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In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.
According to urban legend in the 1930s, a white teacher walked into a classroom in a large northern city where most of the students were black and said, "Boys, let me tell you the story of a real boy." As quick as a wink, one little black boy stood up and said, "Miss, if it's about a black boy, all right, but if it's about a white boy, I don't want to hear it, because I can read about them any time in my books" (Crosson, 1933, p. 253).
In 1933, one of Boston's few black teachers, Wilhelmina Crosson, related this tale to readers of the Elementary English Review. Crosson wanted to convince her colleagues to include literature by and about African Americans in their classes, a strategy she believed would improve the academic achievement of black students and promote tolerance of black students by their white peers. Crosson used this particular story to drive home her point that black children learned better if they studied African American achievements in school. Explaining the boy's comments, she elaborated:
What he wanted was to hear something about the achievements of his own race. Evidently, he had been given a knowledge of the other fellow's achievements and progress and when he tried to emulate them he found it was like the slipper which Cinderella's...