Article 5: The Very Meaning Of Our Lives: Howalton Day School and Black Chicago’s Dual Educational Agenda, 1946-1985

—Doris Allen Anderson

Education played a pivotal role in African-Americans’ post-World War II struggle for equality. Many activists believed that victories against racially discriminatory school systems would lead to gains in other critical areas. Therefore, it is no coincidence that desegregation of the South’s schools became an early focus of the civil rights movement. Victories in equalization cases and in higher education provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the movement’s primary judicial arm, with the momentum and legal precedent to accomplish its decisive defeat of school segregation in the 1954 Brown vs. Board case (Kluger 1976; Tushnet 1987). Although the decision would leave an indelible imprint on public education, many saw the victory as a stepping stone that would lead to the destruction of segregation in all facets of American society.