Morgan and King relied on Harsh's expertise and her budding collection for their research on Black history and life. They spent each week, including some weekends, reading material from the rare books collection, which Harsh “kept under lock and key.”Footnote 52
Morgan and King also benefited from Charlemae Rollins's pioneering work. During her thirty-one years of service as the first children's librarian at the Hall library, she cultivated close relationships with children and parents in the community. She may have drawn upon her own experiences as a teacher in Kansas when interacting with visiting teachers, whom she invited to the library to allow their students to hear stories of African American accomplishments. Rollins conducted reference work, “had regular storytelling hour, prepared book reviews, made book selections, and ran workshops for both parents and teachers.”Footnote 53 She also collected newspaper and magazine articles and clippings about African Americans. In addition to her work in the Hall library, Rollins served as a member of the children's book selection committee for the entire library system. In this position, she educated her colleagues on the deleterious impact that ethnic and racial misrepresentation in children's literature had on Black children. Rollins successfully fought against racism in children's literature throughout her career. For example, she worked for numerous years on a bibliography of acceptable depictions of minorities in children's books called, We Build Together: A Reader's Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use. Published one year before the CPS Black history curriculum, the bibliography would serve as a useful complement to the new and important units that Morgan and King worked hard to design.Footnote 54
Morgan and King's research, which would serve as the scholarly foundation for their pedagogical intervention, extended beyond their work with Harsh and Rollins at the Hall branch. They also consulted sources at the University of Chicago Library, Chicago Historical Society, Field Museum, and Chicago Art Institute. Morgan and King also supplemented their findings with information gleaned from corresponding with experts.Footnote 55
When they were not reading, they were writing and rewriting lesson plans for clarity and accessibility for students at different grade levels. Morgan then submitted the drafts of the curriculum for “corrections, suggestions, and approval” to distinguished scholars of African and African American history and culture such as Carter G. Woodson and Melville Herskovits, an anthropologist at Northwestern University.Footnote 56 She also sent it to Black teachers and school administrators such as Samuel Stratton, Maudelle Bousfield, and Ruth Jackson.Footnote 57 Her relationships with prominent Black women principals would serve her well beyond the review and approval of the social studies supplemental units. Bousfield and Jackson became a part of Morgan's personal and professional network in the local Black history movement in Chicago. Morgan benefited from their breakthroughs working in the racist CPS and relied on their support to advocate the new Black history units.
Bousfield was qualified for her role on the CPS curriculum review board and would serve as a close friend to Morgan. She was a highly educated and musically gifted member of the Black elite in St. Louis, Missouri, and later, Chicago. She received musical training at Charles Kunkel Conservatory of Music in St. Louis, where she was the first Black woman to graduate, and Chicago Mendelssohn Conservatory of Music. Bousfield also earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after only three years of study, and a master's degree from the University of Chicago. After teaching in different states for a few years, she finally settled in Chicago with her husband, a physician who received his training at Northwestern University.Footnote 58
While in Chicago, Bousfield navigated racial tensions and political corruption in CPS to continue advancing her career in education. In 1926 she made history as the first Black dean of a CPS school, Wendell Phillips High School, after working there as a math teacher for four years. Bousfield soon became the first Black woman principal of Keith Elementary School after acing the difficult principal examination, which required proficiency in subjects such as French, German, and mechanical drawing.Footnote 59 This promotion made her the city's first African American principal. The leading Black newspapers and magazines across the country, including the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, Opportunity, and The Crisis, celebrated her groundbreaking accomplishment.Footnote 60 In 1939, Bousfield made history again with her appointment to Phillips High School as the first African American principal of a high school in Chicago and the first African American to head a multiracial school, although Phillips had a predominantly Black student body.Footnote 61 Hence, Bousfield was well prepared for her role on the CPS curriculum review board and would serve as a close friend to Morgan.
