Schools of Our Own: Chicago's Golden Age of Black Private Education

As battles over school desegregation helped define a generation of civil rights activism in the United States, a less heralded yet equally important movement emerged in Chicago. Following World War II an unprecedented number of African Americans looked beyond the issue of racial integration by creating their own schools. This golden age of private education gave African Americans unparalleled autonomy to avoid discriminatory public schools and to teach their children in the best ways they saw fit. In Schools of Our Own, Worth Kamili Hayes recounts how a diverse contingent of educators, nuns, and political activists embraced institution building as the most effective means to attain quality education. He chronicles the extraordinary Measures they employed to secure what many in the United States took for granted. Even as the golden age came to an end, it foreshadowed the complex and sometimes controversial reform efforts of the twenty-first century. Schools of Our Own makes a fascinating addition to scholarly debates about education, segregation, African American history, and Chicago, still relevant in contemporary debates about the fate of American public schooling.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction "What He Needs is Education": Black Education in Chicago to 1940 "For the Very Meaning of Our Lives": Howalton Day School: 1946-1986 "Something Far More Ennobling": Holy Name of Mary, 1940-2002 "We Have Done Black Things Today and We're Going to Do Black Things Again Tomorrow": New Concept Development Center, 1972-1998 Epilogue: "We Have to Invest in Our Own Power" Notes Bibliography

About the Author :
Worth Kamili Hayes is an associate professor of history at Tuskegee University. He was previously the acting chair of the Department of Social Sciences and Criminal Justice at Benedict College. He was the recipient of a UNCF/Mellon Junior Faculty award as well as the Timuel D. Black Jr. Short-Term Fellowship in African-American Studies.

Review :
Schools of Our Own is an important contribution that extends our understanding of the development of education in Chicago and the agency and self-determination of black Chicagoans. It reinforces our understanding of the longstanding efforts of African Americans to use schools for social mobility and personal advancement, and how this cultural value and expectation was transplanted from the American South to urban centers like Chicago when southern blacks migrated north." —Christopher Span, author of From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse