Education Week - December 9, 2015 - 20

COMMENTARY

How Woodrow Wilson Shut the Door on
K-12 Education for African-Americans

By Williamson M. Evers

Getty

rinceton University protesters against
Woodrow Wilson captured headlines in
mid-November. When he was the president of Princeton, Wilson expressed his
pride that no African-American students
had been admitted during his tenure.
When he was the president of the United
States, Wilson brought Jim Crow laws to
the federal government's appointive offices and its civil
service.
In his academic work on American history, Wilson was
friendly to the Ku Klux Klan's mission of suppressing
blacks, and he was forgiving of its terror tactics. Wilson
showed the motion picture "The Birth of a Nation," in
which Klan members are the heroes, in the White House.
We have been reminded of all this by the Princeton protesters, who have called on the university to remove a
dining-room mural of Wilson, and to rename the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the
Wilson College dormitory complex.
But what hasn't received attention is the role of the Wilson administration in national K-12 education policy. The
Wilson administration backed the effort to deny an academic education to blacks. It published a report proposing
to train blacks solely to be more efficient hewers of wood
and drawers of water. In this project, the administration
worked with a leading figure from the world of philanthropy, Thomas Jesse Jones.
Jones was a prominent educator from the Progressive

Era and a white who had long been active in black education. His career included time spent teaching and developing curriculum at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural
Institute, a historically black Virginia college founded
in 1868. Unlike Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard universities
(founded in 1865, 1866, and 1867, respectively), which
were academic in orientation, Hampton concentrated on
vocational education. (Now named Hampton University,
it today is a full-fledged institution of higher education.)
Jones worked for the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a family
foundation that was well known for its progressive outlook. The fund was a leader in white philanthropic efforts
aimed at improving education for African-Americans and
Native Americans, among others. The foundation was also
a pioneer in cooperating on projects with the federal government.
In Thomas Jesse Jones, a number of streams of thought
converged. He had studied at a prominent theologically
liberal Protestant seminary. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister and a proponent of the social gospel. He
held a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University.
He also was the author of the report "Negro Education,"
which said that African-Americans should have only a
vocational, nonacademic education. The black educational
leader W.E.B. Du Bois termed Jones an "evil genius."
"Negro Education" was published in 1917, in Diane
Ravitch's words, "with the prestige and authority of the
federal government," but in cooperation with and helped
by a grant from the Phelps-Stokes Fund.
The report disparaged African-American parents and
teachers who wanted academically serious colleges and

A Native American Parent Confronts a Pervasive NFL Slur

By Jared Hautamaki
ntending to honor
something is a lot different than actually
honoring it." So said
John Oliver, the host
of HBO's "Last Week
Tonight," on Nov. 8,
2015. His point about
the name of the Washington NFL franchise
and its bully of an owner rings true in my encounter this fall with the board of education
of the Montgomery County public schools in
suburban Maryland.
On Sept. 11, I was dropping my child off at
kindergarten for his first day of school, when
I encountered the principal and several staff
members celebrating the start of the NFL
season and the Washington team's first NFL
home game. They were wearing the team's
merchandise while greeting students outside
the school. As a Native American who's lived
in the Washington area since 1999, I initially
gritted my teeth and thought about ignoring
the issue, until I saw the name of the team
written on the sleeve of the principal's shirt.
Redskins.
The word is defined as offensive and disparaging. Linguistically, its origin is disputed.
But no one can disagree that its historical use,
whether it be in terms of referencing scalps
and the bounties paid for them or in the
American cinema, is intended to be negative
in connotation.

While in some ways the repeated exposure
to the slur can be mind-numbing, it can also
be enraging. Every day, I see people in the
team's merchandise, and I ask myself: What if
I wore a shirt that said "Niggers," "Wetbacks,"
or "Kikes"? How would someone wearing a
shirt with the R-word emblazoned across it
react to that?
The other day, I was in a public space and
saw the local team's pregame show on the
television. It was an African-American sportscaster promoting a community-involvement
public relations project in which the team was
involved. I counted the use of the team name
18 times in under two minutes.
Redskins.
I emailed the principal, the board of education, and a local reporter I had spoken with
last year about the issue of the school district's dress code and the use of the R-word.
I explained that academic studies repeatedly
demonstrate not only the harm Native mascots have on the self-esteem and academic
performance of Native students, but also the
impact mascots have on non-Native students,
who are more likely to adopt cultural-stereotyping practices as a result. And I explained
that when school officials tacitly or explicitly
support casual racism, including by wearing
team merchandise, it sends exactly the wrong
message about what we should be teaching
our children. I received no reply.
It didn't take long to discover that it wasn't
just the staff wearing the Washington team's
merchandise. There was a "Welcome Back to

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 9, 2015 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

School" bulletin board in one of the hallways
that used the team pennants with the team's
name and logo-a stereotypical image of a
Plains Indian. A neighbor told me that the
team's flags were also hanging in two of the
school's classrooms.
Two weeks later, I sent another email to the
principal and the board of education. Again,
no response.
I checked the school board's upcoming meeting agendas. At its meeting on Oct. 13, the
board planned to discuss a resolution supporting Native American Heritage Month.
Redskins.
I went and testified to the board. I told them
I was a Native parent, and I was offended.
I told them that I was past-president of the
Native American Bar Association of Washington, D.C. I explained that in the last decade,
as a presidential appointee to three different
American Bar Association committees, I had
worked on issues of diversity within the legal
profession and in education. I told them that if
they truly wanted to honor Native Americans,
the board should enforce the school district's
dress code, which reads:
"Students are expected to wear appropriate
clothing to school. Clothing that offends others
or disrupts learning is inappropriate. Clothing that includes references to gangs, drugs,
alcohol, and sex is not acceptable."
I didn't tell them that I'd benefited from a
prelaw-pipeline education diversity program
at the Pre-Law Summer Institute for Native Americans and Alaska Natives, or that

I'd been recruited from there to attend the
University of Arizona, where I studied federal
Indian law and critical race theory under Professor Robert Williams and constitutional law
under Professor S. James Anaya, who served
as the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of
indigenous peoples. I also didn't tell them that
the resolution they passed was pretty poor lip
service to Natives, and that it expressed little
understanding of the issues we Natives face in
the community and the school district.
The Washington Professional Football Team.
The interim superintendent of the Montgomery County district responded to me. He
said that in a large, diverse school district,
not everyone is going to like what they see.
He said that given the system's values of equity and respect and students' right of free
expression, district officials would continue to
monitor the impact and respond to the issue
by benchmarking their actions against those
of other Washington-area school districts. He
hoped I would continue to collaborate with
my son's principal and still be "respectful and
kind." He didn't address the academic research that I had shared. He didn't address
the comments of the district spokesman, who
said the board addresses complaints like mine
on a school-by-school basis. He didn't address
the dress code. He didn't address the offensiveness of the name. But, he also didn't use the
name itself.
Redskins.
Make no mistake: Wearing and displaying
Washington NFL team merchandise is an af-

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Education Week - December 9, 2015

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