Ruth Jackson was another member of Morgan's network of Black women educators in Chicago who collaborated with her on the Black history curriculum. Jackson graduated from the University of Atlanta and the University of Chicago and was a member of the Theta Omega chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Jackson began teaching in CPS in 1917 after teaching in Atlanta for some time. By 1920, she had married Charles E. Jackson, also a Georgia native, and was raising three children in Bronzeville while she worked as a high school teacher. She spent the first years of her teaching career in Chicago in a high-level position at branch 2 of the Burnside School, followed by six years at Wendell Phillips High School. She made history in 1930 by becoming the second “race woman” after Maudelle Bousfield to pass the CPS principal examination.Footnote 62 However, she was not placed in an administrative role until five years later. Anne Knupfer surmises that this delay may have been caused by “corrupt practices” related to the examination, which the Citizens Save Our Schools Committee exposed. Founded in 1933, this grassroots organization was composed of teachers and concerned citizens who were committed to improving schools in Black communities in Chicago.Footnote 63 For example, starting in 1939, the organization conducted yearly surveys of these schools concerning “overcrowded conditions, teacher loads, and social services available.”Footnote 64 CPS administrators eventually assigned Jackson to Coleman Elementary School on the South Side, where she worked until her retirement in 1942.Footnote 65
“The Supplemental Units for a Course in Social Studies”: A Contributionist Narrative of Black History
Morgan and King offered a revisionist depiction of African American men and women, attending to their accomplishments in all areas of American society. To align with the categorization of the existing social studies curriculum, Morgan and King devised their curriculum in three categories: primary grades 1, 2, and 3; intermediate grades 4, 5, and 6; and upper grades 7 and 8. The units did not stand alone but rather were integrated into the standard social studies lessons. For example, “when community life is studied in the primary grades the children are acquainted with Negroes in the various occupations. Stories are written in these grades that show the Negro not only as public servant but as educator, musician and scientist.”Footnote 66 The first-grade unit included stories about Black police officers and Pullman porters as well as information about contralto vocalist Marian Anderson, symphony writer Florence Price, and poet Paul Dunbar. According to Morgan, “Because most of the poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar are in dialect, the reason for the dialect is told in one of the stories which reads in part, ‘You will think that his father's way of talking is queer. He talks that way because he did not know the English language when he came to America. He spoke the best he could.’”Footnote 67 The second-grade unit continued emphasizing the role of different members in their community and featured agronomist George Washington Carver, singer Dorothy Maynor, composer R. Nathaniel Dett, and poet Langston Hughes. The third-grade curriculum centered on occupations and distant cultures; thus it was the most appropriate grade to learn about life in West Africa's Dahomey (modern-day Benin). Morgan noted that Europeans viewed African farmers in the diaspora as backward, which may have also alluded to the US Southerners’ perspective of Black sharecroppers. She confronted the myth that Black people were lazy by asserting in the curriculum that “African Negroes have to work very hard for a living. . . . Farming [was] not easy.”Footnote 68 Historian Ian Rocksborough-Smith argues that this commendation of agrarian life was probably intended for the many working-class children of southern Black farmers Morgan expected in Chicago classrooms during the Great Migration.Footnote 69 I contend that Morgan was challenging lies in academic scholarship and children's literature that Africans did not have a history, were uncivilized, and unintelligent. In addition to featuring a description of life in Dahomey, the unit addressed civilizations of Africa, the ways Africans lived together and made a living, and African religion, music, and art. Morgan made an implicit argument that African Americans could take pride in African history and culture. The third-grade curriculum also detailed the lives of “Chicago's Negro Neighbors” such as high school principal Maudelle Bousfield, author Arna Bontemps, and even Madeline Morgan herself.
Fourth-grade students learned about early US settlers and Black inventors. These include Jan Matzeliger, who invented the shoe lacing machine; Granville T. Woods, inventor of electrical appliances; and William Trail, a settler in the Indian territory. In fifth grade, pupils learned about the first settler in Chicago, a Black man named Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, whom Morgan portrayed as highly intelligent, as well as plantation life in Virginia. The unit featured Black men like Pedro Alonso Niño, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his first voyage and thus disrupted the Eurocentric historical narrative of early explorers and discoverers. Morgan likely agreed with the curators of the American Negro Exposition, who also decided to spotlight Niño to demonstrate that the Black man's “role in the American epic” extended beyond slavery.Footnote 70 While these units on early US settlers are important for their recovery of Black participation in the formation of the nation, they also present a problematic narrative of settler colonialism; American “discoverers” settled on native land and engaged the military, leading to famine, disease, and the death of scores of native peoples.
