How Equal Was This Separate School?
You could listen to a lot of dry lectures by a lot of windy history professors and still not learn as much about race issues in the century after the Civil War as you do in “A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School.”
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Trailer: 'A Place Out of Time'(PBS.org)
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This hourlong film by Dave Davidson, Monday on PBS, seems on the surface to be a simple documentary: the history of an all-black school in Bordentown, N.J., that existed from 1886 to 1955. But by the time the story is told, you have come to see the school as a microcosm of all the good intentions, misguided theories and veiled prejudice that have made equality so elusive for so long.
The school was founded by a black minister, who wanted to create educational opportunities for youths as more and more blacks came north to escape the lack of economic possibility and murderous racism of the South. The school was successful enough that it was soon taken over by the State of New Jersey, but it remained all black — not an overtly negative thing, as scholars and alumni explain.
“It was separated, not segregated,” says Barbara Wheeler, a 1952 graduate. “One group is voluntary, one group is forced.”
Sounds like a laudable idea: establish a residential school where black educators could find employment and black youths could learn in a safe environment, free of the harassment by white students and teachers they might encounter at an integrated school. And Bordentown established itself as a model institution that emphasized discipline and personal