Privatization skeptics and advocates alike overlook the historical nuances of the prospective administration’s support of vouchers, charter schools, and other school-choice reforms that remove schools from public oversight. An analysis of American history indicates that the use of private means was a critical aspect to ensure quality education for African Americans legally excluded from access to public institutions. The volatile role that privatization played in race relations is noteworthy because it underpinned the establishment of schools for students of color while it also informed the creation of alternatives to desegregation and the Republican narrative on the failure of public schools.

American history clearly demonstrates that communities of color have been forced to rely upon themselves to provide an education to as many students as possible. Students of color have rarely been provided a quality public education. As James Anderson demonstrated in Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, black communities consistently had to provide their own schools by taxing themselves beyond what the law required, as white officials never appropriated public money equitably by race. Black civic leaders and educators had to forge alliances with philanthropists and “progressive” whites for further financial support.

Barred from the American social order, black educators, in effect, were forced to rely upon private means to meet the educational needs of their own children. African Americans established schools controlled by the community. Such “community-controlled schools” were by necessity administered by African Americans, taught by African Americans, and attended by African Americans. These schools matched the aspirations of a population that viewed education as an entreé into the upper echelons of professional society as well the means to inculcate vocational skills that led to employment in a changing economy.

Black civic leaders established secondary schools that educated the masses and prepared students of color to live in and challenge an inherently unequal society. Schools like A.H. Parker High School in Birmingham, Alabama; the Avery Normal Institute in Charleston, South Carolina; Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi; and McKinley High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were among the premier institutions that prepared thousands of students within and by the black community. Fisk University, Morehouse College, Spelman College, Howard University, and scores of other historically black colleges and universities became politically contested sites as they navigated difficult terrain with local and state school officials and white philanthropists to keep their schools open.

Such schools were sometimes known as “Freedom Schools,” devoted in part to challenging institutional racism and preparing students to enter a violently hostile and segregated society. As the education scholar Vanessa Siddle Walker noted in her book Their Highest Potential, these schools hired well-educated and polished professionals who lived in the community they taught, cared for students as their own kin, and fashioned a curriculum grounded in the interests of the families they served. Excluded from white teacher associations, black educators formed their own professional associations, earned advanced degrees, and formed national networks.