'`.``"Education" and "African American" are not antithetical terms. A great deal of discussion about African Americans and education today is being made in the context of the lack of interest in education by African Americans. These discussions frequently cite poor test scores, high dropout rates, and the failure of Blacks to regard education as important.

'`.``A different reading of Black educational history reveals a different assessment. Even before Blacks were wrested from Africa, they had an interest in education. The existence of the University of Sankore at Timbuktu in West Africa is a prime example. A second example of the Africans' high regard for learning is furnished by their embrace of the Muslim religion. Africans who became Muslims were proficient in Arabic. J.A. Rogers has noted that a slave from Maryland, Job Ben Solomon, was taken later to England where he became one of the greatest Arabic translators of his time. He is said to have reproduced the entire Koran from memory. Ben Solomon and other Muslims who were captured and brought to America demonstrate that they were neither heathen nor illiterate.

(`.`` Blacks have been victims of their past, but they have also been active agents in their past. Despite overwhelming odds, they have found ways to educate themselves, educate others, and educate their children.

(`.`` Since the introduction of the African American into the New World, his education in this country has been a controversial topic. African Americans were not supposed to have intellectual ability, but they longed for the humanity that education bestowed. They endured all sorts of personal deprivations and cruelties in order to learn a little reading and writing. They viewed education and literacy as the promised land.

'`.`` In slavery, Blacks were tightly restricted in their quest for learning. One slave recalled that if an enslaved person were so much as found looking at pictures in a book, he was severely flogged, and in some instances, a finger would be cut off. Stories abound of slaves who stole out of the big house or the slave quarters and gathered in some abandoned place to learn the alphabet or to learn how to read, often taught by a house slave who had been fortunate to acquire the rudiments of literacy. It should also be noted that there were instances when a white person, wittingly or unwittingly, also taught a Black person how to read. Occasionally, a planter recognized the intellectual bent of a slave and taught him or her how to write and to compute, reasoning that such a person could be an economic asset to the system of slavery. Efforts of this sort on the part of a member of the slave-owning population were risky, not only for the member of the majority, but, perhaps, even more for the slave. A literate Black person was a threat to the system of slavery. After 1831, the year of Nat Turner's insurrection, the fear of "educated" Negroes reached epidemic proportions.

'`.`` The Civil War provided an unintended boost for the cause of African American education. As the Yankee forces penetrated the South, hordes of freedmen took refuge in camps and behind the lines of the Union forces. Faced with the masses of displaced slaves, who were regarded as contrabands of war, the Union generals had to devise means of dealing with them. In time, the U.S. Congress brought the Freedmen's Bureau into being and this federal agency established thousands of schools for the newly freed slaves. But before the Freedmen's Bureau was operational, Blacks established some schools on their own. A school which was founded by Blacks for themselves was the one established at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, September 1861, with Mary Peake, a Black woman, as the teacher. By the time the Freedmen's Bureau was fully operational, it had established over a thousand schools, enrolling 100,000 students. Of this time Booker T. Washington wrote: "It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make an attempt to learn."

'`.`` The efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau were aided and abetted by the activities of northern missionary societies, which were established by church organizations. The church groups sent missionaries, often called school marms, to teach the newly freed slaves. The major denominations: Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Quakers established schools and colleges in the wake of the Civil War. The efforts of the northern missionaries were heroic because they were regarded as intruders and were frequently physically accosted because they came south to teach in schools for African Americans. They were refused lodging in white homes and were forced to find accommodations with members of the African American community. The Yankee schoolmarms were ostracized by whites, and they were sometimes regarded suspiciously by Blacks. Some Blacks felt that only Blacks could properly teach in schools for African Americans. Thus, the white teachers were, perhaps unfairly, charged with being paternalistic, and because of their church affiliations, they were said to spend more time on matters of the soul instead of of on matters of the mind.

'`.`` Paternalistic or not, the religious instructors from New England taught generations of African Americans. The African American academies of yesteryear and the historically black colleges and universities, which survive today, owe their beginnings to the Yankee schoolmarms who went south. It was under their tutelage that a generation of the Talented Tenth, so beloved by W.E.B. DuBois, received a quality education.

