1105549

research-article2022
RERXXX10.3102/00346543221105549Hines and FallacePedagogical Progressivism and Black Education

Review of Educational Research

June 2023, Vol. 93, No. 3, pp. 454­–486
DOI: 10.3102/00346543221105549
https://doi.org/

Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions

© 2022 AERA. https://journals.sagepub.com/home/rer

Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education:

A Historiographical Review, 1880–1957

Michael Hines
Stanford University Graduate School of Education

Thomas Fallace
William Paterson University of New Jersey

This article offers a critical review of the literature on how race played into
the historical development of pedagogical progressivism in the late-19th and
early-20th-century United States. While many historians have focused on the
overt/covert racism inherent in much of progressive pedagogy as espoused
by White educators, others have highlighted the ways in pedagogical pro-
gressivism supported movements toward liberation and social justice, espe-
cially when taken up by Black educators. Thus, the historical treatment of
pedagogical progressivism is becoming more nuanced by incorporating the
work of Black scholars, school leaders, curriculum designers, and teachers.

Keywords: African American education, progressive education, pedagogy,

history

In the chapter “Social Reconstruction in Education: Searching Out Black

Voices” in Karen L. Riley’s edited volume Social Reconstruction: People, Politics,
Perspectives, historian William Watkins (2006) argues that to better understand
the educational thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, scholars should explore his connec-
tions to the progressive education movement, particularly its social reconstruc-
tionist left flank. Du Bois, Watkins argues, was “undeniably linked” to the
movement through his analysis of schools as sites of ideology and power, com-
mitment to education as a tool for social change, and his views “on the nature of
society, socialism, and reform” (p. 222). For Watkins, the failure to recognize how
Du Bois, one of the most influential educational theorists of his day, contributed
to the discourse of progressive education, the defining educational movement
through which he lived, was a byproduct of historians’ tendency to see Black and
White histories as occurring in parallel discourses instead of in conversation.1 The

454
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
result of this failure was an inability to understand either Black education or pro-
gressive education fully.
Watkins’s (2006) call to expand our understanding of progressive education
and its major figures has gained traction over the 16 years since his essay was
initially published. Scholars have begun to deeply question and to interrogate
White progressive theorists’ views on race and racism. At the same time, others
have begun to map out how Black educators influenced, adopted, transformed,
and deployed aspects of progressivism to meet their own ends. In this review, we
offer a historiographic analysis of the research on race and progressive education.
Our analysis reveals two important trends in the research. First, historians have
become more sensitive to and questioning of the overt/covert racism in the pro-
gressive pedagogy of White educators like John Dewey. Second, and more
recently, scholars have begun to investigate how Black educators thought about,
contributed to, and enacted progressive education. Thus, we compare the research
on the racial thinking of White pedagogical progressives with the more recent
historical research on Black pedagogical progressives, and we put these two lit-
eratures in conversation with one another. We find that the historical treatment of
pedagogical progressivism is becoming more nuanced by incorporating Black
scholars, school leaders, curriculum designers, and teachers.
In our analysis, we applied Kendi’s (2016) segregationist/assimilationist/anti-
racist historical categorization of racial ideas. Kendi (2016) defines segregation-
ist ideas as those that define “Black people as biologically distinct and inferior to
White people” (p. 3). He defines assimilationist ideas as those that embrace “bio-
logical racial equality . . . [but] point to environment—hot climates, discrimina-
tion, culture, and poverty—as the creators of inferior Black behaviors” (p. 3).
Kendi considers both segregationist and assimilationist thinking as racist. In con-
trast, he defines anti-racist ideas as those that recognize “that the different skin
colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are on the
same level, are equal in all their divergences” (p. 4). As Kendi explains, individual
scholars were often inconsistent in their racial views, and our analysis of the racial
thinking of Black and White progressive educators confirms this inconsistency as
many figures changed/evolved their thinking on race over time and/or articulated
thoughts from multiple racial outlooks simultaneously.
As with segregationist/assimilationist/anti-racist, progressive education itself
is a complicated movement to trace, as historians have recognized that the move-
ment incorporated a multitude of contradictory impulses and ideas (Church &
Sedlak, 1976; Cremin, 1961; Graham, 1967; Kliebard, 1995; Labaree, 2005;
Mirel, 2003; Reese, 2001; Semel & Sadovnik, 1988; Spring, 1970; Tyack, 1974;
Zilversmit, 1993). With regard to race, historians have been particularly attuned
to the gap between progressives’ anti-racist rhetoric of democratic empowerment
and the reality of their segregationist and assimilationist policies and pedagogies
(Cohen & Mohl, 1979; Goodenow, 1978a; Noble, 1958). Tyack (1974) estab-
lished a useful distinction between administrative progressives and pedagogical
progressives that in part sought to parse out this racist/anti-racist tension—the
former was an “political-educational movement with an elitist philosophy . . .
[that] fulfilled the goals of social efficiency and social control,” whereas the latter
focused on “ways to ‘meet the individual needs of children’ by subverting the

455
Hines and Fallace
hegemony of established subjects” (pp. 196–197). Following Tyack’s lead, histo-
rians have firmly established the racism of administrative progressives and have
outlined their segregationist links to eugenics, intelligence testing, and segrega-
tionist thinking (Chapman, 1988; Fass, 1980; 1989; Karier et al., 1973; Karier,
1986; Kevles, 1995; Selden, 1999; Ravitch, 2000; Skiba, 2012; Thomas, 1982;
Valencia, 2010; Winfield, 2007). Our analysis primarily addresses the racial views
and curricula of pedagogical progressives because, we argue, this group addressed
race in a variety of contradictory ways, whereas we accept that administrative
progressives were relatively consistent in their segregationist focus on social con-
trol, at least through the 1920s.
Historians also dispute the origins and periodization of pedagogical progres-
sivism in the United States. Cremin (1961) began his narrative of the movement
in 1892, when the writings of Joseph Meyer Rice exposed the outdated, traditional
pedagogy of American schools that inspired widespread calls for pedagogical
reform. Kliebard (1995) cited the National Education Association (NEA) report
of the Committee of Ten in 1893 as the beginning of the pedagogical reformist
impulse, while Graham (1967) identified the founding of the Progressive
Education Association (PEA) in 1919 as the true starting point of the movement.
Others have traced the roots of progressive education to the work of figures active
in the 1880s, such as Booker T. Washington, William T. Harris, William James, G.
Stanley Hall, and/or John Dewey (Church & Sedlak, 1976; Generals, 2000, 2013;
Ravitch, 2001; Zilversmit, 1993). There is far more consensus among historians
(Cremin, 1961; Kliebard, 1995; Zilversmit, 1993) about when the first wave of
pedagogical progressivism in the United States ended. Most agree that enthusi-
asm for the movement ended with the launching of the satellite Sputnik by the
Soviet Union in 1957, an event that inspired a public backlash against the move-
ment. For the purposes of this review, we chose a wide chronological range for
pedagogical progressivism that begins in the 1880s with the work of Washington,
James, Harris, Hall, and Dewey and ends in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik.
Between these years, leading White and Black educators adopted the rhetoric of
pedagogical progressivism to reform the schools in ways that sought to make
them more scientific, relevant, student centered, and socially engaged.
To better analyze the evolving racial thinking of pedagogical progressives, we
divided the 1880–1957 period into two subperiods: 1880–1916 and 1916–1957.
Many historians of race (Barkan, 1992; Burkholder, 2011; Fallace, 2015a;
Menand, 2001; Selig, 2008) mark 1916 as a turning point, because during World
War I many White scholars began to abandon segregationist and assimilationist
thinking and develop, consider, and adopt more anti-racist positions. We further
divided our analysis into studies on White and Black pedagogical progressives.
Chronologically, the historiography on race and pedagogical progressivism for
White educators began in the 1970s, whereas the historiography on pedagogical
progressivism for Black educators has developed more recently with a great deal
of scholarship occurring only in the past two decades. We began our narrative
with the relatively more numerous studies that addressed White educators, then
moved to studies that took up the interactions of Black educators with progressiv-
ism. For consistency across the two sections, we used the same subheadings
within each section marking the broader intellectual shifts in racial thinking.

456
 Method
In this historiographical review, we explored the question: How have histori-
ans explored the relationship between racial theory and pedagogical progressiv-
ism in the United States between 1880 and 1957? We focused on published studies
on progressive education in the United States and excluded dissertations (e.g.,
McNally, 2017). We identified works to review in one of four ways (see Table 1).
First, we searched the online databases JSTOR and Google Scholar for historical
studies with both progressive and race in the title, abstract, or main manuscript.
Excluding historical studies that were not centrally about race (e.g., Weiler, 2006;
Semel, 2002), we initially identified 10 studies (e.g., Fallace, 2015a; Goodenow,
1975, 1978a, 1978b, 1981; Goodchild, 2012; Perlstein, 1996, 2019; Snyder, 2015;
Vaughan, 2018). Second, based on our reading of these works, we searched these
databases for historical studies of cultural gifts and intercultural education
because historians have identified these as the most significant pedagogical pro-
grams on race during the progressive period (e.g., Bohan, 2007; Burkholder,
2011; Johnson & Pak, 2019; Montalto, 1982; Selig, 2008). Third, we viewed the
citations, footnotes, and references in the identified works to locate additional
books, book chapters, and articles that addressed the topics of race and pedagogi-
cal progressivism, with a particular focus on K–12 schools (e.g., Dagbovie, 2007;
Kridel, 2018). Fourth, we located additional works on important and influential
historical figures during this period—such as Booker T. Washington (e.g.,
Generals, 2000), G. Stanley Hall (e.g., Ross, 1972), Carter G. Woodson (e.g.,
Givens, 2019), and John Dewey (e.g., Vaughan, 2018)—who were each the sub-
jects of significant historiographies of three or more studies addressing their racial
views. Finally, we included influential and significant studies on both pedagogical
progressivism (e.g., Cremin, 1961) and race (e.g., Anderson, 1988) that covered
the 1896–1957 period to add historical and historiographical context. Because we
were focusing specifically on K–12 progressive pedagogy and race, we excluded
studies that covered this period but focused on higher education (e.g., Lindsay &
Harris, 1977), adult education (e.g., Nocero, 2018), school attendance (e.g., Rury
& Hill, 2015), and/or educational policy during this period (e.g., Erickson, 2016).
We were looking for historical studies that explicitly connected racial theory to
the theories and reforms of pedagogical progressivism in K–12 schools between
1880 and 1957.
Racial Thinking of Early White Pedagogical Progressives (1880–1916)
The formative years of pedagogical progressivism (1880s to World War I)
overlapped with the high tide of Euro-American imperialism, settler colonialism,
legalized racial segregation in the American South, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
In fact, much of the progressive rhetoric of reform, efficiency, and science was
employed toward the justification of both student-centered methods and the main-
tenance of racial hierarchy. Educational historians studying this period have both
documented the racial views of individual reformers and explored issues related
to the underlying philosophical, epistemological, and ontological value of the
ideas of culture, development, and progress and how these ideas intertwined with
pedagogical and racial theory.

457
Table 1
Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion Example Exclusion Example

• 
race and progressive • Goodenow, • race and • Lindsay & Harris,
education in the title 1975 pedagogy 1977
in higher
education
• cultural gifts and • Selig, 2008 • race and adult • Nocero, 2018
intercultural education education
• White pedagogical • Goodchild, • race and school • Rury & Hill, 2015
progressives with robust 2012 attendance and • Weiler, 2006
historiographies enrollment
(G. Stanley Hall and • not centrally
John Dewey) about race
• Black pedagogical • Givens, • race and • Erickson, 2016
progressives with 2019 educational • McNally, 2017
robust historiographies policy
(Booker T. Washington, • dissertations
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Carter Woodson, etc.).