The seventh- and eighth-grade units covered Black soldiers in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, slave insurrections as resistance to the institution of slavery, and abolitionists. Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois were among the individuals highlighted in the seventh grade. Eighth-grade pupils read about African American military leaders beginning with the War of 1812, such as Benjamin O. Davis. Students also continued learning about the Black contributions to the arts. Given the war climate, it was especially important for educators to emphasize African American soldiers' heroism.
The fact that Morgan called for a Black history curriculum and offered a contributionist narrative of Black history was bound up in her ideas about the race problem in America and its solution. Morgan believed that racial inequality stemmed from white people's prejudice toward Black people, which could be gradually eliminated through education. Thus, Morgan's thoughts very much fit within what historian Leah Gordon calls “racial individualism”—a framework that attributes racism to white prejudice and legal injustice, and views education as its solution. She believed white prejudice, “the flawed racial attitudes that might lead to discriminatory behaviors,” emerged in childhood.Footnote 71 It was a psychological condition that was socially informed. “Their opinions and attitudes are fundamentally determined by their parents or the social group in which they live,” Morgan argued, “and the truth about the road over which the Negro has traveled is unknown to them.” Racial prejudice was not instinctive, but rather passed down from generation to generation or taught by other members of society. Morgan also held the school system responsible for white people's ignorance because it failed to teach children about Black people's significant contributions to the United States. Therefore, schools must be the primary sites of social reform. Morgan wrote, “Success or failure in racial adjustments depends upon the adoption of educational methods that will effect [sic] the desired changes. The change is essentially a change in the quality of attitude, which is an educative process.”Footnote 72 Morgan maintained that African Americans must be included in historical narratives in order for white attitudes to change, because their inclusion would lead to “a type of racial understanding, either by experience or vicariously, that will gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society.”Footnote 73 She believed in the power of education to construct and dismantle racist attitudes.
Morgan did not publicly share the view of more radical advocates that it would take much more than Black history lessons to eradicate white supremacy, and that, beyond changes in attitudes, significant structural reforms in all areas of society were required. However, the manuscript of her 1944 article about the curriculum in The Councilor hints at her true political intentions. She expanded on what she considered the intellectual emancipation of the Negro. Morgan argued:
Intellectual freedom is more than the right to the pursuit of knowledge. It is the unlimited privilege to seek learning in order to fructify one's endowed aptitude and it is the right to have an equal opportunity to practice or to serve in one's chosen field. To Negro Americans to practice or to serve without restriction is the essence of intellectual freedom, and until we have this intellectual freedom we are not enjoying the full rights of citizenship.
This explication was omitted from the published version. It is possible that she was advised to take it out because her definition of intellectual freedom moved beyond the “enduring appeal of uncontroversial tolerance education” to a structural demand: equal access to jobs. Employment discrimination had been outlawed in defense industries owing to A. Philip Randolph's threat to March on Washington.Footnote 74 However, African Americans were barred from many other professions. Morgan chose to be strategic in how she promoted the Black curriculum to appeal to as many teachers, parents, and school administrators as possible.
Morgan wrote that the Black history curriculum she designed would not only eradicate racial prejudice among white people, but it would also have favorable psychological influences on Black youth by augmenting race pride among them. She deemed the curriculum she designed as “the Negro's third emancipation, intellectual freedom.”Footnote 75 She maintained that the Black history curriculum would benefit both Black and white children and American society at large. Her reference to the “full rights of citizenship” reflects her deep-seated faith in American liberal democracy.
Morgan's views on race were very much in the tradition of Carter G. Woodson, who shared a similar rationale for the inclusion of Black people in US history curricula: to build the self-esteem of African Americans and eradicate prejudice among white people. According to historians Elliott Rudwick and August Meier, Woodson repudiated any radical inclinations and distanced himself from anything that disrupted the status quo, which helped to elevate the legitimacy of his work among distinguished Black and white groups that could aid his cause.Footnote 76 The Black history units that Morgan designed reflect these outlooks in that they do not particularly criticize American society or directly challenge white American racism. This helps explain their relatively easy incorporation into the overall curriculum. Nonetheless, as historian Jarvis Givens cogently argues, “the true political intentions undergirding black educational striving were rarely on full display,” given the prevalence of anti-Black violence.Footnote 77 Black educators, including Woodson and Morgan, had to strategize how they resisted “oppressive school settings that reflected a world order built on black subjection.”Footnote 78
Education “Will Shape the Destiny of Our Democratic Society”: World War II, the Intercultural Education Movement, and Educational Reform
It is not a coincidence that Superintendent Johnson approved the Black history curriculum during World War II. Johnson's published writings and public speeches about the new curriculum reveal the war's influence on his sympathies toward Black history. For example, in a 1943 article entitled “The Place of the Negro in the Social Studies, Chicago Public Schools,” he argued that “the anticipated results [interracial tolerance] are worth any effort, because they mean a unification of our country from within and strengthening of our democratic ideals.”Footnote 79 Like Morgan, he believed that the curriculum would improve race relations between white people and African Americans. Johnson emphasized the usefulness of the curriculum in preparing students to serve their nation as active participants in a democracy.Footnote 80 He detailed the broad and successful objectives of the inclusion of Black people in history, arguing that all young people augment their comprehension of “good citizenship” by recognizing both the challenges and triumphs that all groups in “our great democracy” face.Footnote 81 He admitted that radical changes in attitudes might take time, but expressed confidence that “intelligent instruction and practice in democratic principles” would be effective in the end.Footnote 82 This would lead to a respect for “democracy in action,” more interracial cooperation, and a “final victory.”Footnote 83 During his speech at a dinner given in his honor, Johnson further contextualized his acceptance of the proposal. According to a Chicago Defender reporter, he said that Chicago was part of a “national and world trend for co-operative justice” that he had “observed across the years and miles and as rapidly as possible is helping Chicago to the full realizations of truth.”Footnote 84 The Black history curriculum was directly associated with promoting racial tolerance, democracy, and citizenship in the United States—all rallying points during World War II.
Johnson's desire to maintain a unified domestic front and increase morale for the war was not arbitrary for him or any of the other white liberals in power. African Americans were subjected to violence at the hands of white people in both the North and the South. Northern cities, in particular, could be hotbeds of race riots. The 1919 race riots served as an example of how vicious racial tensions could get in Chicago. On July 27, 1919, a white man struck a teenage Black boy who floated over the imaginary line that separated two segregated beaches. The injury led to the boy's death. Over the course of five days, thirty-eight people died—twenty-three Black people and fifteen white people—and over five hundred people were injured.Footnote 85 The first school year that the new CPS curriculum went into effect, race riots erupted in Detroit and Harlem. On June 20, 1943, a warm Sunday on which thousands of people had flocked to Belle Isle in the Detroit River to cool off, fights broke out all day between Black and white people on the island and soon escalated into mob violence and spread to the downtown area. Federal troops intervened after numerous days of turmoil. By then, thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of them Blacks, and 675 people were severely wounded.Footnote 86 The Harlem riot resulted in less bloodshed, although it was still significant. Six people died, and over three hundred people were injured over the course of sixteen hours after a white police officer shot a Black soldier in uniform.Footnote 87 While no major riots erupted in Chicago that summer—perhaps because of the work of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations—the black market in weapons and ammunition thrived on Chicago's South Side in the summer of 1943 in preparation for violent attacks by white people.Footnote 88
Even if CPS administrators and politicians were unaware of the illicit gun activity in Chicago, they knew about the deadly events around the country; they wanted to do their part to maintain peace by promoting interracial understanding through education for the duration of World War II. It is likely that Johnson also saw this integrationist curriculum as a means to quell a growing sense of frustration among the Black community with white violence and racial oppression. There was interest convergence between Johnson's eagerness to promote domestic unity because of the war, and Morgan and her network of Black history activists’ desire to emphasize Black people's humanity and significance.
