Color in the Classroom

How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954

Bibliographic Data

ID5705757
AuthorsRaymond Wolters (University of Delaware, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume99
Issue2
Pages629-629
Publication date2012-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jas166
OpenAlexW2024871569
LanguageEN
Citations received18

Color in the Classroom describes the efforts of school reformers who worked to change American attitudes toward race during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite dense prose, the book effectively demarcates different phases in the effort to promote tolerance and combat bigotry. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when many Americans used the word race as a synonym for ethnicity, schools sought to Americanize immigrants recently arrived from Europe. Some teachers tried to suppress every vestige of non-Anglo ethnicity, while others fostered assimilation by encouraging respect for carefully selected aspects of immigrant heritage. After immigration was restricted in the 1920s, the latter approach came to prevail. The more tolerant approach had an unintended effect: it reinforced the belief that all European Americans were members of the Caucasian race. According to Zoë Burkholder, this “recasting [of] previously racialized white minorities as members of the dominant racial majority” led to a “hardening [of] the racial distinction between ‘white’ people and those who were ‘colored’” (p. 13

Assimilation (phonology · Ethnic group · Immigration · Linguistics · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · White (mutation · Critical Race Theory in Education · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law