Segregationist-Assimilationist Thinking in a Domestic Context

Child-centered education had long roots stretching back to the 18th and 19th
centuries through the work of European precedents such as Herbert Spencer, Johann
Herbart, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Marie Montessori.
What distinguished pedagogical progressivism from earlier child-centered move-
ments was its justification by a pragmatic-naturalistic philosophy based upon inter-
action and its focus on education as a means of social reform (Cremin, 1961;
Menand, 2001). Both ideas were linked to broader changes taking place in American
society, such as industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Educational
reformers dismissed the old pedagogy of rote learning and teacher-centered instruc-
tion as no longer appropriate for a world that was rapidly changing. Some signifi-
cant White scholars who contributed to the ideas of pedagogical progressivism
during its formative years were William James, Marietta Johnson, Edward
Thorndike, William C. Bagley, G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey (Cremin, 1961;
Kliebard, 1995). Historians have identified Thorndike as an administrative progres-
sive and linked his segregationist thinking to his advocacy for intelligence testing
and eugenics (Karier et al., 1973; Karier, 1986), but historians have paid relatively
little attention to the racial views of James, Bagley, and Johnson. In contrast, numer-
ous historians have explored the racial views of pedagogical progressives Hall and
Dewey, who were not only two of the most influential pedagogical progressives but
also two of the most impactful intellectuals of their respective generations.
Hall was an experimental psychologist, early advocate for child study, found-
ing president of Clark University, and founding editor of the academic journals

458
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
Pedagogical Seminary, American Journal of Psychology, and The Journal of
Race Development. Hall considered the minds of peoples of color to be the bio-
logical/cultural equivalent of young White children, and this segregationist theory
informed his work. Yet Hall was also a vocal opponent of US imperialism, presi-
dent of the Congo Reform Association—an organization opposed to the genocidal
policies of King Leopold II of Belgium against its Indigenous population—and
advocate for establishing museums dedicated to the preservation of lost Indigenous
cultures. Historians have been fascinated by Hall’s contradictory mix of segrega-
tionist thinking based on biological racism and his more assimilationist ideas of
cultural egalitarianism and racial advocacy. “Hall regarded himself as something
of a liberal on the race question,” Hall’s biographer, Ross (1972) first explained,
because he “thought the Program of Booker T. Washington, with its effort at self-
improvement and indigenous development, was the key to black improvement,
which whites ought to encourage and support” (p. 415). Under the Hampton-
Tuskegee model of Washington, Black students in the American South were pro-
vided with an industrial curriculum designed to teach them vocational skills,
thrift, and humility instead of a liberal arts–based curriculum centered on critical
thinking and civic engagement.
Other historians have also explored Hall’s inconsistent social outlook.
According to Platt (2018), Hall’s The Journal of Race Development “saw a role
for a science of politics and administration in directing racial evolution in posi-
tive directions” while simultaneously espousing segregationist thinking and poli-
cies (p. 73). Based on his historical reading of Hall’s Adolescence (1904),
Garrison (2008) reached a similar conclusion: “Despite academic critiques that
rightly locate . . . a deluge of racism [in his work], Hall was committed to a pro-
gram of liberation for both children and indigenous peoples” (p.137). Furthermore,
in his intellectual profile of Hall’s racial views, Goodchild (2012) concluded that
Hall’s “racial beliefs thus disclosed his most enlightened ideas, practices, and
policies as well as some reprehensible ones” (p. 97). In general, Hall approached
students of color through a segregationist lens but paternalistically fought on
behalf of what he deemed to be their social uplift and protection in ways that both
reinforced and challenged racial hierarchy. His advocacy for student-centered
methods brought these beliefs together, because he viewed White children and
people of color as inhabiting the same psychological stage of development
(Fasteland, 2019).
Like Hall, the complex and at times contradictory racial ideas of John Dewey,
the central figure of pedagogical progressivism, have also become a source of
scholarly interest. Dewey’s racial views first came under scrutiny in the 1970s by
Karier (1973) and Feinberg (1975), who drew attention to his unflattering study
of the unassimilated Polish community (considered by many to be a “race” at the
time) during World War I, as well as Dewey’s endorsement of the racially segre-
gated schools in his coauthored book, Schools of To-morrow (Dewey & Dewey,
1915). In the 1970s, leading Dewey scholars (Eiesle, 1975; Greene, 1975; Miller,
1974; Zerby, 1975) launched a counterattack against Karier and Feinberg by pro-
viding context for Dewey’s views on unassimilated Poles and drawing attention to
his role in forging the anti-racist doctrine of cultural pluralism. Goodenow’s
(1975, 1978a, 1978b, 1981) pioneering studies of the racial views of Dewey and

459
Hines and Fallace
other leading pedagogical progressives, such as William Heard Kilpatrick and
George S. Counts, further underscored their anti-racist but also assimilationist
positions on race. As a result, the debate over Dewey’s racial views generally
remained dormant until the 2000s when Sullivan (2003) focused on Dewey’s
racialized use of the term savage, opening up an entirely new line of inquiry. As
Sullivan (2003) asserted, “Because ‘savage’ is not a racially neutral term, Dewey’s
discussion of savages is racially coded. Savagery represents the wild, dark non-
European, in contrast with the civilized, White European” (p. 119).
Building on the work of Sullivan (2003), Margonis (2009) pushed the argu-
ment even further in his controversial article, “Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the
Student and Classroom Community.” Margonis pointed to Dewey’s consistent
use of the term savage in his works on education to argue that Dewey’ pedagogi-
cal vision was segregationist and dismissive of Black students. Margonis pointed
to Dewey’s endorsement of racially segregated schools—such as PS 26 in
Indianapolis, the School for Organic Education in Fairhope (Alabama), the
schools of Gary (Indiana), and the Arthurdale community school in West
Virginia—and Dewey’s overall failure to recognize racial injustice as a major
impediment to his democratic vision. “Dewey’s approach to racial equality was
shaped by an overly celebratory conception of European American ability,”
Margonis (2009) asserted, “combined with a patronizing view of African
American ability” (p. 19). Margonis pointed out these oversights were not ignored
by African American leadership at the time. For example, the NAACP had con-
tested Black exclusion from the Arthurdale and Gary schools (Perlstein, 1996),
and W. E. B. Du Bois had specifically criticized the segregated schools of
Indianapolis that Dewey praised. Several scholars (Eldridge, 2010; Neubert,
2010; Waddington, 2010) authored rebuttals to Margonis’s essay, pointing to
Dewey’s broader philosophical views on the democratic community and his
essays on race, yet Margonis’s critical perspective on Dewey inspired further
research along these lines. For example, in her study of Dewey’s racial views,
Vaughan (2018) concluded that “despite his expressed commitment to full and
equal rights for African American students, [Dewey] normalized the experience
of White students and implicitly endorsed accommodationist education for
African American children” (p. 39). By accommodationist, Vaughan meant that
Dewey’s pedagogical vision did not seriously challenge racial segregation and
thus accommodated White supremacists.
Other scholars have also explored Dewey’s racial views by comparing him
with his contemporary Du Bois. For example, Eldridge (2004) noted that Du Bois
made repeated attempts to get Dewey to engage the Black readers of his periodi-
cal The Crisis, but Dewey never responded. Burkes (1997) authored an article
comparing favorably the cultural views of Du Bois and Dewey, but Sullivan
(2019) contrasted the two educators’ responses to World War I, concluding that,
while Du Bois was critical of cultural and economic imperialism, Dewey was
assimilationist and thus was complicit “in the white colonialist domination of his
time” (p. 268).
In a series of articles and a book, Fallace (2008, 2010, 2011, 2015b, 2015c)
argued that previous scholarship on Dewey had erroneously depicted his racial
views as static, when, in fact, Dewey’s views evolved between the 1890s and

460
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
World War I. Fallace (2010) argued that before World War I, “Dewey considered
American non-White minorities to be biologically and psychically equal to Whites
but socially deficient” (p. 471). However, during and after the war, Fallace (2010)
elaborated, “Dewey forged important new positions” on race that allowed him to
“remove the elements that made reference to the cultural deficiency of non-White
groups” (p. 476). Thus, Fallace agreed with Sullivan (2003) and Margonis (2009)
that Dewey’s pre-1916 work employed an assimilationist view of culture based on
the savagery-barbarian-civilization developmental scale that was dismissive of
non-White cultures. However, Fallace explained, Dewey replaced this ethnocen-
tric view with an anti-racist, culturally pluralistic outlook after World War I that
was more aligned with the views of Du Bois and anthropologist Franz Boas. Pratt
(2016) also recognized that Dewey (1916) expressed an inconsistent view of race
during the transitional World War I period as expressed in his magnum opus,
Democracy and Education. Pratt (2016) argued that Dewey espoused a form of
“settler colonialism” that was assimilationist but then outlined an anti-racist view
that “fostered a respect for [cultural] boundaries” (p. 210).
The historical work on Dewey and Hall demonstrates how racial views dur-
ing this period were fluid and inconsistent. As new research emerged from
social scientists across the twentieth century, pedagogical progressives updated
their views to reflect new developments in anthropology, psychology, and soci-
ology (Fallace, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). As a result, leading White pedagogical
progressives often demonstrated segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist
ideas at the same time. Yet, even when expressing an anti-racist position, White
educators were still addressing a largely racist audience and operating within a
broader sociocultural environment of White supremacy. The overall historio-
graphical momentum in recent decades has been toward documenting with
greater precision the segregationist and assimilationist ideas of these influential
pedagogical leaders.
Segregationist-Assimilationist Thinking in a Global Context
Beyond exploring the racial views of individual reformers, historians have
investigated how progressive educators employed the rhetoric of progress, devel-
opment, and frontier to justify racist policies and pedagogies against students of
color in the United States and other nations and territories across the globe.
Specifically, historians have demonstrated the ways in which segregationist and
assimilationist ideas traveled across national boundaries. In Race and the Origins
of Progressive Education, Fallace (2015a) argued that the entire generation of
prewar pedagogical progressives subscribed to some form of the racist theory of
recapitulation—an assimilationist theoretical framework that equated non-White
individuals and cultures with the minds of White children because both were
believed to represent an equivalent, savage stage of psychological/sociological
development. The theory of recapitulation, Fallace (2015a) argued, “made a per-
vasive impact on educational theory and curriculum between 1890 and 1929—the
formative years of progressive education—and the influence of the theory could
be found decades later” (p. 3). Fallace traced uses of the theory of recapitulation
in the work of Montessori, Dewey, Hall, and numerous other progressive peda-
gogical leaders, and how their segregationist/assimilationist ideas influence both