As an advocate and scholar of the CPS Black history units, Morgan wrote several articles about the curriculum, in which she strategically employed wartime rhetoric to promote the study of Black history during World War II. For example, in the manuscript of her article in the Virginia Teachers Bulletin, Morgan wrote:
The present world threat to democracy has stirred people to unusual depths in their thinking and acting. Many are now demanding that the schools teach democracy effectively to our youth. It is because of this cultural crisis, with dangers involved for all, that the problems of Negro Americans are being discussed widely. Attention is being focused upon the fact that democracy must strive to establish justice and freedom at home among all groups if it is to have the morale and unity essential for its success.Footnote 89
Morgan connected democracy and citizenship with educational material on the historical and modern contributions Black people have made to America. By doing so, she joined scores of African Americans who employed the wartime rhetoric of democracy and anti-fascism to advance a host of civil, political, and economic rights for Black people such as school desegregation, fair housing practices, and equal access to defense industries jobs. Morgan's writings strongly reflect the activism associated with the “Double V for Victory” campaign, launched by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1942, which encouraged the defeat of facism abroad and in the United States.Footnote 90 In a 1943 article in the Negro College Quarterly, Morgan argued that “the kind and quality of education gained . . . will shape the destiny of our democratic society.”Footnote 91 She maintained that the school was a social agency and, therefore, the most suitable site for reshaping interracial attitudes and instructing American children to believe in and practice democracy. She hoped the new curriculum would bring the “American family” closer together.Footnote 92
In 1944, Morgan continued using rhetoric related to popular American ideals during World War II to advance Black intellectual freedom. “The school curriculum is an educational guide and unless it includes the contributions of all its citizens it is not adequate to the preservation of democracy,” she wrote in The Councilor.Footnote 93 “The Intellectual Emancipation of the Negro,” as the article was titled, would result from Black children learning about wide-ranging achievements that Black people have made. It would also have positive psychological effects by improving their notions of self-worth.Footnote 94 She concluded an article in the Virginia Teachers Bulletin with a call for educators to “work incessantly, intelligently, and courageously for the rights of citizenship for all Americans.”Footnote 95
The intercultural education movement also provides useful context for the convergence of Black and white interests with regard to the need for Black history, and thus, the approval of the Black history curriculum in Chicago. The intercultural education movement picked up more steam in urban school districts across the country in the 1940s. This is likely the “national and world trend for co-operative justice” that Superintendent Johnson referred to in his speech at a dinner in his honor.Footnote 96 The intercultural education movement gained traction around the same time as the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. Its adherents challenged traditional concepts of race and aimed to foster ideals of cultural pluralism in classrooms. For example, New York City teachers collaborated with the American Jewish Committee and the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education to disseminate educational materials. These documents were created to decrease white students’ racial prejudice and to bolster minority students’ self-esteem.Footnote 97 Intercultural education gained wider acceptance after the US entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. According to education historian Zoë Burkholder, “Religious leaders, educators, and politicians stressed tolerance as a central tenet of democracy, a theme that was echoed through tolerance rallies and the distribution of ten million ‘badge of tolerance’ buttons to citizens nationwide by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.”Footnote 98 The intercultural education curriculum usually incorporated the history, cultural practices, and important contributions of minority groups, including Jews, Italians, Mexicans, and African Americans to US society. For white liberals like Johnson, it was not practical to fight against fascism while practicing racism.
Not only did curricula become more inclusive of different racial and ethnic groups in the US during the war, but national teaching journals displayed similar changes. Burkholder notes that the usual contributors to teaching periodicals before World War II were white teachers who were mostly concerned with the education of white children. However, during the war, teachers championed racial tolerance for white racialized or ethnic minorities, including Jews, Germans, Italians, and Russians. They soon redirected tolerance education to address the treatment of African Americans because teachers recognized that African Americans were discriminated against the most in the US. With the rise in race riots over the summer of 1943 and “new and sudden visibility” of Black social justice activism, came an increased focus on Black education in the pages of national teaching journals.Footnote 99 In the 1940s, white teachers promoted racial tolerance for African Americans for the first time on a national scale.