'`.`` The quest for quality education reached a crescendo in the famous debate between Booker T. Washington and DuBois over the question of industrial education versus an education in the classics. Washington, the most powerful Black person of his time, supported by the financial moguls of the nineteenth century (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan), favored industrial education. He believed that a race must find as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. DuBois, on the other hand, favored a liberal arts education claiming that Blacks needed a cadre of highly educated leaders to be leaders of thought among their people. Washington's accommodationist philosophy was more palatable to whites as evidenced by the large amounts of money that were funneled to Washington's Tuskegee Institute and the country training schools supported by foundations such as the Slater and Peabody Funds. Some Black schools professed to accept Washington's views regarding industrial education; however, many of them did so begrudgingly and secretively did everything they could to provide instruction in the classics and liberal arts. African American universities such as Fisk, Atlanta, and Wilberforce openly required at least two years of the classics for graduation. Ironically, even Booker T. Washington sent his own daughter, Portia, to Wellesley College.

'`.`` The debate over what was "politically correct" in the education of Blacks continued as the so-called "A and M" colleges emphasizing agricultural and mechanical education which came into existence as a result of the Morrill Act of 1890. The classical emphasis was continued in private liberal arts colleges and universities in the South. In time, the distinctive curricular emphasis of Black higher education institutions offered instruction in the more practical areas. Nevertheless, the separate but equal doctrine became more characteristic of African American education at all levels.

'`.`` In the nineteenth century, where there were schools for African Americans, they were segregated on the basis of race. There were, in fact, places in the North and South where public for Blacks was non-existent. In Baltimore, Maryland, for example, the public school system was established in 1829 by the mayor and city council, but city officials felt no obligation to provide free public education for Black children. Taking matters in their own hands, Black churches in Baltimore filled the void and established private schools, Chief among the Black congregations operating schools were Sharp Street Methodist Church, Bethel A.M.E. Church, and the St. James Episcopal Church in the Protestant community. St. Francis Academy was opened in 1828 by the Oblate Sisters of Providence "to educate and train to virtue and industry colored female children in the city of Baltimore." Despite the financial problems of operating private schools, Blacks in Baltimore and in other cities did whatever was necessary to provide education for their children. Taxed for schools to which they could not send their offspring, diligent Black parents and patrons shouldered the burden of double jeopardy and taxed themselves again to keep hard-pressed private schools open. Similar sacrifices were made by African Americans in other urban areas, North and South. Leonard Curry, an educational historian, has written: "One of the remarkable accomplishments in American history is the degree to which Blacks marshaled their slender financial and human resources... and the effectiveness with which they developed educational opportunities adapted to their needs." When it came to providing education, no cost was too great and no barrier was too harsh to prevent African Americans from finding ways to achieve educational opportunities.

'`.`` The noose of segregation was legally removed by the momentous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. However, more than 45 years after Brown, the education of African Americans is still a problem. There are more children in racially identifiable schools today than there were in 1954. Also, today, African American public institutions of higher education are under threat of being closed or merged with majority institutions in the name of creating a unitary system of higher education. Large numbers of African American children in the twenty-five large urban school systems are in schools with deteriorating physical plants, inadequate equipment and materials, non-certified teachers, and student bodies with depressed scores on standardized tests. Historically Black colleges and universities continue to be funded at less than adequate levels and have libraries with fewer volumes than comparable white institutions and physical plants that are unequal to those at majority institutions.

'`.`` In an earlier day, African Americans fiercely rejected the status quo. As this essay has tried to show, the intense desire of African Americans literally drove them to improve educational opportunities "by any means necessary." During African American History Month, Black America needs to look at its educational status and where it is heading. The irony of the present situation is that more is known about how to educate Black children than was known in previous centuries. We know that parental involvement with their children's education is a key ingredient in the quest for educational excellence; we know that teacher expectations are critical for academic success; we know that too much emphasis on standardized testing is a no-brainer; we know that a safe and healthy environment facilitates learning, and we know that adequate financial resources de-coupled from accountability are less than useful. With all of the knowledge that we possess concerning the achievement of quality education for African American children (and other children as well), it will be a tragedy for history to record that there was an African American generation that had less and did more for its children than a subsequent generation that had more and knew more, but did less for its children.