461
Hines and Fallace
US schools, as well as those created through US imperialist excursions in
Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Drawing on Fallace’s work (2015a,
2015c), Luckey (2018) demonstrated how the two figures most responsible for
bringing the Kindergarten to US public schools, Susan Blow and William Torrey
Harris, also used the theory of recapitulation to justify their student-centered
reform by transposing “widely circulated theories of biological and cultural evo-
lution, a belief in Western superiority, and their vision of a civilized social order
onto the biology and psychology of the child” (p. 800). In their innovative study
of photographs of student-centered pedagogical practices during the Progressive
Era in the United States and England, Braster and Andres (2020) concluded that
these images instilled “in the minds of children the idea that there is a cultural
order with ‘primitive,’ coloured people at the bottom, and a special class of
(White) people at the top” (p. 23).
Stepping back to an even broader perspective, Willinsky’s (1998) award-
winning account To Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End explored how
the legacy of “colonial schooling and western imperialism” was conveyed to stu-
dents through the academic disciplines of history, geography, science, language,
and literature, teaching them “to unconsciously divide the world” in ways that
“proved eminently useful to Europe and often detrimental to the larger body of
humanity” (pp. 90, 27, 17). Elsewhere, Willinsky (2001) explored how Dewey
and other pedagogical progressives applied these assimilationist ideas through
their pedagogical and social commitment to progress. In The White Architects of
Black Education, Watkins (2001) linked the segregationist ideological outlooks of
White educators and philanthropists who established the schools and curriculum
for Black students in the United States and abroad as rooted in the effort to “con-
trol, pacify, and socialize subject people” (p. 1). Kim (2009) read Dewey’s phi-
losophy in the context of US imperialist policy in the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii,
and Puerto Rico, concluding that Dewey’s “frontier vision” of America as “per-
petually innocent, always flush with democratic youth” was “deeply anti-demo-
cratic” and “potentially collusive with an expansive white supremacy” (pp. 63,
60). According to Threlkeld (2017), even peace education curricula during World
War I taught “Native-born Americans to see themselves as the only rightful lead-
ers of a new world order” (p. 520), and Stratton’s (2016) Education for Empire
and Eittreim’s (2019) Teaching Empire provided further evidence of theoretical
connections between domestic racial theory, foreign imperialism, and the segre-
gationist/assimilationist ideas of educational progress.
Studies of educational imperialism in the newly acquired US colonies (Angulo,
2012; Coloma, 2009; Jernigan, 2014) confirmed that educators employed pro-
gressive pedagogical rhetoric to provide Indigenous populations of the Philippines,
Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico with a segregationist, Hampton-Tuskegee-style
industrial curriculum for economic exploitation. Educators employed a similar
pedagogy with other non-White populations under their control. As Paulet (2007)
demonstrated, American reformers applied the so-called lessons of teaching Black
and Indigenous American youth at home to the Indigenous populations of the new
territories, thus linking domestic and foreign imperialism in a frontier vision of
cultural displacement and conquest. Furthermore, Jacobs’s (2013) comparative
study of Indigenous child removal in the United States and Australia, White

462
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
Mother to a Dark Race, demonstrated how leaders employed child-centered, pro-
gressive rhetoric to justify both their segregationist removal policies and the
industrial-vocational curriculum they offered their Indigenous students.
Some scholars have complicated the one-sided nature of cultural displacement
and the alleged passivity of immigrants, although these studies mostly examined
White immigrant groups (e.g., Jews, Polish, Italians), which many at the time
considered to be different races. For example, Zimmerman (2002) demonstrated
how many immigrant groups supported a traditional, patriotic, assimilationist
brand of US history, so long as it included their own ethnic heroes, and Mirel’s
(2010) study of foreign language newspapers and educational materials found that
immigrants balanced their desire to retain the cultural attributes of their native
country with a desire to assimilate, an outlook Mirel dubbed patriotic pluralism.
Weiner (2010) demonstrated how the Jewish community in New York City suc-
cessfully deflected the segregationist curriculum of Gary, Indiana, that would
have displaced the academic curriculum with a more vocationally oriented one.
Thus, certain immigrant groups rejected some of the pedagogically progressive
ideas that were designed to assimilate them, whereas others actively balanced
desires for cultural assimilation with anti-racism (see Olneck, 2008).
Despite these exceptions, the overriding historiographical momentum has been
toward linking pedagogical progressivism to racial segregation, cultural assimila-
tion, and cultural displacement. Specifically, the recent literature on race and
pedagogical progressivism among White educators has supported two assertions.
First, that the very ideas so central to pedagogical progressivism—child develop-
ment, child-centeredness, student interest, hands-on and practical learning, “sci-
entific” research, and education as a means of social progress—were justified
through, with, and by segregationist theories of psychological and social develop-
ment that relegated students of color to second-class citizenship. Second, segrega-
tionist/assimilationist theories of racial hierarchy that identified White students as
the most biologically, sociologically, and ethically superior were applied domesti-
cally to students of color at home (Indigenous Americans and Black) and abroad
(Cuba, Hawaii, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Africa). It was not simply that individual
pedagogical progressives were racist and that, as a result, some of this racism
found its way into their pedagogical theory. Rather, historians argue, racial theory
was part of the “weight-bearing structure” of pre–World War I pedagogical pro-
gressivism itself in ways that deliberately shaped, justified, and maintained White
supremacy (Fallace, 2011, p. 4).
Racial Thinking of Later White Pedagogical Progressives (1916–1957)
Part of the problem with making broad generalizations about the racial views
of pedagogical progressives is that the racial views of social scientists evolved
rapidly between the 1920s and 1950s as the reforms of progressive education
began to gain ground in American schools. Three related factors in particular
moved mainstream social science away from a segregationist, biological view of
race toward an assimilationist/anti-racist, culturally pluralistic approach, which
opened the door for a more egalitarian and anti-racist perspective. First was the
growing influence of the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and his former stu-
dents Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. These scholars directly challenged the
biological basis of race and rejected the cultural stage theory (e.g., savage,
463
Hines and Fallace
barbarian, civilization) that aligned with the theory of recapitulation. Boas and
like-minded scholars espoused a relativistic, contextualized approach to culture
that replaced the hierarchical, segregationist, and assimilationist approaches to
culture of previous generations, and they directly engaged educators in spreading
their views. Second, the economic devastation of the Great Depression and World
War II redirected scholars away from racial explanations of social change toward
economic and ideological ones. The racist suggestion that unassimilated immi-
grants and minorities was the major issue facing American society seemed farci-
cal in the face of 25 % unemployment, rising fascist aggression, and global war.
Finally, the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany appalled American scholars and
policy makers, leading them to take more anti-racist positions to distance them-
selves and American culture from the overt racism of Adolph Hitler (Baker, 1998;
Barkan, 1992; Degler, 1991; Jacobson, 1998; McKee, 1993; Stocking, 1968).
None of these factors upended White supremacy in the 1930s and 1940s, nor did
they seriously challenge the emerging assimilationist paradigm toward racial
minorities, but they created a context in which some pedagogical progressives
introduced programs and ideas aimed at prejudice reduction, most notably the
cultural gifts/intercultural/intergroup education movement.
Assimilationist–Anti-racist Views and White Intercultural Educators
The cultural gifts movement was one of the earliest and most widespread
attempts by American educators to proactively use the public schools to reduce
religious and racial prejudice. Several historians have studied the cultural gifts/
intercultural/intergroup education movement, which began in the 1920s and
extended into the 1950s (C. M. Banks, 2005; Burkholder, 2010; Halverson &
Mirel, 2013; Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Montalto (1982) and Selig (2008) both
identified New Jersey teacher Rachel Davis DuBois as the originator of the cul-
tural gifts idea in American schools. According to Montalto (1982), DuBois was
“the one person more than any other responsible for setting a new agenda for
American education” (p. 77). DuBois authored anti-racist textbooks and launched
popular assembly programs meant to celebrate the cultural contributions of differ-
ent races and cultures, and she later took a leadership role in intercultural educa-
tion at the national level before, according to Bohan (2007), she was replaced as
the director of the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education by the less radical
Stewart Cole, who rebranded the cultural gifts movement into more assimilation-
ist, unity-driven intergroup relations. The PEA, which formed in 1919, endorsed
and collaborated with intercultural education, and leading pedagogical progres-
sive educators discussed the race issue in the pages of the radical Social Frontier
and more moderate Progressive Education journals.
In Americans All, Selig (2008) traced the grassroots reformers such as DuBois,
Leonard Covello, and Rev. Everett Clinchy, who collaborated directly with one
another and with pedagogical progressives such as Dewey, Benedict, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Bruno Lasker, and Frederick Thrasher, to “fashion arguments for cultural
persistence rather than forced assimilation” (p. 3). These reformers made consid-
erable inroads toward changing White students’ views of attitudes toward ethnic
and racial minorities. Ironically, however, as Selig (2008) argued, the strategies
they employed to do so often inadvertently “perpetuated cultural stereotypes” by
assigning particular behaviors and attributes to entire racial groups, even if these
464
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
behaviors were positive (p. 13). Potentially more damaging, according to Selig
(2008), was that White intercultural educators often failed to address the larger
socioeconomic causes of racism.
In their review of the literature on intercultural education, Johnson and Pak
(2019) identified multiple strands of intercultural/intergroup education and dem-
onstrated the idea served as “a symbolic response to racial conflicts at a time
when ‘riots’ and racial uprisings in cities across the country—Chicago, Detroit,
Los Angeles, Harlem, Mobile Alabama, and Beaumont Texas—challenged the
United States’ international image” (p. 13). Johnson and Pak suggest that policy
makers used intercultural education conservatively, to assuage racial tensions
through an assimilationist outlook, rather than pursuing an anti-racist agenda of
challenging racial hierarchies and advancing racial justice.
In Color in the Classroom, Burkholder (2011) traced changing conceptions of
race as reflected in teaching journals between 1900 and 1954, during which Boas,
Benedict, and Mead convinced many progressive teachers to divorce race from
biology by linking it to culture but still largely maintained an assimilationist ide-
ology of racial hierarchy. “Some teachers employed an anthropological definition
of human race to challenge racism and social inequality,” Burkholder (2011)
explained, but “This critical antiracist pedagogy was more the exception than the
rule . . . [because] Most teachers simply translated an essentialist understanding of
human ‘race’ into a softer language of culture that continued to define minority
individuals according to the supposed natural characteristics of their group”
(p. 6). Furthermore, the expansion of extracurricular activities in the 1930s—an
outgrowth of the progressive impulse to educate the whole child—created new
opportunities for minority participation in sports, clubs, school newspapers, and
the yearbook. But, as Fass (1989) demonstrated, these activities tended to rein-
force rather than upend racial hierarchies, such as the prevalence of Black stu-
dents on the track team, Catholic students in religious clubs, and Jewish students
in the science and literature clubs. “Thus the high school culture acted as a filter,”
Fass (1989) concluded, “letting through some qualities from its diverse popula-
tion and not others” (p. 110).
As these studies of intercultural education demonstrate, many White educators
moved from segregationist to assimilationist and at times even anti-racist stances
during the 1920s and 1930s as the science supporting biological racism began to
be challenged. Instead of assigning racial attributes to individuals and groups
based on their traits that were supposedly biologically inherited, they argued that
these same attributes (and deficits) were transmitted culturally. Either way, White
educators approached minoritized racial groups as having fixed, essential traits in
ways that often reinforced preexisting racial stereotypes. Thus, while White peda-
gogical progressives affiliated with the cultural gifts/intercultural education
movement effectively combated the segregationist paradigm, they did not chal-
lenge racial injustice in America as seriously as they might have.
Assimilationist–Anti-racist Views of White Pedagogical Progressives
With the rise of the fascism in Europe and in response to the efforts of intercul-
tural educators, leading White pedagogical progressives continued to expand their
racial views during the 1920s and 1930s. Goodenow’s (1975, 1978a, 1978b, 1981)