“I Am Proud to Know That I'm a Negro”: Celebrations and Backlash to the Curriculum
The Black history curriculum was met with great acclaim over the course of its implementation as a mandatory component of instruction in all CPS schools between 1942 and 1945. Hundreds of letters praising the curriculum or expressing interest in acquiring it flooded the Chicago school system after the curriculum was released.Footnote 100 In one of her many articles on the curriculum, Morgan summarized the widespread enthusiasm for the new units of study as well as other racial projects that it inspired in Chicago schools:
Many articles are appearing in school newspapers and city papers about Negro contributions, and the children enjoy finding material about Negroes. Plays, round table discussions, and stories about Negroes are taking a greater place in school programs. Forty states have been reached and almost a thousand sets of units have been mailed since September. Among some of those receiving the units are people so far south as South America; as far north as Maine; as far west as California; as distant as Italy and Africa; and the United States Office of Education in Washington, D.C., the board of education, social agencies, ministers, principals, teachers, soldiers, colleges, city interracial commissions, and interested citizens.Footnote 101
The curriculum was mandatory in CPS, but its reach was not limited to this Midwestern city. The Office of Education, the highest educational office in the country, as well as members of school districts around the country requested copies of the units. People from South America, Africa, and Europe praised the work and expressed their interest in learning more about it. The Chicago Board of Education sold copies for a dollar.Footnote 102 These requests demonstrate a widespread interest in this era in eliminating racial prejudice through education. It also illuminates that there was a dearth of literature on Black people, especially for youth, at this time.
The curriculum was not only politically salient, but the students who learned it enjoyed the material and learned a new perspective on Black life. According to an eighth-grade teacher, “The children knew so little about Negroes, they were inspired to do research of their own. They wanted to talk about Negroes all day every day. I couldn't do that, so I had to organize a Negro History Club. I asked the children to save their findings and questions either for the regular daily history period or the weekly Negro History Club.” A few of the many remarks made by Black and white students were: “I didn't know that Negroes had done such outstanding things in American wars”; “I am proud to know that I'm a Negro”; “We feel uplifted when we learn that our race is doing something”; and “We don't need to feel ashamed of the Negro race.”Footnote 103 A teacher reported that one student asked, “Why haven't we heard about Negro achievements before?”Footnote 104 The curriculum seemed to have the desired effect of imparting racial pride to African American children and changing white attitudes toward African Americans.
Although the “Supplementary Units” received positive national and international recognition, there was also some backlash to the reform measure. Morgan recalled that “attacks began” when the curriculum was institutionalized and white ethnic groups demanded units that highlighted their own people's history and contributions to the United States.Footnote 105 There was both indifference and resistance to the curriculum, but none of these reactions surprised Morgan because of the racial climate in her city—it “could be expected in a segregated city like Chicago.”Footnote 106 Resistance to her efforts for all children to learn a truthful version of US history continued long after her curriculum became mandatory. James Burke, the principal of A. O. Sexton Elementary School in Chicago, scribbled an insolent note over a 1968 Chicago Sun-Times article about Morgan's curriculum. Addressing her as “Rev. Madeline Stratton,” he penned in large all capital letters, “SOAPY WILLIAMS SAID AFRICA FOR AFRICANS[.] EDUCATION CAN NOT[,] WILL NOT TAKE THE JUNGLE OUT OF APES.”Footnote 107 This note reveals the intensity of white racism in Chicago, a place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described white mobs he believed were more hostile and hate-filled than those in the Deep South. The year of the article's publication also points to the long-lasting prominence Morgan received for her work, even if the curriculum was mandatory for only three years.
