Parsing American Education

Jarvis R. Givens’ American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation begins with a story.

On a late spring day in 1899, a woman named Susan McCoy traveled to “Old Goodland,” a school in the Choctaw nation of present-day Oklahoma, to claim her rights before the Dawes Commission — a group established by the federal government to dissolve tribal lands and allot them to individual members of the Five “Civilized” Tribes — Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole — who had been forced out of their native lands in the Southeast in the 1830s.

Although Susan, born to an enslaved Black woman, was considered “colored,” she knew her father had been Choctaw, as was her late husband, with whom she had five children. She saw herself as both.

At Goodland, there were two lines. One was for Black people who, in the complex race relations of Indian Territory, were Choctaw citizens; the other was for Choctaws. Although her Choctaw ancestry had been recorded on the tribal census, her appearance made her afraid to choose the Native line. Ultimately, her claim was denied.

Susan McCoy was Jarvis Givens’ third great-grandmother, although the Harvard professor and historian of American education did not know that until he noticed her name — and her “mark,” since she was illiterate — while doing research.

The story illustrates what Givens calls the “appropriation of the written word for the exploitation of some and the benefit of others.” The way Susan knew herself mattered less than the “world of paper,” a synecdoche for what he calls the grammar — the metaphorical syntax and semantics — of the U.S. educational system.

Typically, this “grammar” parses American educational history along racial lines. The best schools, designed for white students, excluded Black children — a story generally emphasized in histories of 20th-century school desegregation. Meanwhile, Native students were sent, often against their will, to special boarding schools.

Rather than focusing on exclusion, American Grammar interrogates how these racialized approaches were interconnected. The point was domination, Givens says, with Black and Native students dominated differently in a single system, or grammar. Specifically, Black people were denied education because it was feared they might use it to communicate and gain ideas about freedom. Before the Civil War, it was illegal to teach Black people — enslaved or free — to read and write; whites who did so faced heavy fines. Meanwhile, boarding schools were set up to teach members of different tribes to call themselves “Indian” and adopt white culture. The goal, Givens argues, was to “civilize” Native youth into giving up their tribal identities and, more importantly, their land — education being ultimately cheaper than war. Paradoxically, Black labor was often used to build Native schools.

Divided into four sections, American Grammar approaches its topic from multiple angles. The first begins in 1819, when the Virginia legislature passed anti-literacy laws aimed at enslaved people around the time Congress passed the “Civilization Fund Act” to fund Native schools. The Brainerd Mission School near Chattanooga, aimed at agricultural training and Christian conversion, was among the first.

The next two sections look closely at Native education, particularly the connection between the “Indian Wars” and boarding schools. The chapter “Boarding School Is Now the Ancestor” explores how Native students were given the names of their financial benefactors, with one Brainerd student named “Boston Recorder” after a newspaper that had donated funds. Students were taught to write “Indian” rather than their tribal identity. Yet some pushed back, gathering secretly to speak their own language.

The third section, “Black Education in Indian Territory,” explores how Black people enslaved by members of different tribes gained education. Here Givens focuses on differences among the “Five Tribes” — the word “Civilized” now often dropped as offensive — in their approach to their own new situation in what is now Oklahoma.

The last section of the book focuses on one person — Black educator Booker T. Washington — who was controversial for favoring vocational training rather than intellectual development.

Givens’ “grammar” metaphor is apt, for it challenges us to think about how language both constructs and obscures our understanding of lived experience. He is aware of the present political moment, when topics such as his are difficult. History can be a weapon, he says, but can also be used for the benefit of everyone. “Hopefully, this new origin story of U.S. education, as a more honest reckoning with race, power, and schooling in our society, might bolster efforts to reimagine what healing can look like in a world so deeply stratified by education.”