465
Hines and Fallace
studies of pedagogical progressives mostly focused on the 1930s, during which
Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg expressed anti-racist views
informed by Boas’s pluralistic approach. Dewey scholars (Eldridge, 2004; Stack,
2009) have also explored the philosopher’s impassioned defense in 1936 of Odell
Walker, a Black sharecropper who had been wrongfully accused of murder.
However, these perspectives were not likely representative of broader society nor,
perhaps, even the views of most pedagogical progressives. In the American South
prior to World War II, some ambitious teachers and schools sought to challenge
White supremacy through prejudice reduction programs and engagement with
Black history, but the overriding ideological thrust was toward assimilationist
ideas (Dennis, 1998; Montgomery, 2018; Woyshner, 2012, 2018). The vast major-
ity of White and Black children were consciously and unconsciously socialized
into a hierarchical world, where, according to Ritterhouse (2006) in Growing Up
Jim Crow, “adult white southerners tried . . . to teach both black and white children
to ‘forget’ any possible alternative to white supremacy” (p. 9). Southern geography
textbooks continued to reinforce the savagery-barbarian-civilization cultural hier-
archy, and Southern history textbooks reported “the lost cause narrative” of
Reconstruction in which radical Republicans allegedly punished the Southerners
by putting them under the rule of Black citizens before “heroic” Southerners
restored the natural order by reimposing White supremacy. Northern textbooks
eventually adopted the “lost cause narrative” as well (Bohan et al., 2020).
Furthermore, science textbooks used across the United States related eugenics
as a legitimate science, and issue-centered social studies textbooks related racial
stereotypes and failed to question the legitimacy of racial segregation (Fallace,
2012; King et al. 2012; Moreau, 2010; Selden, 1991; Spearman, 2012). Even
reform efforts aimed explicitly at introducing progressive pedagogies into schools
were shaped by racial views of their constituents. Wraga’s (2019) comparative
study of how Southern White and Black schools implemented reforms related to
the PEA’s Eight Year Study discovered a divergence in pedagogical outlooks. The
Eight Year Study was a funded national reform project designed to compare the
impact of student-centered methods versus traditional methods in terms of college
achievement. Schools across the nation received funding from the PEA to develop
and implement innovative pedagogies. According to Wraga’s study, the White
schools that participated in the Eight Year Study emphasized progressive methods
as a “clinical technique” and “democracy as racially exclusionary,” while the
Black schools “emphasized participatory problem-solving as a vehicle for democ-
ratizing African American education, tacitly resisting hegemonic white suprem-
acy” (pp. 235, 254).
In summary, the new anti-racist definition of culture that gradually took root in
the 1920s and 1930s removed the biological justification for racism and suggested
that social inequalities between Whites and Blacks were the result of race preju-
dice, unjust social policies, and cultural difference instead of intelligence, innate
potential, or immutable traits. Some White pedagogical progressives embraced
Boas’s culturally relativistic and anti-racist approach. However, many, if not
most, White pedagogical progressives simply replaced theories of biological defi-
ciency with newer assimilationist theories of cultural deficiency. As a result,
White pedagogical progressives either essentialized the behaviors of cultural

466
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
groups in simplistic ways by ascribing fixed traits and behaviors to racial groups
or depicted Black communities as somehow pathological, damaged, or less devel-
oped than their White counterparts, both of which were forms of racism. So,
although segregationist thinking in the form of biological racism receded among
White educators during the peak years of pedagogical progressivism, assimila-
tionist thinking in the form of cultural racism persisted, leaving White supremacy
more or less intact. Yet, against this backdrop, historians have documented numer-
ous examples of how leading Black educators steered the untapped potential of
pedagogical progressivism toward anti-racism in ways that directly challenged
the White supremacy of the day. This literature complicates the view that peda-
gogical progressivism was inherently or structurally racist.
Racial Thinking of Early Black Pedagogical Progressives (1880–1916)
Although the historiography on pedagogical progressivism initially focused
almost exclusively on the ideas of White theorists like those discussed in the pre-
vious section, this work has grown to consider the lessons and legacies of Black
pedagogical progressives, allowing historians to recognize the multiple ways in
which Black educators and theorists fundamentally influenced and were influ-
enced by the trajectories of pedagogical progressivism. Historians have shown
how Black theorists and teachers redefined the discourses and refashioned the
methods associated with pedagogical progressivism, adapting them to their own
priorities and understandings of society. As a result, historians have expanded our
understanding of how Black educators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
understood themselves and their missions, and how they navigated the larger ide-
ological currents that surrounded them.
The early decades of the progressive movement in the United States coincided
with a low point of the postemancipation experience of Black Americans, as
Reconstruction era protections for Black citizenship rights including education
withered under the Jim Crow legal regime and the constant threat of extralegal
terrorism in the newly “redeemed” South (Anderson, 1988; Butchart 2010; Span,
2009; Williams, 2005). Although Black political, intellectual, and moral leaders
developed various and sometimes opposing strategies for Black advancement in
this era, there was consistent agreement that education posed one of the most
secure routes to attainment both for individuals and for the race. Thus, as a people,
Black Americans were deeply invested in the educational debates of the day,
including those surrounding pedagogical progressivism.
Early connections between the educational movement that would come to be
known as pedagogical progressivism and Black education are evident in the phi-
losophy and pedagogy of Booker T. Washington, the figure whose influence
loomed largest over Black schooling prior to World War I. Although Washington
has been “virtually ignored in the body of literature known as progressive educa-
tion,” Generals (2000) argued that his pedagogical approach anticipated the work
of Dewey, Kilpatrick, and other pedagogical progressives (p. 215). Washington’s
embrace of an “integrated industrial academic curriculum” and his insistence that
students learn to use “the things of life for the source of developing the habits of
critical thinking” are of a piece with the progressive focus on experiential learning
and the relationship between the concerns of the classroom and those

467
Hines and Fallace
of the community (pp. 219, 222). Importantly, these parallels, far from going
unacknowledged, were noted in Washington’s own time by White progressives,
who held that the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education was worthy of not only
attention but imitation in both Black and White settings. For instance, Generals
(2000) cites Paul Monroe, the head of the Education Department of Teachers
College, who described Tuskegee as working, “not only along the lines of practi-
cal endeavor, but of the most advanced educational thought” (p. 219). Taking this
into account, Generals (2000) contended that Washington should be included
among the founders of the progressive education.
Following Generals’ argument closely, Chennault (2013) and Lewis (2014)
also traced the extent of the connections between Washington and pedagogical
progressive thought. Chennault (2013) located both Dewey and Washington
within the American intellectual tradition of pragmatism, a philosophical stance
in which, “the meaning of an idea is determined by putting that idea into practice”
(p. 122). This essential concern with making meaning through action instead of
abstraction, Chennault believed, was expressed in the pedagogy developed by
both educators. Lewis (2014), for his part, was more concerned with how ideol-
ogy shaped curriculum and instruction at the segregated Tuskegee Institute, argu-
ing that Washington’s vocationalism constituted “progressivism in practice” and
served as “a vehicle for transmitting academic [emphasis original] knowledge,
skills, and values” alongside and through industrial training (p. 194).
Underlying the readings of Washington by Generals, Chennault, and Lewis
was their shared sense that the Hampton-Tuskegee approach had been misunder-
stood and unfairly maligned by both contemporaneous opponents and by later
historians. Generals (2000), for example, bemoaned the fact that Washington
was not given “due recognition” as a progressive educational theorist and posited
that “if placed in a contemporary context, Washington’s ideas could have pro-
found implications for today’s educational problems” (p. 231, 232). Lewis (2014)
agreed, seeing Washington as “well ahead of his time as an educator” and as a
clear forerunner to the modern vocationalism embodied in career academies and
other educational models (p. 190). For these scholars, placing Washington along-
side pedagogical progressives like Kilpatrick and Dewey was a way of reassert-
ing his status as an educator both historically and in contemporary educational
debates.
Importantly, while some scholars have pointed to Washington’s ties to peda-
gogical progressivism as a means of rehabilitating his legacy, others have, con-
versely, found in these connections still further proof of the limitations and
segregationist thinking embedded in pedagogical progressivism itself. Like
Chennault, Lewis, and Generals, Hefferon (2019) found numerous and substan-
tive links between Washington’s educational philosophy and that of White peda-
gogical progressives. However, for Heffron these connections spoke not to
Washington’s forward-looking orientation or his facility as an educator or theorist
but to the extent to which the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism often served
as a thin veneer concealing a fundamentally conservative educational philosophy
rooted in racial segregation and economic exploitation. Building from Anderson
(1988) and his work on Black education during and after Reconstruction, Heffron
argued that White educators, policymakers, and philanthropists in both the North

468
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
and South were fundamentally concerned with channeling and controlling the
economic and social disruptions of the late 19th century in ways that maintained
their position in society. This concern led them to embrace a limited industrial
curriculum for Southern Black education that was tied to racism and political and
economic disenfranchisement. Importantly, Heffron finds that this same industrial
curriculum was quickly expanded and applied to European immigrants, Indigenous
peoples, and others as “what was best for the ex-slave—his and her uplift and
civilization” was seen as “best for all Americans, especially a large and growing
class of immigrants” (Heffron, 2019, p. 168). For Heffron, the alignment between
Washington’s Hampton-Tuskegee model and early pedagogical progressivism
arose from the fact that both relied on a rhetoric of science and modernity while
functioning to maintain segregationist thinking.
Whether Washington’s ties to pedagogical progressivism marked him as a far-
seeing pragmatist who sought to use vocationalism as a “veritable Trojan horse”
to incorporate advanced pedagogies, or whether both his own philosophy and that
of the White pedagogical progressives who praised it offered only segregation for
Blacks and others under the name of progress, is a matter of debate (Lewis, 2014,
p. 194). What is obvious, these historians agree, is that both Washington and the
Hampton-Tuskegee model with which he was associated occupied a clear space
within pedagogical progressivism, drawing support from such figures and organi-
zations as John D. Rockefeller Jr., General Education Board, Paul Monroe, and
Teachers College.
Historians have only recently begun to sketch Washington’s relationship to
pedagogical progressivism. The same can be said of his contemporary and critic,
W. E. B. Du Bois. Alridge (2008) has argued that Du Bois was connected to the
progressive movement by a shared belief in the potential of education to “bring
about a more democratic society” and “address and resolve social, economic, and
political problems” (p. 41). Directly connecting Du Bois and Dewey, Alridge
pointed to their shared adherence to the ideas of William James, with whom they
both studied, their membership in the NAACP and the League of Independent
Political Action, and Du Bois’s requests for Dewey to contribute to The Crisis, as
proof of their overlapping agendas. In contrast to Sullivan’s contrasting of the two
philosophers (2019), Alridge (2008) found Dewey and Du Bois to be men “of like
mind and spirit” who believed in both “experiential education and education in
the humanities” (p. 41).
Du Bois’s educational thought evolved considerably over his long and storied
career, which stretched from the 1890s to the 1960s. Early on, he advocated for
the role of education in building a “talented tenth” composed of the “exceptional
men” of the race, who, after rigorous classical educations, would emerge fitted to
guide their people in the climb toward social progress (Du Bois, 1903, p. 33). It
was a vision largely modeled after his own educational experiences at Fisk
University, Harvard University, the University of Berlin, and other elite institu-
tions and was articulated in his advice to his own daughter to “read some good,
heavy, serious books just for discipline” and to commit herself to the “blunt, hard,
exercise of memory” (Alridge, 2008, p. 64). Pedagogically, this initial vision was
far more traditional and, in some aspects, even assimilationist, however as his
career continued Du Bois would greatly expand his educational thought.

