'Education in Black and White' explores issues from 19th century to now
Last week, the Moonstone Arts Center held a three-day festival titled “Education in Black & White” as part of its Hidden History project with panel discussions and presentations focusing on the struggle for African American education in the city. Two of them included a historical look at the impact of the Institute for Colored Youth and a modern day take on the importance of Black teachers for Black students.
“What’s interesting and scary is that these are the same issues in education today as there were 150 years ago,” said Larry Robin, director of Moonstone, introducing the panel talk on the Institute for Colored Youth.
Opened in 1852 on Lombard Street, the ICY was a Quaker project that fostered “some of the best and the brightest of the city’s African American community,” according to Villanova history professor Judith Giesberg, who directed a study of the school’s 37 graduates from 1852 to 1866.
Giesberg said that ICY students were the cream of the crop who studied mechanical arts and also took a rigorous academic regimen that included math, Greek, Latin, and social sciences. They learned to read the New Testament in Greek and needed to pass oral exams that were open to the public.
“These men and women were really bright and had nerves of steel,” Giesberg said.
The school, she continued, served a welcome counterpoint to the segregation, discrimination and prejudice of the day. As an example, she said, ICY principal Caroline Le Count tried to flag down a streetcar in March 1867 as a new law had been passed banning streetcar segregation. The driver sneered at her. She showed a copy of the new law to a police officer, who arrested and fined the streetcar conductor.
“It’s not a Rosa Parks story, but they were getting on streetcars and protesting the segregation of streetcars,” Giesberg said.
“The awful part of this is a lot of the history hasn’t been written yet, which is a crime,” said Daniel Biddle, co-author of Tasting Freedom: Octavius V. Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. “I cannot get over how much of this history we were not taught. A lot of these stories remain untaught and untold.”
Biddle’s co-author, Murray Dubin, recalled how ICY opened a public library with 1,300 volumes with the recognition that “education must become a family ambition. It must become a habit.” The library worked, he said, and became the most important source for books in Philadelphia’s Black community.
The ICY rose to prominence during a time when African Americans were particularly under siege, said Kambria Bumgartner, associate professor of history at the College of Wooster. Mobs attacked Black schools, she said, and some were burned down. Educators were threatened with tar and feathering. “And Philadelphia wasn’t immune to this violence,” she said. “But the ICY is a cultural center, a monument in the face of this climate.”
Linda Perkins, associate professor of history at Claremont Graduate University, grew up in Mobile, Ala., and said she had seen up close the struggle African Americans face securing an education. “But they always said, education is the one thing White people can’t take from you,” Perkins said.
Black teachers for Black students
On Friday, the gathering featured a panel that talked about the philosophical and psychological importance of Black teachers for Black students, which had been a guiding principle of the ICY. Rosalind Jones-Johnson, education director for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, pointed out that while the student population nationally is becoming increasingly diverse (about 50 percent minority), the number of minority 'Education in Black and White' explores issues from 19th century to now | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:
