>> Now, given the history of,
you know, the last 50,
60 years, one always asks, well, were
these schools racially
integrated or not?
And the answer is: generally, no.
They were generally segregated,
not by law, but de facto,
in practice.
The laws of these Southern
states did not require
racial segregation.
Some of them banned [segregation].
Particularly, South Carolina
and Louisiana constitutions
prohibited racial segregation,
although it de facto
developed anyway.
Local whites were particularly
hostile to integrated
public education.
White families refused
to send their children
to integrated public schools,
by and large.
And most black families seemed
to have felt
that the priority was education,
not who was sitting next to you
in the classroom.
Remember, the alternative here
for African Americans was not
simply integration
versus segregation,
there was a third possibility,
which was exclusion all
together, right?
That's what they had suffered
up to this point, no education.
So the step
into segregated education was a
major step forward, rather
than something that they...
Now, there were a few black
leaders, particularly
in those two places
where the free black community
was so prominent,
South Carolina and Louisiana,
where there was a big push
to integrate the public schools.
Francis Cardozo,
the superintendent of education
of South Carolina, said
that this was the only way
to really eliminate racial
prejudice, to do it
from the bottom up,
to do it from children getting
to know each other early on
and that would eventually purge
the South of racial prejudice.
And it would also be living
proof of this principle,
or living illustration,
of this principle
of equality before the law.
But actually,
even in South Carolina,
the local school boards
basically set
up separate schools,
because they just felt they
couldn't function otherwise.
Only in Louisiana was there any
extensive racial integration
of the public schools.
And in fact,
in the Gienapp book,
you have the editorial
in the New Orleans Tribune,
black newspaper,
black-owned newspaper,
about integrated education.
The editorial there says, "We have
to make this community one
nation and one people."
That's a good summary
of what a lot of these people want.
Make this one nation
and one people, and the way to do
that is to put people --
one of the ways to do it is
put people together,
children together,
in public school.
And so Louisiana,
actually, the legislature passed
a law prohibiting the exclusion
of children from public schools
on the basis of race,
in fact fining any teacher
or school official
who excluded a child from school
on the basis of their race.
And when Republicans took power
in New Orleans in 1870,
they established 
the only real example
of a functioning, racially
integrated school system
in Reconstruction was
in New Orleans,
where they just mandated:
from now on,
all schools are going
to be integrated.
At first, a lot
of the white students withdrew.
But then they came back.
And by 1877,
when Reconstruction ends there,
there are several thousand white
and black children attending
integrated public schools
in New Orleans.
One of the very, very first things,
as we'll see,
that the so-called "redeemers,"
the Democrats who came back
into power in 1877,
one of the first things they did
was to repeal the integrated
education law
and to mandate racial separation
in the schools.
Most of the universities were
segregated. In other words,
these black universities were
set up partly to avoid conflict
over integrating the
existing universities.
So instead of, let's say,
University of Mississippi being
integrated, you had Alcorn set
up for black --
These are very small
institutions at that time.
You know, they're not like today,
with tens of thousands
of students. Very small.
So you set up Alcorn,
or Fisk, as I said,
up in Tennessee.
In Arkansas, at the University
of Arkansas,
there was only black student
at the university level during
Reconstruction, and he was taught
by the president
of the university
in his own home.
Rather than him going to classes
with other students,
the president sort
of tutored him,
so he wouldn't have to be
in there with the
white students.
Again, the one counterexample is
South Carolina,
where the University
of South Carolina,
the legislature mandated
that the University
of South Carolina had
to admit black students.
So the University,
which had existed before the
Civil War,
in fact, it had been the
training ground of secessionism.
They had taught secession
in the University
of South Carolina.
And as I've mentioned weeks ago,
many of the leaders of secession
in other states were South
Carolinians
who had been educated
at the pre-war University
of South Carolina
and then migrated
out to other Southern states.
So this is the period
that they call
in South Carolina "the Radical
university,"
1871 to '77, racially integrated.
Many of the students
(and again, you're talking
about a pretty small number)
were actually black members
of the legislature who wanted
to get further --
because this is Columbia,
South Carolina,
where the legislature is
and the university is --
and they wanted
to get more education.
Now,
several of the professors
resigned from the University
of South Carolina rather
than teach black students.
One of them
(this is a name
which might conjure up something
if you're from California)
one of them,
a very distinguished scientist
named LeConte,
decided he had to get
as far away from black students
that he possibly could.
The furthest he could get was
Berkeley, California. So he went
to Berkeley.
He got a job there,
became a major founder
of some branch
of American science.
And at the University
of California, Berkeley,
there is LeConte Hall today,
named after him.
Nobody says why he was there
in the first place:
because he refused
to teach black students
in South Carolina.
So this question
of school integration is
actually one piece
of the whole question
of I guess what you'd call civil
rights, or to use this phrase
which the free black leaders
of Louisiana introduced
into the language of rights,
"public rights." Public rights.
Not civil rights,
not social rights,
not political rights,
not natural rights.
Public rights,
how you are treated
by public facilities,
public institutions.
And this was also a main area
of interest
of these
Reconstruction governments.
The black leadership was highly
interested in this question
of treatment in public,
which was closely related
to this question
of racial segregation
or integration or exclusion.
As we'll see next time,
the United States Congress,
in 1875, enacted the last
Reconstruction measure,
the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
which prohibited segregation
or discrimination on the basis
of race in public facilities.
It didn't apply to schools,
but businesses,
public accommodations,
railroads, transportation,
etc., was prohibited.
It was the last major piece
of Reconstruction legislation.
It was later declared
unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court in 1883.
But there were also a lot
of state laws.
That was federal law,
but there were many state laws
in Reconstruction demanding
equality before the law,
requiring --
South Carolina, for example,
made a business,
a public business
that discriminated on the basis
of race liable to a $1,000 fine,
or the proprietor,
possibly a jail term.
The Louisiana Bill of Rights
of 1868 talked
about this concept
of public rights.
They insisted on equal rights
in all licensed businesses
and transportation.
If you open yourself
to the public,
if you're a business,
you open to the public,
you've got to serve everybody.
You can't make these
discriminations,
and with criminal penalties
if you violate that.
There were also fights
(I wrote about this)
about streetcars.
It varied from city to city.
We're talking
about horse-drawn carriages
really, or streetcars,
usually one car driven by a horse
which would traverse
the streets.
Before the Civil War,
most of those did not allow
blacks at all.
Sometimes there were separate
cars with a little star
(there's a reference to this
in the New Orleans thing),
a star car.
That is to say, every once
in a while a car would come
by for blacks
and it had a little star
on the front,
showing that this is the
black one.
The others, they couldn't go on.
Or sometimes whites could sit
inside in the seats
and then there were these outer
railings, and blacks could kind
of stand on the outside.
But in 1867, '68,
there were these --
this is 100 years almost before
the sit-ins,
but there were sit-ins
on these horse-drawn coaches
in Southern cities,
where African Americans would
just seize the seats and refuse
to move until transported
by the driver.
And this happened
in Louisville,
it happened in Charleston,
other cities,
and it led the military
commanders
(this is before the
Reconstruction Act)
to order these streetcar
companies to allow anyone
on the streetcar,
to avoid conflict, really.
So my point here is,
as I said last time,
there was a kind of a trope
in the literature
that only the upper crust blacks
cared about these issues
of equal treatment in public.
After all, you know, 
your average field hand is not
going into a hotel anyway.
But this is not really
entirely true.
In these streetcar
demonstrations,
it was not your upper crust
who were sitting in
and demanding to be served,
it was just everybody
who felt it was an indignity
to not be able to ride
on a public accommodation.