469
Hines and Fallace
As his thinking developed, Du Bois came to believe that a broader and more
diverse education, one that incorporated aspects of both industrial and liberal
training, was necessary to spark the kinds of social change he envisioned. By the
1930s, Alridge (2008) argues, he had largely moved away from his earlier concen-
tration on building an elite leadership cadre within the Black community and
instead advocated for Black middle- and working-class efforts to control their
own destinies through “economic and social cooperation” (p. 76). This could be
done through education that provided “a sound curriculum in economics, capital-
ism, and economic cooperation,” subjects which would allow Black youth to rec-
ognize the forces that held up the oppressive conditions they lived under and more
effectively work against them (Alridge, 2008, p. 78). Concentrating his analysis
on this period of Du Bois’s thought, Watkins (2006) argued that Du Bois should
be associated with the social reconstructionist wing of pedagogical progressivism
that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s. In Du Bois’s commitment to “outthink-
ing and outflanking the owners of the world,” Watkins (2006) recognized a “con-
summate social reconstructionist” at work, one whose commitment to enacting
radical social change was also central to the writings of Harold Rugg, George
Counts, and other pedagogically progressive educators (p. 222).
Washington and Du Bois represented different poles of Black educational
thought, and teachers and administrators facing the day-to-day problems of teach-
ing and learning often pulled from both to craft their own beliefs and approaches.
One example of the dynamic nature of Black education at the ground level can be
seen in the celebrated Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for
Colored Youth in New Jersey, a segregated public boarding high school for Black
students that was dubbed “The Tuskegee of the North.” Several historians have
explored this fascinating school. When it was founded in the 1880s, the school
originally offered an academic curriculum, but by the 1910s it began to incorpo-
rate more industrial offerings. To that end, the New Jersey commissioner of edu-
cation hired William R. Valentine as principal of the school, a man Burkholder
(2017) identified as a “black progressive educator and Harvard University gradu-
ate” (p. 51). Valentine, formerly the principal of PS 26 in Indianapolis, had been
featured in John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow (1915), published the
same year that Valentine was hired at Bordentown. Valentine’s ability to success-
fully offer both industrial and academic curricula drew contemporaneous praise
from W. E. B. Du Bois and subsequent historians (Goddard, 2019; Jordan, 2017;
Wright, 1941). According to Burkholder (2017), Valentine “believed that cultivat-
ing a strong work ethic and sense of personal responsibility was every bit as
important as training in industry and academics,” (p. 55) and Goddard (2019)
considered Bordentown to be the realization of the kind of industrial/academic
progressive curriculum outlined by Dewey. However, by the 1940s, civil rights
leaders began to criticize Bordentown as an outdated, segregated, Southern-style
industrial school that destined Black youth to a second-class citizenship. By the
end of World War II, the once-celebrated school was resented by many as a racist
relic of the past.
While less widely recognized than Washington or Du Bois by educational his-
torians, the contribution of teacher, author, and school leader Anna Julia Cooper
to pedagogical theory and educational philosophy easily placed her alongside

470
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
(and often ahead of) her male contemporaries. Part of what Waite and Crocco
(2001) have described as the invisible talented tenth, the group of Black women
intellectuals who “exemplified and implemented” the educational theories of Du
Bois and other male academics, Cooper moved seamlessly between theory and
practice over a career that encompassed teaching and administrative roles at
Oberlin, the famed M Street High School in Washington D.C., and Frelinghuysen
University (p. 39). Although there has been little inquiry into the possible links
between Cooper’s teaching and pedagogical progressivism, recent scholarship
reveals the exciting possibility of new inquiry along this line.
Like Du Bois, Cooper was shaped by her own Victorian era classical liberal
education. Yet as she developed her own practice throughout the early and mid-
20th century, she incorporated strategies that took note of more modern trends in
pursuit of an anti-racist agenda. Grant et al. (2016), while focusing much of their
analysis on Cooper’s theoretical contributions, also give us a glimpse of her peda-
gogy, which fused traditional teaching methods with an emphasis on the poetry,
the arts, and dramatic performance geared to help students think expansively and
engage through multiple modalities. While noting Cooper’s Victorian era roots,
Alridge (2007) similarly highlighted Cooper’s pedagogy as incorporating a pro-
gressive thinking, noting that she “believed so strongly in the potential of drama
as an educational tool that she wrote several plays herself for her students” along-
side poetry and sketches she also produced (Alridge, 2007, p. 435). Cooper’s
incorporation of the arts as part of a broad-based education aimed at promoting
not only knowledge but social action and activism is just one potential point of
intersection between her pedagogy and that of her Progressive Era peers.
As Johnson (2009) made clear, animating Cooper’s pedagogy was a vision of
education as not simply a means of personal development but as a process of
“social reform” and a “vehicle for acquiring social change” (p. 52). Cooper
brought this commitment to bear not only in her work with K–12 students but also
in her later work as head of Frelinghuysen University in Washington DC, a peo-
ple’s college for working- and middle-class Black adults. According to Johnson,
Cooper was “deeply conscious of the fact that adult education and schooling were
not isolated from the realities of U.S. society” and built her program to encourage
each student to “take his or her knowledge and skills and in turn use these to
improve the life chances of other members of their community and society over-
all” (Johnson, 2009, p. 51). As Cooper put it, “no teacher of whatever degree is
worth his salt who can not or does not loyally and intelligently ‘pass’ [the] test of
preparing their learners for purposes of service to human betterment” (Johnson,
2009, p. 51).
Beyond Cooper, a wide range of Black women educators are just beginning to
receive scholarly attention for their role in the development of Black education
during the Progressive Era. Murray (2018), for example, in her work on the devel-
opment of Black counternarrative traditions in social studies education from the
1890s to 1940s, argued that “black women consistently created, implemented, and
applied Progressive principles to their work as educators” (p. 6). Analyzing cur-
ricula and classroom practices of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Leia Amos Pendleton,
Mary Church Terrell, and Jessie Redmond Fausset, among others, Murray (2018)
concluded that these educators put progressive pedagogies to work in service of
racial justice because, “Although African American historians were interested in
471
Hines and Fallace
larger Progressive education reform, they were more passionate about fighting the
rampant [racism] endemic in American life” (p. 44). Murray’s excellent work
notwithstanding, much more scholarship is necessary to elucidate how Black edu-
cators, and particularly Black women, transformed and applied progressive peda-
gogies as a tool with which to combat the racism embedded in American schools.
Racial Thinking of Later Black Pedagogical Progressives (1916–1954)
Anti-racism and Pedagogical Progressivism in the Early Black History
Movement
No figure did more to pursue an anti-racist agenda in American schools during
the interwar years than Carter G. Woodson, the Harvard-trained historian, scholar,
and leading figure of the early Black history movement. Although Woodson’s
experience and expertise spanned the full breadth of education settings, he
remained deeply committed to and invested in primary and secondary education
throughout his life and career. This passion was shown by his embrace of school-
teachers alongside academics as members and officers of Association for Negro
Life and History, the production of the Negro History Bulletin for K–12 teachers
as a companion to the more scholarly Journal of Negro History; his creation of
Negro History Week, which relied on networks of Black teachers across the coun-
try to organize and enact; and his authorship of multiple textbooks and curricular
resources tailored to primary and secondary students (Dagbovie, 2007).
While Woodson’s significance to Black education and his commitment to anti-
racism are undisputed, historians disagree about his relationship to pedagogical
progressivism. Snyder (2015) argued that Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the
Negro should also be recognized as an essential text of the pedagogical progres-
sive educational tradition. Like other pedagogical progressives, Woodson saw the
educational system that surrounded him as fundamentally flawed, characterized
by “rigidity, a hopelessly old-fashioned curriculum,” and a “neglect of student
interests” (Snyder, 2015, p. 278). Woodson, however, recognized that for Black
students these problems were rooted in and exacerbated by “the spirit, point of
view, and content of the curriculum,” which sought to impose White worldviews,
histories, values, and cultural norms onto non-White students (Snyder, 2015,
p. 278). Education of this kind resulted in a bitter irony, as those Black students
who performed best by standard measures nonetheless emerged alienated from
their own communities and identities. Further, these same students were then
blocked by racial segregation from making the kinds of claims on White society
that their educations had led them to feel entitled to. In order to rectify this alien-
ation, Woodson endorsed an education that built what scholars today would term
critical consciousness—that is, an ability to name and describe the systems of
oppression, along with a concomitant dedication to radically altering these sys-
tems and the confidence and skills to act on this desire. In so doing, Snyder (2015)
argued that Woodson, “advanced what is arguably the most fundamental tenet of
progressive pedagogy, which is that education must be relevant,” and articulated,
“the progressive vision, representative of the mid-1930s, that education should
aim to reform society, especially by encouraging students to set aside selfish pur-
suits in favor of service” (p. 276). Similarly, Murray (2018), pulling from Snyder,
determined that “the basic tenets of Carter G. Woodson’s critique of Black educa-
tion can be squarely placed at the center of a Progressive tradition” (p. 5).
472
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
Furthermore, in their work contrasting Woodson and progressive educator
Harold O. Rugg, King et al. (2012) place both educators within a progressive
tradition, noting that one purpose of their investigation is to “highlight the similar
and different ways in which African American and White progressives addressed
curricular issues during the same historical period” (p. 360). However, they called
attention to the large differences between even radical White progressives like
Rugg and their Black peers. Rugg was a pioneering educator who prompted stu-
dents to think critically about economic inequality, labor, and immigration, and
whose critical stances on economic and social inequality saw his textbooks vili-
fied and even banned. Yet he evinced little concern for racial justice, and his cur-
ricular materials reinforced many pernicious racial stereotypes. As a result, King
et al. found that Rugg’s textbooks “seemed to ignore the presence of race and
racism as an important ‘American problem’” (p. 376). On the other hand,
Woodson’s curricula were explicitly and deeply rooted in the effort “to attend to
the racial silences that were apparent in most of the mainstream curricular texts”
(p. 376). Although similar in many respects, King et al. (2012) argued that White
progressives and their Black counterparts diverged widely on the extent to which
racism was made visible in and central to their work.
This distinction between the central concerns of White and Black pedagogi-
cal progressives has led some historians to conclude that placing Woodson
within the tradition of pedagogical progressivism might obscure and misrepre-
sent the central aspects of his work. Givens (2021) cautioned against reading
Woodson through the lens of pedagogical progressivism, because the “crux of
Woodson’s philosophy” centered on “explicit critiques of antiblackness,” some-
thing the mainstream progressive movement failed to embrace (p. 122). In addi-
tion, because Woodson was primarily concerned with “the content and the
message of the curricula,” Givens (2021) wrote, he sometimes embraced peda-
gogical techniques based on “a banking style model of education” and “didactic
form of pedagogy,” which were at odds with “key components of progressive
education” (pp. 122–123). Because “the core aspects of his writing on black
education fall outside its parameters,” and Woodson himself was “largely alien-
ated” from the movements’ professional proponents and organizations, Givens
(2021) saw Woodson’s educational theorizing as distinct from pedagogical pro-
gressivism (p. 122).
Despite their divergent views on whether Woodson should be characterized as
a progressive, Snyder (2015), Givens (2021), and King et al. (2012) agreed that
Woodson’s educational philosophy offered a critique of “mainstream progressive
theories” that “were not grounded in the lives of black people and were insuffi-
cient as a resource for interpreting their experiences” (Givens, 2021, p. 123).
Reading Woodson alongside pedagogical progressivism, then, means recognizing
that substantial differences and distinct outlooks comprised the Black progressive
tradition.
Pedagogical Progressivism and Experimental Black School Spaces
Woodson never explicitly aligned himself with pedagogical progressivism and
offered criticism of celebrated progressive theorists such as Dewey, making his
exact relationship to the movement a subject of debate. Many Black teachers and

473
Hines and Fallace
administrators however unambiguously identified themselves as progressives and
sought ways to utilize progressive approaches and ideas in the pursuit of a libera-
tory education for Black people. Perlstein (2019), for instance, has written about
how Black teachers and school leaders in New York City adopted elements of
progressive pedagogy during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.
Perlstein (2019) provided detailed descriptions of the work of Gertrude Ayers, a
teacher and administrator of Harlem’s PS 24, and Mildred Johnson, founder of
The Modern School of Harlem (later simply The Modern School), which catered
to the families of the Black elite. Although they served students of different social
and class backgrounds, both women engaged deeply in progressive pedagogy.
Perlstein found that Ayers, for example, utilized “A Unit Activity Program” that
“relied on experiential learning, self-directed projects, democratic classroom liv-
ing, and field trips into the community,” while Johnson encouraged experimenta-
tion and dissolved rigid lines between school subjects with the expectation that
the teacher “builds her curriculum and adapts it to the particular group of chil-
dren” (Perlstein, 2019, p. 46). Even as they embraced progressive calls to enable
students’ individuality, however, Ayers and Johnson also sought to build racial
pride and group solidarity through the incorporation of lessons dealing with Black
history and culture. The result, for Perlstein (2019), was that these teachers
“simultaneously built upon the capacity of Black children to construct their own
understanding of the world and instilled a humanity that enduring structures of
oppression sought to deny” (p. 50).
Similarly, Kridel (2018) has explored how Black educators in the American
South incorporated progressive pedagogies into their programs in his work on the
Secondary School Study, an effort launched in the 1940s by the Association of
Colleges and High Schools for Negroes and the General Education Board and
aimed explicitly at bringing progressive practices to Black Southern high schools.
Participating schools took part in professional development through summer
institutes and workshops and read the latest research in magazines and books.
Faculty and administrators were encouraged to think deeply and collaboratively
about potential areas of improvement within their schools and then engage in
pragmatic experimentation to develop unique solutions. True to the study’s pro-
gressive philosophy, schools shared stories of their improvement not through
impersonal statistics but through narrative reports that presented fictionalized
characters and situations as a gateway into different arguments and points of view
encountered throughout the school study process.
Overall, Kridel (2018) found that the narrative reports mapped the movement
of the participating schools away from traditional teacher-centered instruction and
rote learning toward “a distinctive view of schooling with correlated and fused
core curricula, pupil-teacher planning, student assessments and cumulative stu-
dent records, community building and engagement, summer workshops, and an
emphasis on the role of school philosophy” (p. 6). Throughout, teachers and
administrators self-consciously pursued and implemented what they saw as hall-
marks of progressive pedagogy. At the same time, however, they carefully navi-
gated the extent to which they could claim the mantle of pedagogical progressivism
in a country and region still marked by Jim Crow racial segregation. Kridel (2018)
noted that many Black teachers avoided the term “progressive,” even as they

