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Race, education, integration and unity in America

Given all the controversies about teaching the history of immigrants who didn’t come from England in the public schools, I’d like to read a sentence from my book about the Roberts Court:

Integration had been applied over two centuries to class, immigration, language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and, and finally, to race.

Let me break that out for any of you not familiar with the history.

18th century schools in what became the U.S. were local, generally run out of homes and churches. Colleges were religious institutions, but most gradually broadened themselves from training for clergy of specific faiths, to ecumenical in both faith and subject matter.

Horace Mann was the leader of what was called the common school movement – we just call them public schools. His point was to bring rich and poor into the same classroom so they would get to know and appreciate each other. The 19th century saw common or public schools largely take over grade school education through what we now called high school.

The 19th century also brought co-education so girls and boys increasingly went to school together. There was a period when some families kept their girls out of schools where they would meet the male children of poor families. Call that gender flight or wealth flight.

As immigration grew, public schools became agents of Americanization, introducing immigrant children to English, and the customs of America by mixing them with those already here. Both of my parents learned English in school and learned to speak it as if they’d spoken it all their lives. They deliberately prevented me from learning Yiddish, using it only to keep things from me. Papa told me many times how proud he was of an A on an English paper – he had a lot to be proud of, graduating from the Juilliard School of Music and becoming an excellent musician – but he kept bringing up that English paper.

It had been customary to use the Bible to teach English, but the original Protestant Americans used the Protestant version of the Bible, much to the objection of Catholics. The increasing presence of Catholics from Ireland and Italy made schooling more ecumenical.

Common schooling didn’t satisfy the military. They had to organize an army out of people who spoke many different languages. For a while, soldiers were recruited and organized by separate ethnic and language groups. By the 20th century, the military was integrating soldiers from all their different faiths, and countries of origin. President Theodore Roosevelt praised the way that the military tent brought people together from all different backgrounds.

So by the end of World War II, the Army and public schools brought Americans together across class, language, religion, and countries of origin. Integration was a strategy, a way of making the American. Endless books and articles were written about the value of bringing people together.

During World War II, women like my mother-in-law entered the military as nurses or, like Rosy the Riveter, to do whatever there weren’t enough men to do. By the end of World War II, many understood that women could do most of the work men did and they were increasingly integrated.

What we now call “integration” was just the application of a traditional American remedy to one more area.

Having brought people together from so many different backgrounds, there is good reason to celebrate the accomplishments of all the people who sacrificed, worked, fought for and learned to celebrate America. Integration is central to the experience of us all. Unity is in sharing its blessings.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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