Education for citizenship: African-Americans and Native Americans in Kansas, 1865--1935

Rooted in race and gender fields, "Education for Citizenship: African Americans and Native Americans in Kansas, 1865--1935" is a comparative study of segregated education and the development of American identities. I examine Native American and African American missionary, government, and public schools between 1865 and 1935 in order to uncover the complicated motivations of white reformers and the varied levels of agency asserted by their students in Kansas and across the nation. I argue that although reformers expected both groups of children to learn how to "become American," what it meant to become American meant different things depending on a student's race and gender. While Native Americans were to use their educations to assimilate, even "disappear," into white society, African Americans were to use their educations to learn how to be hard workers who maintained a distinct position on the margins of white society.; In the second section of this project, I argue that Native Americans and African Americans had distinct ways of asserting themselves in response to the efforts of reformers. The reactions of Native American students ranged from accommodation to outright rebellion. While Native American students fended for themselves as individuals, African American adults organized themselves in groups to call for improved educational opportunities and integration into white schools for their children.; In the last part of the dissertation, I argue that when Native Americans and African Americans who had been educated at such segregated schools became teachers themselves, they took creative and sometimes covert measures to insert race pride and race/ethnic studies into their curricular and extracurricular activities. African American teachers joined other leaders in the fight for integration that culminated in the 1954 United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Native American teachers adopted bicultural identities and taught their students to negotiate within white society while reclaiming the very traditions, culture, and pan-Indian identities that their teachers had tried to destroy in the late nineteenth century.