474
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
incorporated the practices and dispositions associated with the movement, well
aware that it “would have caused suspicion” among Southern Whites, (p. 4). This
kind of subterfuge has been a necessity for Black educators from the antebellum
era until the present.
Pierson (2015), in an article on Black laboratory high schools connected to
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), some of which took part
in the secondary study themselves, made the relationship between Black educa-
tion, pedagogical progressivism, and social justice even more explicit. Much of
the pedagogy practiced within the lab schools, like the use of “scientific study” as
a basis for classroom lessons or the adoption of “detailed written assessments”
instead of letter grading, was common to a wide range of progressive schools
(Pierson, 2015, p. 97). Underlying and animating each of these strategies, how-
ever, was an anti-racist educational vision that centered the Black experience.
Pierson (2015) noted that the social studies classrooms blended the work of Du
Bois and Woodson with that of Rugg and Counts to posit questions like, “Does the
Negro’s racial inheritance incapacitate him for significant achievement in world
civilization? How is the effort of the Negro to achieve security in the American
social order related to the efforts of other minority groups?” and “Can participa-
tion by the Negro in labor organizations result in desirable improvement in his
social, economic, and political position?” (p. 98). In adapting progressivism to
prepare Black students, these only confirmed the ethos of experimentation that
surrounded progressivism and “echoed the malleability of the Progressive educa-
tion era” as a whole (Pierson, 2015, p. 91).
Many of the Black teachers and administrators in Pierson’s study learned pro-
gressive techniques and pedagogies at predominately White institutions, then
molded this knowledge to the needs of their own students and communities. As
Pierson (2015) stated, “lab school teachers and principals were open to explora-
tion and self-evaluation, employing methods learned at nationally renowned insti-
tutions such as Teachers College, Columbia University; New York University,
Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago” (p. 96). This pattern is also
visible in Crocco’s (1997) pioneering work on scholar Marion Thompson Wright,
the first Black woman in the United States to earn a PhD in history and a faculty
member at Howard University. Crocco (1997) placed Wright as “part of an intel-
lectual milieu that included the new social history, social reconstructionism, and
the new social studies movement” (p. 16). Wright’s career included study at the
progressive bastion of Teachers College, Columbia University, where she was
exposed to the ideas of scholars such as Dewey, whose Schools of To-morrow is
cited in Wright’s dissertation on the history of Black education of New Jersey.
Somewhat surprisingly given the time, Wright was hardly alone as a Black educa-
tor studying at Teachers College. In 1938, for instance, Crocco (1997) noted that
“between two hundred and three hundred African Americans enrolled in Teachers
College, constituting almost 10 percent of the student body” (p. 15). After her
time at Columbia, Wright carried her progressive values into the academy through
her work in teacher education at Howard, her contributions to landmark Brown v
Board of Education case, and her continuing efforts to promote Black history and
culture at the primary and secondary levels.

475
 Black Pedagogical Progressives and Intercultural Education
Black progressive educators like Wright found new avenues for social critique
throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As discussed previously, this era saw the ascen-
dancy of intercultural/intergroup education, which was tied to pedagogical progres-
sivism through the involvement of the PEA, National Council for the Social Studies
(NCSS), National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), and other organiza-
tions in intercultural/intergroup work. Although the movement initially focused on
assimilationist projects of ameliorating prejudice against European immigrant com-
munities, intercultural/intergroup education also created broader opportunities for
Black pedagogical progressives to engage in anti-racist work in the schools. The
relationship between intercultural/intergroup education and education for Black his-
tory and culture has only recently begun to come into clearer view.
J. Banks (1992), for instance, argued that the intergroup education movement
and the early movement for teaching Black history and culture were clearly
related phenomena but found “little evidence that the movements were signifi-
cantly linked,” maintaining that they “had different origins, ideologies, and grew
out of two distinct traditions,” with the first rooted in the Black struggle for sur-
vival and racial pride and the other largely rooted in White education for prejudice
reduction and interracial harmony (p. 279). While J. Banks was correct in his
assessment of the origins and basic orientations of each movement, many times
these rigid ideological distinctions were less clear in action, as Black educators
recognized interculturalism as a potential vehicle to advance their own ideas.
C. M. Banks (2005), for instance, noted that although people of color operated
largely at the “periphery” of the intercultural education movement, there was still
evidence of Black involvement in intercultural/intergroup education (p. 121), and
provides an abbreviated but illuminating list of such projects:

For example Allison Davis (1945), an African American anthropologist at the University
of Chicago, wrote a chapter for the 16th yearbook of the National Council for Social
Studies. Alain Locke, another African scholar, co-edited a path-breaking book in
intergroup education entitled When People’s Meet. Harriet Rice, an African American
educator, coauthored, with Rachel Davis Du Bois, a pamphlet describing the Woodbury
Assembly Programs. (C. M. Banks, 2005, p. 121).

Despite this evidence, C. M. Banks (2005) concluded that the lack of Black
leadership within intercultural groups and the absence of significant collaboration
between Black and White scholarly associations meant that “with few exceptions,
Black scholarship was not influential in intergroup education” (p. 122). Still, even
if the promise of intercultural/intergroup education may have been blunted by its
failure to involve Black educators in more meaningful roles, Black voices cer-
tainly engaged with and influenced this movement.
As C. M. Banks references, the work of Alain Locke, the philosopher of the
Harlem Renaissance and first African American to be selected as a Rhodes
Scholar, shows the inroads between Black educational theorists made within the
intercultural education movement. In the mid-1930s Locke curated a series of
Bronze Booklets on African American culture, funded by the Carnegie Corporation

476
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
and the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE). More significantly,
Locke coedited an anthology for the PEA called When Peoples Meet, funded by
the General Education Board and endowed by John D. Rockefeller. “By pitching
his book as a resource on global intercultural problems for teachers,” Stewart
(2018) argued, “Locke persuaded the PEA to bring his knowledge of global prac-
tices about race to the White educators’ audience” (p. 790). Black educators work-
ing in variety of settings pursued similar agendas.
Drawing on Black scholarly journals and those produced by Black teacher
associations, Burkholder (2012) found that Black teachers during World War II
took up intercultural/intergroup education as a tool for social change. As
Burkholder (2012) wrote, “the war generated opportunities for black teachers to
discuss the defining principles of democracy, the civil rights of all citizens, and
the dangers of racial discrimination in a way that would have been impossible a
few years earlier” (p. 345). Committed to the hope symbolized in the emblem of
the “Double V” popularized in the Black press with the goal of victory over rac-
ism at home and fascism abroad, many Black teachers embraced intercultural/
intergroup education, using it to amplify their own message and address antiblack
racism and its manifestations in American life.
As Hines (2022) noted in his work on Black educator Madeline Morgan, whose
Supplementary Units for the Course of Instruction in Social Studies was the first
Black history curriculum adopted by the Chicago Public Schools when they
debuted in 1942, Black intercultural educators often combined a commitment to
racial justice with progressive faith in the ability of education to elicit social
change. Hines (2022) argued that Morgan’s educational philosophy was shaped
by her memberships in Black Greek letter sororities and churches, academic orga-
nizations such as NAACP, Urban League, and others. However, she combined
these influences with the pedagogical training she received at Northwestern
University and the University of Chicago, where she added a progressive approach
to educational philosophy and practice to her repertoire. Like Black teachers who
participated in the Secondary School Study, Morgan actively drew from, partici-
pated in, and contributed to progressive thought.
The previously discussed literature, most of which was authored since the turn
of the century, presents a robust and sophisticated body of evidence that Black
educators engaged with, argued with, and extended on the ideas that formed the
basis of pedagogical progressivism. Crucially, Black educators demanded that
this progressive rhetoric, with its anti-racist focus on education that extended
democracy, equality, and social and economic justice, also address and advance
racial equality, a topic that too few contemporary White educators and theorists
were ready to take up in meaningful ways.
Discussion
As is clear from the historiography presented here, pedagogical progressivism
encompassed a host of contradictory and conflicting impulses regarding race and
racism. Historians of the early and formative years of pedagogical progressivism
(1880–1916) have argued that the movement was characterized by “belief in
Western superiority” (Luckey, 2018, p. 800), “a deluge of racism” (Garrison,
2008, p. 137), and an “accommodationist” (Vaughan, 2018, p. 39) view toward

477
Hines and Fallace
racial segregation that was “patronizing . . . of African American ability”
(Margonis, 2009, p. 19). Even as there was a positive trend away from segrega-
tionist/assimilationist thinking toward anti-racist thinking during the 1920s–1940s,
White pedagogical progressives especially “continued to define minority indi-
viduals according to the supposed natural characteristics of their group”
(Burkholder, 2011, p. 6) and “perpetuated cultural stereotypes” (Selig, 2008,
p. 13). These realities have led many historians to conclude that pedagogical pro-
gressivism failed to evince any engagement with racial justice or seriously pursue
an anti-racist agenda.
This conclusion has been complicated, however, by a new literature that
expands the scope of pedagogical progressivism to focus on Black educators and
theorists who had hitherto been ignored or relegated to the margins. The results
are accounts of how Black educators engaged pedagogical progressivism and
turned its rhetoric toward anti-racist ends in unanticipated and profound ways,
from Cooper’s progressive framing of education as a “vehicle for social change”
(Johnson, 2009, p. 52) to the “common origins” and “common views” that con-
nected Du Bois to social reconstructionism (Watkins 2006, p. 222). This emerging
history of Black pedagogical progressivism is useful and necessary, not only
because it acknowledges the multiple connections and intersections between
Black education and pedagogical progressivism, but because it recognizes the
often-overlooked contributions of Black educators to the progressive movement
and vice versa.
At a moment when scholars are reexamining historical narratives at both the
K–12 and university level, this emerging history of Black pedagogical progressiv-
ism could help reshape how historians, teachers, and teacher educators discuss
one of the most influential periods in the history of education. In many contempo-
rary schools of education, courses on curriculum theory, history of education, and
educational foundations discuss the Progressive Era with little or no mention of
the presence or pedagogies of Black educators. Black voices are regularly ignored
or consigned to well-worn topics like the debates between Du Bois and
Washington. The history of Black engagement with pedagogical progressivism
opens new ground to discuss how Black educators contributed to and challenged
the dominate educational discourses of their day.
Historians have only begun to uncover the complicated ways in which Black
educators engaged pedagogical progressivism, and the possibilities for future
research are wide. For instance, intellectual historians might productively trace
how William James’s philosophy of pragmatism—which attacked epistemologies
based on fixed principles, ideas, and systems, and embraced an outlook based on
contingency, interaction, and growth— was taken up in different ways and to dif-
ferent ends by Black and White educators. Such an investigation would grapple
with how and why many White educators approached the open-ended nature of
the world, as James described it, as a threat and, as a result, sought to impose
control on a rapidly evolving social reality, while some White and many Black
educators saw instead an opportunity for expanding the promise of democracy
and empowering the dispossessed. Furthermore, historians can and should explore
the ways that educators from other minoritized groups such as Asian, Hispanic, or