While backlash from the white community was rooted in white supremacy or jealousy, some in the African American community offered constructive criticism. The Negro History Bulletin ran an article that vaguely expressed concern over the methods that the Chicago Bureau of the Curriculum suggested, and the exclusion of certain data and selection of facts which “may be emphasized beyond their importance.”Footnote 108 It is not clear which elements of the curriculum the authors referred to, but they balanced their assessment of the curriculum, calling it an “auspicious beginning” that helped to fill the void in educational materials about Black people and remedy racial attitudes around the world about African Americans.Footnote 109
Despite these perceived limitations, prominent members of the Black community honored Johnson with a dinner for approving and overseeing the curriculum at some degree of risk to his personal safety within a changing but still racially divisive city. More than three hundred of Chicago's most illustrious citizens gathered at the Woman's City Club for the dinner, hosted by the National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, on June 12, 1942.Footnote 110 Maudelle Bousfield was among the speakers who emphasized that research for the project began long before the United States joined World War II. Perhaps she was responding to rumors that the new curriculum was merely a temporary and reactionary measure “to assuage national wartime observance of racial tolerance.”Footnote 111 Even if work for the curriculum began prior to the US's entry into the war, Johnson and other school administrators were likely aware of the possibility of the US entering the war. Bousfield also expressed her fear that “certain sinister influences” would attempt to “crucify” Johnson for his role in the enactment of the social studies plan.Footnote 112 This remark sheds light on the dangerous racial climate in Chicago: even a top white official could be retaliated against for helping to advance the fight for full citizenship, true democracy, and greater respect for Black people. Attorney Patrick B. Prescott tried to liven up the mood after Bousfield's remarks by reminding Johnson that “Jesus Christ was crucified, and He is remembered.”Footnote 113 He went on to say that brave men and women are remembered for their commitment to human justice, including Abraham Lincoln, while nefarious people are forgotten. His reference to Lincoln is reminiscent of Morgan's claim that her curriculum was a “third emancipation” for African Americans. Other important figures in the Black community that gave remarks include Attorney Oscar C. Brown from the NAACP, Frazier Lane of the Chicago Urban League, Samuel Stratton of DuSable High School, and the principal of Coleman Elementary School, Ruth Jackson.
Other attendees further underscored the importance of this “revolutionary trend” not only for public education in the Black community but also for the field of education and the nation. J. M. Hughes, dean of the School of Education at Northwestern University, and District Superintendent Leo G. Herdeg, among other leading school administrators, gave brief remarks after attendees ate dinner and sang the National Anthem. Johnson offered formal remarks toward the end of the program. He assured the guests that he was not fearful of “crucifixion” and that it was important for students to learn that the Negro had given “his toil . . . talents, and even his life, to create and perpetuate our democratic way of life.”Footnote 114 He claimed that the Board of Education supported any effort that would improve CPS, and that some people even told him that the 1942 curriculum should have been developed sooner. Phi Delta Kappa Sorority then presented Johnson with an album of Marian Anderson records. President Franklin Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt could not attend, but they sent congratulatory telegraphs. Their recognition of the curriculum emphasized its significance as an unprecedented reform measure.
It is important to note, however, that the entire African American community did not agree with the banquet for Johnson. An anonymous Black woman sent a letter one month before the scheduled event that reprimanded Morgan and members of her sorority for planning the event for him. “Is it you women are trying to show Dr. Johnson you are not prejudice or is it some one [sic] in your organization that is trying to get a promotion and using this group of women to ride in on?” she asked.Footnote 115 The anonymous writer reminded Morgan of deplorable conditions in Black public schools: curtailed school days, secondhand resources, and white teachers and principals who do not take their jobs seriously because “they know they are only teaching little niger [sic] children.”Footnote 116 “You know Dr. Johnson approves of these things,” the writer continued.Footnote 117 This letter reveals a diversity of opinions within the Black community regarding which educational issues should be prioritized. For example, the executive secretary of the Chicago Council of the National Negro Congress denounced inequality in CPS as acts of “criminal neglect.”Footnote 118 He asserted that Black children were losing 40 percent of their school time because city and school officials implemented double shifts as the solution to overcrowding.Footnote 119 The anonymous writer did not have any objections to the Black history curriculum itself but argued that other important structural reforms must be implemented in Black schools in Chicago. She criticized Morgan and the National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa for honoring the man that oversaw Black children's oppression and supported educational inequality.
As revealed by Morgan's scholarship about the new curriculum, discussed above, integrating Black achievements into the social studies curriculum was her ultimate priority—not addressing structural inequality. Morgan maintained that social studies curricula that included African American contributions to all areas of society would change racial attitudes and solve the race problem in America. As a result, Morgan valued celebrating the man who approved the citywide Black history curriculum.
