A Timeline of Racial Injustice in Education

This timeline from RaceForward does a solid job capturing some of the key moments in race and education in the U.S. It’s full of sad and important facts.  I myself didn’t know that it took the Supreme Court to force California to open public education to Chinese immigrants–in 1905.

Here’s how the timeline starts:

1647
The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decrees that every town of fifty families should have an elementary school and that every town of 100 families should have a Latin school. The goal is to ensure that Puritan children learn to read the Bible and receive basic information about their Calvinist religion.

1779
Thomas Jefferson proposes a two-track educational system, with different tracks in his words for “the laboring and the learned.” Scholarship would allow a very few of the laboring class to advance, Jefferson says, by “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.”

Read the rest @ RaceForward