478
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
Indigenous Americans may or may not have adopted the rhetoric and reforms of
pedagogical progressivism in pursuit of racial justice.
At the level of pedagogical practice there is still much to discover about how
Black teachers employed and extended on the principles of pedagogical progres-
sivism in their day-to-day teaching. A closely related question is the role that
Black women working as educators and librarians, archivists and administrators,
clubwomen, settlement house workers, and school founders took in spreading
progressive pedagogies and techniques. Pedagogical progressivism could be used
as a lens to explore the philosophies and practice of luminaries like Anna Julia
Cooper and Mary McCleod Bethune, as well as those of hundreds of their lesser-
known peers.
Finally, researchers might seek to understand where and when Black pedagogi-
cal progressives’ efforts to transform society through the schools met with success
and where they ultimately failed, with the goal of using these lessons to inform
policy making in the present. A greater appreciation of the barriers Black educators
faced as they applied the principles of pedagogical progressivism within systems
beset by White supremacy would lead to a more robust conception of similar cir-
cumstances faced by Black educators who look to transform society in the present.
Conclusion
Overall, the historiography of pedagogical progressivism and Black education
suggests that scholars should continue to wrestle with the ways in which peda-
gogical progressivism served both to reinforce existing currents of segregationist
and assimilationist thinking while simultaneously inspiring anti-racist experimen-
tation and action. Key to this task will be expanding the discussion of race and
pedagogical progressivism beyond accounts of White progressives to better map
Black pedagogical progressive traditions. To do so, the literature on pedagogical
progressivism and racial justice, regarding both White and Black educators, must
be addressed, engaged, and synthesized.

Note
1. Unless the terms appear within a quotation, we capitalized Black, White, and
Indigenous throughout our text because the terms refer to racial and ethnic identity. This is
in accordance with the latest preferences of APA style guidelines. See https://apastyle.apa.
org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/racial-ethnic-minorities.

References
*Alridge, D. P. (2007). Of Victorianism, civilizationism, and progressivism: The edu-
cational idea of Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1892–1940. History of
Education Quarterly, 47(4), 416–446.
*Alridge, D. P. (2008). The educational thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An intellectual
history. Teachers College Press.
Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South,1860–1935. University
of North Carolina Press.
*Angulo, A. J. (2012). Empire and education: A history of greed and goodwill from the
war of 1898 to the war on terror. Palgrave Macmillan.

479
Hines and Fallace
Baker, L. D. (1998). From savage to negro: Anthropology and the construction of race,
1896–1954. University of California Press.
*Banks, C. M. (2005). Improving multicultural education: Lessons from the intergroup
education movement. Teachers College Press.
*Banks, J. (1992). African American scholarship and the evolution of multicultural
education. The Journal of Negro Education, 61(3), 273–286.
Barkan, E. (1992). The retreat of scientific racism: Changing conceptions in Britain
and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge University Press.
*Bohan, C. H. (2007). “A rebellious Jersey girl”: Rachel Davis DuBois, intercultural
education pioneer. In S. Totten & J. Pedersen (Eds.), Addressing social issues in the
classroom and beyond: The pedagogical efforts of pioneers in the field (pp. 99–115).
Information Age.
*Bohan, C. H., Bradshaw, L. Y., & Morris, W. H. (2020). The mint julep consensus: An
analysis of late 19th century Southern and Northern textbooks and their impact on
the history curriculum. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 44(1), 139–149.
*Braster, S., & Del Mar del Pozo Andres, M. (2020). From savages to capitalists:
Progressive images of education in the UK and the USA. History of Education,
49(4), 571–595.
*Burkes, B. (1997). Unity and diversity through education: A comparison of the
thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey. The Journal of Thought, 32(1), 99–110.
*Burkholder, Z. (2010). From forced tolerance to forced busing: Wartime intercultural
education and the rise of Black educational activism in Boston. Harvard Educational
Review, 80(3), 293–326.
*Burkholder, Z. (2011). Color in the classroom: How American schools taught race
1900-1954. Oxford University Press.
*Burkholder, Z. (2012). Education for citizenship in a bi-racial civilization: Black
teachers and the social construction of race, 1929–1954. Journal of Social History,
46(2), 335–363.
*Burkholder, Z. (2017). “Integrated out of existence”: African American debates over
school integration versus separation at the Bordentown school in New Jersey, 1886-
1955. Journal of Social History, 51(1), 47–79.
Butchart, R. (2010). Schooling the freed people: Teaching, learning, and the struggle
for Black freedom 1861-1878. University of North Carolina Press.
Cohen, R. D., & Mohl, R. A. (1979). The paradox of progressive education: The Gary
Plan and urban schools. Kennikat Press.
Chapman, P. D. (1988). Schools as sorters: Lewis M. Terman, applied psychology, and
the intelligence testing movement, 1890-1930. New York University Press.
*Chennault, R. (2013). Pragmatism and progressivism in the educational thought and
practices of Booker T. Washington. Philosophical Studies in Education, 44(1),
121–131.
Church, R., & Sedlak, M. (1976). Education in the United States: An interpretive his-
tory. Free Press.
*Coloma, R. S. (2009). “Destiny has thrown the Negro and Filipino under the tutelage
of America”: Race and curriculum in the age of empire. Curriculum Inquiry, 39(4),
495–519.
Cremin, L. (1961). The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American edu-
cation 1876–1957. Alfred Knopf.
*Crocco, M. (1997). Mary Bitter Beard and Marion Thompson Wright: Shaping inclu-
sive social education. Theory and Research in Social Education, 25(1), 1–33.

480
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
*Dagbovie, P. (2007). The early Black history movement: Carter G. Woodson and
Lorenzo Johnston Greene. University of Chicago Press.
Degler, C. N. (1991). In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism
in American social thought. Oxford University Press.
Dennis, M. (1998). Schooling along the color line: Progressives and education of
Blacks in the New South. Journal of Negro Education, 67(2), 142–156.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of
education. Macmillan.
Dewey, J., & Dewey, E. (1915). Schools of to-morrow. E. P. Dutton & Co.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The talented tenth. In B. T. Washington (Ed.), The Negro
problem: A series of articles by representative American Negroes of today
(pp. 33–75). James Pott and Company.
*Eiesle, C. (1975). John Dewey and the immigrants. History of Education Quarterly,
15(1), 67–85.
*Eittreim, E. M. (2019). Teaching empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and US impe-
rial education, 1879-1918. University Press of Kansas.
*Eldridge, M. (2004). Dewey on race and social change. In B. E. Lawson & D. Koch
(Eds.), Pragmatism and the problem of race (pp. 11–21). Indiana University Press.
*Eldridge, M. (2010). Challenging speculation about Dewey’s racialized visions.
Educational Theory, 60(4), 503–517.
Erickson, A. T. (2016). Making the unequal metropolis: School desegregation and its
limits. University of Chicago Press.
*Fallace, T. (2008). John Dewey and the savage mind: Uniting anthropological, psy-
chological and pedagogical thought, 1894-1902. The Journal of the History of
Behavioral Sciences, 44(4), 335–349.
*Fallace, T. (2010). Was John Dewey ethnocentric? Reevaluating the philosopher’s
early views on culture and race. Educational Researcher, 39(6), 471–477.
*Fallace, T. (2011). Dewey and the dilemma of race: An intellectual history, 1895-1922.
Teachers College Press.
*Fallace, T. (2012). The racial and cultural assumptions of the early social studies
educators, 1901-1922. In C. Woyshner & C. H. Bohan (Eds.), Histories of social
studies and race, 1895-2000 (pp. 37–56). Palgrave Macmillan.
*Fallace, T. (2015a). Race and the origins of progressive education, 1880-1929.
Teachers College Press.
*Fallace, T. (2015b). Educators confront the “science” of racism, 1898-1925. Journal
of Curriculum Studies, 48(2), 252–270.
*Fallace, T. (2015c). The savage origins of child-centered education, 1871-1913.
American Educational Research Journal, 52(1), 73–103.
Fass, P. (1980). The IQ: A cultural and historical framework. American Journal of
Education, 88(4), 431–458.
*Fass, P. (1989). Outside in: Minorities and the transformation of American education.
Oxford University Press.
*Fasteland, M. (2019). Reading the antimodern way: G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence
and imperialist reading for White American boys. Journal of the History of Childhood
and Youth, 12(10), 7–25.
*Feinberg, W. (1975). Reason and rhetoric: The intellectual foundations of 20th cen-
tury liberal educational policy. John Riley and Sons.
*Garrison, J. (2008). A problematic alliance: Colonial anthropology, recapitulation
theory, and G. Stanley Hall’s program for the liberation of America’s youth.
American Educational History Journal, 35(1), 131–147.

481
Hines and Fallace
*Generals, D. (2000). Booker T. Washington and progressive education: An experi-
mentalist approach to curriculum development and reform. Journal of Negro
Education, 69(3), 215–234.
*Generals, D. (2013). Booker T. Washington, the architect of progressive education.
Strategic Book Publishing.
*Givens, J. R. (2019). “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the school-
room”: Carter G. Woodson and the occasion of Negro History Week, 1926–1950.
American Education Research Journal, 56(4), 1457–1494.
*Givens, J. R. (2021). Fugitive pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the art of Black
teaching. Harvard University Press.
*Goddard, C. (2019). Bordentown: Where Dewey’s “learning to earn” met Du Bosian
educational priorities: The unique legacy of a once thriving but largely forgotten
school for Black students. Education and Culture, 35(1), 49–70.
*Goodchild, L. F. (2012). G. Stanley Hall and American social Darwinist pedagogy:
His progressive educational ideas on gender and race. History of Education
Quarterly, 52(1), 62–98.
*Goodenow, R. (1975). The progressive educator, race and ethnicity in the Depression
years: An overview. History of Education Quarterly, 15(4), 365–394.
*Goodenow, R. (1978a). The progressive educator as radical or conservative: George
S. Counts and race. History of Education, 7(1), 45–57.
*Goodenow, R. (1978b). Paradox in progressive educational reform: The South and the
education of blacks in the Depression years. Phylon, 39(1), 49–65.
*Goodenow, R. (1981). The Southern progressive educator on race and pluralism: The
case of William Heard Kilpatrick. History of Education Quarterly, 21(2), 147–170.
Graham, P. (1967). Progressive education: From arcady to academe: A history of the
Progressive Education Association, 1919–1955. Teachers College Press.
*Grant, C., Brown, K., & Brown, A. (2016). Black intellectual thought in education:
The missing traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy
Locke. Routledge.
*Greene, M. (1975). Revisionism and its discontents. Insights of Members of the John
Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture, 12(1 & 2), 9–10.
Hall, G. S. (1904). Adolescence: Its psychology and relations to physiology, anthropol-
ogy, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. Appleton & Co.
*Halverson, A., & Mirel, J. (2013). Intercultural education in Detroit, 1943-1954.
Paedagogica Historica, 49(3), 361–381.
*Heffron, J. (2019). The rise of the south in American thought and education: The
Rockefeller years (1902-1917) and beyond. Peter Lang.
*Hines, M. (2022). A worthy piece of work: the untold story of Madeline Morgan and
the fight for Black history in schools. Beacon Press.
*Jacobs, M. (2013). White mother to a dark race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and
the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1800-1940.
University of Nebraska.
Jacobson, M. F. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the
alchemy of race. Harvard University Press.
*Johanek, M. C., & Puckett, J. (2007). Leonard Covello and the making of Benjamin
Franklin High School: Education as if citizenship mattered. Temple University
Press.
*Johnson, K. (2009). “In service for the common good”: Anna Julia Cooper and adult
education. African American Review, 43(1), 45–56.

