Three Phases in United States History
Created The Historical Context for the Murder of George Floyd
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
Three phases in United States history created
the context for the murder of George Floyd.
The first was the failure of Reconstruction,
culminating in the Compromise of 1877, an agreement by Republicans and
Democrats to resolve the impasse in the presidential election of 1876;
Democratic leaders signaled to Republicans that they would concede contested
votes in Florida and a few other states if the resulting administration would
withdraw federal troops from southern states. These troops had been
protecting African Americans as they exercised their constitutional rights of
citizenship as formulated in the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments. The deal was cut, the troops were withdrawn, and the way was
clear for whites (albeit not entirely the same individuals who had held power
prior to the Civil War) to take reassert full control.
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, therefore,
was inspired not foremost by a desire to prevent military forces from assuming
police powers; rather, the motivation was to gain a presidency and
curtail African American citizenship rights. Ironically the Insurrection
Act of 1807, which conversely gave legal presidential and therefore federal
executive authority to order use of federal troops in times of compelling
domestic national emergency, was also motivated by a desire to control nonwhite
populations: A slave revolt of 1800 led in Richmond, Virginia, by Gabriel
Posser; Native American resistance to westward expansion in the aftermath
of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition
(1804-1805); and the end of the international slave trade in 1807 seemed
to be events capable of encouraging African and Native Americans to foment
armed opposition to United States government policy and a westerly expanding
white population.
The Compromise of 1877 inaugurated a long
phase in United States history in which Jim Crow laws, white vigilante
violence, and the oppressive constraints of the sharecropping system induced
African American migration to an urban North that offered better economic opportunities
and less blatant violence but also via restricted housing covenants
confined African Americans to particular residential areas, along with Jews and
immigrant populations deemed socially undesirable.
The second and overlapping phase began at
Teachers College of Columbia University in the 1920s. Identified with
John Dewey but more clearly ideologically led by figures such as William Heard
Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg, so-called “progressive” education was ranged
against knowledge-focused curriculum. The “progressive” view held that
subject area knowledge is not important; rather, education professors
would come to assert that classroom activity should be driven by
“child-centered” student interest and the practical needs of everyday living,
so that the study of history, literature, and higher mathematics was not needed
except for a very few college preparatory students. In the racist manner
of the times, the image of the college-bound student did not include African
Americans and southern and eastern European immigrant populations. Most
“progressives,” educational and political, of the early 20th century
were racist and anti-immigrant; many were frankly eugenicists.
From the 1920s forward the ideology of “progressive”
educators spread from the influential Teachers College of Columbia University
to other teacher training programs. Full integration of the ideology into
the school districts of the United States, though, took several decades;
many parents and teachers well-trained in their subject areas resisted the
anti-knowledge creed of education professors, as did African Americans and
immigrant populations seeking to ascend the social hierarchy on the basis of
substantive education. But the “progressive” approach was in sync with
the zeitgeist of the 1960s and by the 1970s was on the way to dominance among
teachers and school administrators devising curriculum for locally centralized
districts.
The third phase dated from that very period of
the 1960s and 1970s and continues to this day. This phase is defined by a
situation in which whites who had already started to flee the central cities
were now joined by middle class African Americans, Jews, and others whose civil
rights and fair housing opportunities had been given firm legal underpinning in
congressional legislation of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Martin Luther
King, organizing a Poor People’s March at the time of his death, knew that his
herculean efforts had opened the way for those with the wherewithal to realize
the middle class dream but left behind a restive population of increasingly
impoverished communities living at the urban core. Residential housing
covenants had created racially isolated communities; now those
communities became more impoverished with the tendency of the middle class to
flee to the suburbs.
During this third phase of 1964-2020 there has
been a confluence of these three historical trends:
Conditions in the Jim Crow South induced the
Northern Migration and racist white leadership in communities of the North
perpetrated or condoned the creation of racially segregated communities.
A racist educational ideology that appropriated the “progressive” label denied
to all students a knowledge-intensive public school education; this
created a situation in which even putatively well-educated people were only
trained in their vocational fields and in which those whose only education came
at the K-12 level had little education of any sort. The resulting
American society has little historical knowledge, little understanding of
government or the United States Constitution, meager grasp of how the American
economy functions, and increasingly votes on the basis of emotion and what
feels right or beneficial for those who operate within their familial and
personal universes. And those mired in poverty at the urban core remain
in conditions of cyclical poverty and frequently on a life trajectory that
sends more African American males to prison than to college and leaves too many
others dead on the streets.
A poorly educated general public gave us
Donald Trump, whose support remains strong in 28 states and in large segments
of even blue or lean-blue states, such as the northern and southern regions of
Minnesota. Terrible systems of public education send forth people who
become, among many other vocational practitioners, police officers, who lack
the knowledge of history and psychology necessary to interpret properly the
actions of those who are, or appear to be, breaking the law. Many in the
crowds now out in the streets protesting the injustice they understand at a
rudimentary level have little comprehension of the deeper injustice and the
historical trends that have produced intractable tensions between police and
African Americans and others of nonwhite epidermal hue. And those
nonwhites who are disproportionately abused by police officers operate on a low
knowledge base bequeathed to them by their K-12 experiences. They
understand little of the specific historical trends that have produced their
life circumstances; and they have been given few analytical skills and
information bases necessary to transform the current conditions of their lives.
The societal results of the three historical
phases of focus may be witnessed throughout the United States. They have
operated in the insidiously racist past of Minneapolis. They are manifest
in the current condition of the city. They have produced the wretched
quality of education in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The confluence of the three historical trends
established the context wherein the malicious murder of George Floyd could take
place. Justice in this particular case needs to be served. The
processes and procedures of the Minneapolis police union and department must be
reformed.
But justice in the present case and reform of
the police union and department will not avert recurrence of abuses in the
absence of a better informed citizenry, broadly educated professionals,
and knowledgeable public servants.
In the absence of knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education our best efforts at institutional reform will be
vitiated.
Thus must we overhaul curriculum and teacher
quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools, giving rise to a community comprised
of culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied
citizens--- providing a model for the creation of better
communities throughout the nation.
Our streets will be safer and our communities
stronger when police and citizen stand face to face on a mutual foundation of
knowledge.
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