"Teach Your Children Well:" Imagining Interracial Harmony in a Post-Civil Rights Act United States, 1964-1978
Creators: name: Showalter, Margaret
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Race
subject: Childhood
subject: Education
subject: Multiculturalism
subject: Cultural Pluralism
subject: History (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: This dissertation bridges historical scholarship on postwar racialization and scholarship on the history of education to explore how and why childhood—particularly children’s media— became a primary site for liberal racial reform in the late 1960s and 1970s. With many Americans believing that the battle for racial equality had been won with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some reformers turned to what they considered the final hurdle: eliminating individual prejudice. Since the 1940s, educators and social scientists understood children as malleable subjects able to overcome prejudice. Midcentury reformers turned to the integrated school to alter racial attitudes, but when the momentum of integration stalled in the 1970s, antiprejudice efforts shifted to integrating children’s minds. This study draws on a variety of sources—from congressional hearings, teaching journals, institutional archives, and newspapers to television shows, ethnic studies lesson plans, and picture books—to demonstrate how children’s education was at the center of emerging racial ideologies in the post-civil rights era. Many prejudice-reduction efforts targeted children’s media. Invigorated by the midcentury faith in an activist government’s ability to address social problems, reformers used Great Society funding and contributions from liberal foundations to create and disseminate children’s television shows and books featuring interracial casts, Black history programming, curriculum reforms emphasizing cultural heritage, and textbooks featuring racially diverse illustrations. When these new products proved to be popular and profitable, private businesses followed suit. In a few short years, the material culture of American childhood had become integrated. Cultural texts depicted a country where civil rights dreams were fulfilled, showing images of neighborhoods where children of all races lived, learned, and played together. These materials modeled tolerant, vibrant communities and affirmed children of color who had rarely seen themselves in media. Despite these positive influences, these efforts were part of a liberal representational approach to structural problems that both failed to achieve its goals and—by furthering the narrative that the fight for civil rights was already won—supported an emerging politics of colorblindness. The interest prejudice-reduction programs for children extended beyond books and television. Boston’s Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program saw small-scale busing as both a means of school integration and as an on-the-ground attempt to influence children’s racial attitudes. While local Black parents supported METCO because it brought access to educational resources for their children, many suburban parents and officials understood it as an opportunity to introduce their white children to racial diversity. At the national level, the Ethnic Studies Heritage Act provided funding for schools and other groups to promote “ethnic heritage” for children of all racial backgrounds. While these efforts came out of a sincere desire to promote racial understanding, they shifted the focus away from the structural racial equality in the school system. . Children’s education and media helped shape a colorblind racial ideology that attributed the persistence of racial inequality to individual choices or personal failings rather than to policies that continued to privilege the white middle class. In the 1970s, many people deployed colorblindness to roll back civil rights reforms, including affirmative action, busing, and other race-conscious programs. Ultimately, the antiprejudice efforts described in this dissertation operated to unmoor race from historical inequality and prize the appearance of diversity over real equity.