482
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
*Johnson, L. D., & Pak, Y. K. (2019). Teaching for diversity: Intercultural and inter-
group education in the public schools, 1920s to 1970s. Review of Research in
Education, 43(1), 1–31.
*Jordan, M. L. R. (2017). Reclaiming African American students: Legacies, lessons,
and prescriptions: The Bordentown school model. iUniverse.
*Jernigan, J. A. (2014). Civics education policy in Puerto Rico, 1900-1904. American
Educational History, 41(1), 93–110.
*Karier, C. J. (1973). Liberal ideology and the quest for orderly change. In C. J. Karier,
P. Violas, & J. Spring (Eds.), Roots of crisis: American education in the twentieth
century (pp. 84–107). Rand McNally.
Karier, C. J. (1986). Scientists of the mind: Intellectual foundations of modern psychol-
ogy. University of Illinois Press.
Karier, C. J., Violas, P. C., & Spring, J. H. (1973). Roots of crisis: American education
in the 20th Century. Rand McNally.
Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas
in America. Nation Books.
Kevles, D. J. (1995). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity.
Harvard University Press.
*Kim, D. (2009). The unexamined frontier: Dewey, pragmatism, and American
enlarged. In C. Kautzer & E. Mendieta (Eds.), Pragmatism, nation and race:
Community in the age of empire (pp. 46–72). Indiana University Press.
*King, L., Davis, C., & Brown, A. (2012). African American history, race, and text-
books: An examination of the works of Harold O. Rugg and Carter G. Woodson.
Journal of Social Studies Research, 36(4), 359–386.
Kliebard, H. (1995). The struggle for the American curriculum 1893–1958 (2nd ed.).
Routledge.
*Kridel, C. (2018). Becoming an African American progressive educator: Narratives
from 1940s Black progressive high schools. Columbia Museum of Education.
Labaree, D. (2005). Progressivism, schools, and schools of education: An American
romance. Paedagogica Historica, 41(1), 275–288.
Lagemann, E. C. (1989). The plural worlds of educational research. History of
Education Quarterly, 29(2), 171–185.
*Lewis, T. (2014). Booker T. Washington’s audacious vocationalist philosophy. Oxford
Review of Education, 40(2), 189–205.
Lindsay, B., & Harris, J. J. (1977). Progressive education and the Black college.
Journal of Black Studies, 7(3), 341–357.
*Luckey, E. (2018). Kindergarten for civilisation: The intellectual origins of the Saint
Louis Public Kindergarten. Paedagogica Historica, 54(6), 800–821.
*Margonis, F. (2009). John Dewey’s racialized visions of the student and classroom
community. Educational Theory, 59(1), 17–39.
McKee, J. (1993). Sociology and the race problem: Failure of a perspective. University
of Illinois Press.
McNally, A. (2017). Empire imaginary: International understanding and progressive
education in the United States. Unpublished dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. Farrar, Straus,
& Giroux.
*Miller, H. (1974). The New Left and revisionist critique of John Dewey. Insights of
Members of the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture, 11(1 &
2), 12.

483
Hines and Fallace
Mirel, J. E. (2003). Old educational ideas, new American schools: Progressivism and
the rhetoric of educational revolution. Paedagogica Historica, 39(4), 477–497.
*Mirel, J. E. (2010). Patriotic pluralism: Americanization education and European
immigrants. Harvard University Press.
*Montalto, N. (1982). A history of the intercultural education movement, 1924-1941.
Garland.
*Montgomery, R. S. (2018). Celeste Parrish and educational reform in the progres-
sive-era South. Louisiana State University Press.
*Moreau, J. (2010). Schoolbook nation: Conflicts over American history textbooks
from the Civil War to the present. University of Michigan Press.
*Murray, A. D. (2018). The development of the alternative Black curriculum, 1890-1940:
Countering the master narrative. Springer.
*Neubert, S. (2010). Democracy and Education in the twenty-first century: Deweyan
pragmatism and the question of racism. Educational Theory, 60(4), 487–502.
Noble, D. W. (1958). The paradox of progressive thought. University of Minnesota
Press.
Nocera, A. (2018). Negotiating the aims of African American adult education: Race
and liberalism in the Harlem experiment, 1931–1935. History of Education
Quarterly, 58(1), 1–32.
*Olneck, M. (2008). American public schooling and European immigrants in early
twentieth century: A post-revisionist synthesis. In W. J. Reese & J. L. Rury (Eds.),
Rethinking the history of American education (pp. 103–141). Palgrave Macmillan.
*Paulet, A. (2007). To change the world: The use of American Indian education in the
Philippines. History of Education Quarterly, 47(2), 173–202.
*Perlstein, D. (1996). Community and democracy in American schools; Arthurdale and
the fate of progressive education. Teachers College Record, 97(4), 625–650.
*Perlstein, D. (2019). Schooling the New Negro: Progressive education, black moder-
nity, and the long Harlem Renaissance. In A. Erickson & E. Morrell (Eds.), Educating
Harlem: A century of schooling and resistance in a black community (pp. 31–55).
Columbia University Press.
*Pierson, S. (2015). New perspectives on progressive education: HBCU lab schools
during Jim Crow. In D. Danns, M. Purdy, & C. Span (Eds.), Using the past as pro-
logue: Contemporary perspectives on African American educational history
(pp. 87–117). Information Age Publishing.
*Platt, J. (2018). Race and the making of American political science. University of
Pennsylvania Press.
*Pratt, S. L. (2016). Geography, history, and the aims of education: The possibility
of multiculturalism in Democracy and Education. Educational Theory, 66(1–2),
199–210.
Ravitch, D. (2000). Left back: A century of battles over school reform. Touchtone.
Reese, W. J. (2001). The origins of progressive education. History of Education
Quarterly, 41(2), 1–24.
*Ritterhouse, J. (2006). Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White children in the
South learned race. University of North Carolina Press.
*Ross, D. (1972). G. Stanley Hall: The psychologist as prophet. University of Chicago
Press.
Rury, J. L., & Hill, S. A. (2015). The African American struggle for secondary school-
ing, 1940–1980: Closing the graduation gap. Teachers College Press.

484
 Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education
*Selden, S. (1991). Selective traditions and the science curriculum: Eugenics and the
biology textbook, 1914–1949. Science Education, 75(5), 493–512.
Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America.
Teachers College Press.
*Selig, D. (2008). Americans all: The cultural gifts movement. Harvard University
Press.
Semel, S. (2002). Progressive education. In D. Levinson, P. Cookson, & A. Sandovnik
(Eds.), Education and sociology: An encyclopedia (pp. 463–472). RoutledgeFalmer.
Semel, S., & Sadovnik, A. R. (Eds.). (1988). Schools of tomorrow, schools of today:
What happened to progressive education? Peter Lang.
Skiba, R. (2012). “As nature has formed them”: The history and current status of racial
difference research. Teachers College Record, 114(5), 1–49.
*Snyder, J. (2015). Progressive education in Black and White: Rereading Carter G.
Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro. History of Education Quarterly, 55(3),
273–293.
Span, C. (2009). From cotton field to schoolhouse: African American education in
Mississippi, 1862-1875. University of North Carolina Press.
*Spearman, M. (2012). Race in elementary geography textbooks: Examples from
South Carolina, 1890-1927. In C. Woyshner & C. H. Bohan (Eds.), Histories of
social studies and race, 1895-2000 (pp. 115–134). Palgrave Macmillan.
Spring, J. (1970). Education and progressivism. History of Education Quarterly, 10(1),
53–71.
*Stack, S. F. (2009). John Dewey and the question of race: The fight for Odell Walker.
Education and Culture, 25(1), 17–35.
*Stewert, J. (2018). The New Negro: The life of Alain Locke. Oxford University Press.
*Stratton, C. (2016). Education for empire: American schools, race, and the paths of
good citizenship. University of California Press.
Stocking, G. (1968). Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropol-
ogy. University of Chicago Press.
*Sullivan, S. (2003). (Re)construction zone. In W. Gavin (Ed.), In Dewey’s wake: The
unfinished work of pragmatic reconstruction (pp. 109–127). SUNY Press.
*Sullivan, S. (2019). Dewey and Du Bois on race and colonialism. In S. Fesmire (Ed.),
The Oxford handbook of Dewey (pp. 257–270). Oxford.
Thomas, W. B. (1982). Black intellectuals’ critique of early mental testing: A little
known saga of the 1920s. American Journal of Education, 90(3), 258–292.
*Threlkheld, M. (2017). Education for pax Americana: The limits of internationalism
in progressive era peace education. History of Education Quarterly, 57(4), 515–541.
Tyack, D. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Harvard
University Press.
Valencia, R. R. (2010). Genetic pathology model of deficit thinking. In R. R. Valencia
(Ed.), The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice (pp. 41–113).
Falmer Press.
*Vaughan, K. (2018). Progressive education and racial justice: Examining the work of
John Dewey. Education and Culture, 34(2), 39–68.
*Waddington, D. (2010). Afterwards. Educational Theory, 60(4), 519–520.
*Waite, C., & Crocco, M. (2001). Du Bois and the invisible talented tenth. In K. Weiler
(Ed.), Feminist ENGAGEMENTS, Reading, resisting, and revisioning male theorists
in education and cultural studies (pp. 33–45). Routledge.

485
Hines and Fallace
*Watkins, W. H. (2001). The white architects of black education: Ideology and power
in America, 1865-1954. Teachers College Press.
*Watkins, W. H. (2006). Social reconstruction in education: Searching out Black
voices. In K. Riley (Ed.), Social reconstruction, people, politics, perspectives (pp.
211–234). Information Age.
Weiler, K. (2006). The historiography of gender and progressive education in the
United States. Paedagogica Historica, 42(1–2), 161–176.
*Weiner, M. (2010). Power, protest, and public schools: Jewish and African American
struggles in New York City. Rutgers University Press.
*Williams, H. (2005). Self taught: African American education in slavery and freedom.
University of North Carolina Press.
*Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to divide the world: Education at empire’s end.
University of Minnesota Press.
*Willinsky, J. (2001). What is progressive about progressive education? In C. Dudley-
Marling & C. Edelsky (Eds.), The fate of progressive language: Policies and prac-
tices (pp. 80–100). National Council for Teachers of English.
*Winfield, A. G. (2007). Eugenics and education in America. Peter Lang.
*Woyshner, C. (2012). “No unfavorable comments from any quarter”: Teaching Black
history to White students in the American South, 1928-1943. Teachers College
Record, 114(10), 1–23.
*Woyshner, C. (2018). “I feel I am really pleading the cause of my own people”: US
Southern white students’ study of African-American history and culture in the 1930s
through Art and the senses. History of Education, 47(2), 190–208.
*Wraga, W. (2019). Clinical technique, tacit resistance: Progressive education
experimentation in the Jim Crow South. History of Education Quarterly, 59(2),
253–254.
*Wright, M. Y. (1941). The education of negroes in New Jersey. Teachers College
Press.
*Zerby, C. (1975). John Dewey and the Polish question: A response to the revisionist
historians. History of Education Quarterly, 15(1), 17–30.
*Zilversmit, A. (1993). Changing schools: Progressive education and practice, 1930–
1960. University of Chicago Press.
*Zimmerman, J. (2002). Whose America? Culture wars in the public schools. Harvard
University Press.

Authors
MICHAEL HINES is an assistant professor of education at Stanford University. He has
been published in History of Education Quarterly and The Journal of the History of
Childhood and Youth. He researches the curriculum history and the history of Black
education.
THOMAS FALLACE is professor of education at William Paterson University of New
Jersey. He is author of four books, most recently, In Shadow of Authoritarianism:
American Education in the Twentieth Century (Teachers College Press, 2018). He
researches curriculum history and the history of ideas in education.

486