Black American Higher Education

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 3,0 (C), University of Leipzig (Institute for American Studies), course: American Education in the 19th Century, 33 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper will deal with the development of higher education, in particular, with the development of African and Native American higher education in America. It may be questioned, from developments that speedily followed, whether the mass of blacks did not really desire this advantage of higher education as a sign of freedom, rather than from a wish for knowledge, and covet it because it had formerly been the privilege of their masters, and marked a broad distinction between the races. It was natural that this should be so, when they had been excluded from this privilege by pains and penalties, when in some States it was one of the gravest offenses to teach a negro to read and write. This prohibition was accounted for by the peculiar sort of property that slavery created, which would become insecure if intelligent. Both, the Native American and the Black American population went through specific phases or periods of development in higher education and so there are questions that help to follow the specific development of each population. The questions are which happenings in the development of Indian education has affected Indian education profoundly and which laws, if there were any, have helped this process of development to integrate the Indian culture into white society? The same questions can be analyzed for the Black American population, how blacks could be integrated and which periods occurred during the development of black education after slavery was abolished? A historical overview of the development of higher education in the United States of the two minorities - of the Native Americans and Black Americans - will be given.