Chapter 8: Paradise Lost?: Teachers’ Perspectives on the Use of Cultural Capital in the Segregated Schools of New Orleans, Louisiana

W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of his most controversial essays, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?”, published in 1935, concluded that what the Negro needed was neither segregated schools nor mixed schools; rather, “What he needs is Education.”¹ This education, to which Du Bois referred, is what black students received in segregated schools, as opposed to the schooling that was received in mixed settings.

Anna Julia Cooper, a progressive African American educator at Washington Colored High School in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, believed that because of desegregation, African American children would no longer be taught racial pride.³ Ruby Forsythe, one of the “Elder” teachers interviewed by educational anthropologist Michelle Foster in her study of black educators, saw another threat to achievement coming from mixed or integrated schooling. “Instead of seeing black children winning prizes for their achievements, you see them all in special education classes.. .. Instead of being taught to lead, they are being taught to follow.”⁴ With regard to teacher behaviors after school desegregation, Everett Dawson, another “Elder” in Foster’s study, recalled that “The [white] teachers made it clear that blacks were not welcome … a lot of young black brothers get into the classes of white instructors who went into the class saying. .. ’these black kids can’t make it.’”5