The Black history curriculum and Morgan's subsequent popularity attracted attention from regional associations and policymakers. Grace Markwell, an elementary school teacher in Brookfield, Illinois, contacted Morgan to join the Illinois Council for the Social Studies (ICSS). The ICSS's Committee on the Social Studies in the Elementary School established a subcommittee on interracial cooperation during a period of heightened national attention to diversity. Rather than focus on a range of groups of people, the subcommittee decided to focus on Black people, demonstrating that “social studies teachers [were] in the van in the movement to educate for a just and endurable peace.”Footnote 120 Like many other people in the nation, Markwell and her colleagues “[recognized] that one of the greatest challenges to democracy on the ‘home front’ [was] that of the American Negro.”Footnote 121 Morgan served as a member of the Committee on the Social Studies in the Elementary School from 1943 to 1944. Markwell and Morgan collaborated on a handbook on interracial cooperation to aid teachers with promoting understanding and fellowship between white people and Black people. The booklet suggested speakers that could visit schools to talk with students about interracial cooperation or Black history. It is not surprising that members of Morgan's network are included on this list: Maudelle Bousfield, Ruth Jackson, and Samuel Stratton. The handbook also included a list of sites of interest in “the Negro district” such as the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library and the Chicago Defender headquarters as well as recommended literature for students and teachers. In the testimonial section, teachers shared their efforts to promote racial understanding; several of them expressed their gratitude and their students’ appreciation for Morgan's curriculum. Markwell wrote, “My pupils received the stories from the ‘Supplementary Units’ in a silence most unusual, so astonished were they to learn that Negroes had made such outstanding contributions. They were excited that the Morgan they learned of in their classroom ‘was a real person’ and Markwell's friend.”Footnote 122
On March 13, 1945, Illinois (and South Side) state representative Corneal Davis invited Morgan to appear before the Education Committee of the State Legislature in Springfield, Illinois. Samuel Stratton also spoke before the same committee. As leading educators in Black schools and Black history activists, their presence at the 64th General Assembly was significant.
Davis, a Southern African American who was a valuable contributor to later civil rights, public aid, and public welfare initiatives, proposed House Bill 251.Footnote 123 This legislation required Illinois schools to include Black history in the curriculum. The bill he initially proposed on March 13, 1945, read:
History of the negro race shall be taught in all public schools and in all other educational institutions in this State supported or maintained in whole or in part, by public funds [emphasis added]. No pupils shall be graduated from the eighth grade of any public school unless he has received such instructions in the history of the negro race and gives evidence of having a comprehensive knowledge thereof.Footnote 124
However, by changing one word, legislators sapped the force of the bill by giving schools the option to choose whether to include information about the largest minority group in the state. The final version read, “History of the Negro race may be taught in all public schools and in all other educational institutions in this State supported or maintained, in whole or in part by public funds [emphasis added].” Replacing “shall” with “may” was a blow to Davis's intentions, but it may have also contributed to the bill being approved by 120 to 0 votes in the House.Footnote 125 Morgan was not disappointed with the results. She maintained that the voting record reflected the statewide interest in diversifying school curriculum during World War II.Footnote 126
“Shunted Aside”: The End of the Curricular Mandate and the End of The War
Unfortunately, the Board of Education “shunted aside” the curriculum in 1945.Footnote 127 The Board did not explain its decision to downgrade the curriculum's status from mandatory to optional.Footnote 128 Certainly, the urgency to establish peace and unity on the home front among African Americans and white people abated with the end of World War II. The Board's decision marked the ending of the convergence between Black and white interests, which strongly suggests that the white people in authority did not truly value integrated school curricula and how it could shape children's perception of themselves and other racial groups. The looming Cold War would bring race and education back to the forefront of national policy but in a different context.Footnote 129
Morgan's activism and intellectual output did not end with the curriculum's demise. She went on to teach African American history and pedagogy in higher education and published two textbooks, Negroes Who Helped Build America in 1965 and Strides Forward: Afro-American Biographies in 1973. In addition to her success as an educator, she emerged as a leader of many civic organizations. Morgan served as president of the Chicago branch of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in the 1970s, an Executive Board member of the NAACP, and a delegate to the 1980 Democratic National Convention. She headed service organizations such as the Chicago chapter of the National Council of Negro Women and was an active member of the Church of the Good Shepherd.Footnote 130 Morgan dedicated her life to the struggle for racial justice and educational equity.
Ashley D. Dennis is a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University. This work has benefited from the thoughtful suggestions and encouragement from Ana Rosado, Martha Biondi, Brett Gadsden, Ian Rocksborough-Smith, Melanie Chambliss, and Jeffrey Helgeson.
