The definition of who is white has changed and expanded over time. In the 1800s, Irish Catholics were marginalized; in New York State, laws preventing them from becoming citizens were on the books until 1821. Then, after a mass influx of Eastern European immigrants in the early-20th century, these immigrants became a focal point of exclusion. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge both spoke openly about fears that Eastern Europeans would outnumber so-called white people as they emigrated into the United States and had children. Roosevelt frequently used the phrase “race suicide” to refer to the dangers of the government allowing this to happen.

Education in the United States began when the Puritans organized the first community school in the 1600s instead of using private tutors. Their schools focused heavily on religion. In 1778, Thomas Jefferson proposed a bill for schooling in the state of Virginia, which would establish schools for all children, and then select the best of those children to continue onto college. Although his bill failed, the basic premise became ingrained in United States schools: Education should be used to find and promote the nation’s best children for democratic leadership.

Several well-known historical figures weighed in on the initial creation and role of schools in the United States. Statesman Daniel Webster emphasized the importance of learning English, as well as the goal of ensuring students supported and reiterated the goals of democracy. As governor of New York, William Seward in 1840 argued for consistency across schools, highlighting the dangers of Irish communities’ separate schools—even though his ideas of including the Irish were highly criticized. Educational reformer Horace Mann similarly stressed the importance of common education in the mid-1800s, arguing in Congress for state-funded schools for all social classes. All these early ideas assumed the inclusion of only white students, emphasizing either exclusion or assimilation to provide “unity and social cohesion” as the “keys to bringing the Founding Fathers’ dream of a republic of intelligence” (46-47). 

Ewing includes several examples of unification and “Americanization” of school children established at the turn of the 19th century. First is the Pledge of Allegiance—a daily recitation of patriotic loyalty written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards established the curriculum of home economics—classes in specifically American cooking and household management— to, as she argued, “save our social fabric from what seems inevitable disintegration” (53). Kindergarten was established initially to socialize immigrant children as early as possible. Similarly, Henry Stoddard Curtis, as playground supervisor for public schools in Washington, DC, helped establish recess to teach immigrant children orderly play, arguing it would help assimilate them. As public schools facilitated the assimilation of formerly marginalized immigrant groups, they were now seen as “white.” However, Black and Indigenous children were excluded, with different sets of schools and rules established for them.

The African School was founded by free Black people in Boston in 1798. In 1812, the Boston public school system took control, creating Black schools and placing all Black children into them. By 1846, parents were arguing that this created a system wherein Black children lost the chance to become part of society. However, Boston public schools countered that God had created Black people as inferior, and that separate schools were thus appropriate. Unlike white schools established for socialization and Americanization, Black schools began as a form of “civilization”—along with which “comes its underlying ethos, saviorism, and its underlying purpose, social control” (60).

Other Black schools were founded during Reconstruction. By July 1870, there were over 3,500 teachers throughout the South. However, most of them were white women and religious leaders who focused on “civilizing” children, insisting that they could not become intelligent equals but could be taught to become a menial part of society. The textbooks for the first Black schools emphasized the importance of civility and Christianity. For example, The Freedman’s Third Reader (1866) contains religious lessons about humility and forgiveness, while positioning enslavement as something that freed Africans from their difficult life. A biography of Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint L’Ouverture refers to his “domestic joy” during enslavement. Similarly, The Freedman’s Book—written in 1865 by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child—instructs Black people to dress nice, work hard, and forgive their enslavers. Child emphasized the importance of not responding with anger or seeking revenge, no matter what wrongdoing her readers had faced.

White women like Child were part of a legacy of mediating agents, serving as a connection between the white colonizer and the colonized. They taught out of nobility and charity, wanting to help the Black population, playing into the “White Lady Bountiful” archetype (68)—a figure ostensibly well-positioned to civilize Black children. This legacy lives on in media like the films Dangerous Minds (1995) and Freedom Writers (2007), and has become the norm for public schools, where the vast majority of teachers are white and female.

Conversely, Black people were seen as incapable of educating Black students; school leaders of the time argued that there were no suitable Black teachers available. Efforts like the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which was founded in Virginia in 1868 with the goal of training teachers, centered manual labor as the focal point of Black education.

In sum, religious and philanthropic institutions—led by white people—dominated public schooling for Black children. Their system centered on civilizing Black children, teaching manual labor and servitude, and encouraging agreement and docility.

William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, was an integral part of the education system of St. Louis, Missouri, where he helped establish the nation’s first kindergarten. In 1883, at a conference hosted by the assimilationist Indian Rights Association, Harris said that the role of education was to accelerate Indigenous peoples’ “evolution”—becoming “civilized” in the same way that white Europeans had.

This became the cornerstone of Indigenous education in the late 1800s: Through education, their culture would be eradicated and their children would assimilate. As Carl Schurz—US secretary of the interior from 1877 to 1881—pointed out, their options were “extermination or civilization” (76), and it was cheaper to educate than fight Indigenous people. For these goals, Indigenous peoples were forced into schools that erased their heritage, trying to make them “white”—a new form of genocide.

The first institution to try the experiment was started by Richard Henry Pratt, a brigadier general in the army during the US Civil War. In 1875, he was tasked with overseeing a group of Indigenous prisoners in Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida. Believing that they could be integrated into society, he cut their hair, changed their clothes, hired them out as day laborers, and set up savings accounts for them. Eventually, they were educated by white, female volunteers.

In 1878, Pratt argued for the men’s release and reintegration into society. Samuel Chapman Armstrong—founder of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute—accepted Pratt’s request that the men be educated at his institution. Armstrong established a branch of the school for Indigenous students. With Pratt’s help, they recruited hundreds more students. Although Armstrong asked Pratt to run the institution, Pratt declined, insisting that he needed to work with much younger Indigenous children.

Carl Schurz, a German immigrant himself, granted Pratt an abandoned barracks to could prove that education of Indigenous children was possible. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Pratt’s institution was a tool of Manifest Destiny. The first students were children taken from Lakota and Chiricahua Apache tribes after military defeats. These children were partially hostages, kept to encourage acquiescence by their incarcerated parents. The Carlisle School remained open until 1918, enrolling over 10,000 students. Pratt ran it militaristically, employing many techniques he had used at Fort Marion. He dressed the students in uniforms, changed their names, and had them practice drills each day. Through it all, Pratt emphasized the importance of “kill[ing] the Indian in [them], and sav[ing] the man” (87).

Children at Carlisle resisted in a myriad ways. One student refused the cutting of his hair, then ceremoniously cut it himself on the parade grounds in the middle of the night. Another boy, Ernest White Thunder, refused to write, going on a two-month hunger strike that ended in his death. Students secretly spoke their native languages or to communicate in Plains Sign Talk. However, many students also went along, internalizing the idea that their own cultures must be inferior.

Eventually, Pratt’s work was adapted nationally. Indigenous youth attendance in school was compulsory starting in 1891; 25 more boarding schools opened across the country. Parents who resisted were often arrested; army troops were deployed to force students into schools and their parents into military prisons. Estimates state that as many as 75% of Indigenous children were in school by 1900.

Pratt’s influence continues in schools today. Black and Indigenous children are viewed as inferior by birth and in need of help. Instead of teaching them leadership and democracy, the primary objective of schooling is to “civilize” them, with an emphasis on their obedience. Ewing argues that the premise on which educators still emulating the Lady Bountiful stereotype operate denies the “personhood” of Black and Indigenous children.