Hidden Curriculum: Institutionalizing Racism and Ableism in Southern Education, 1868–1920s

Beginning in 1868, a system of stand-alone schools and separate “departments” attached to state institutions emerged throughout the southern states to educate deaf and blind children of color. The first, as it was then known, was the North Carolina School for the Colored Deaf and Dumb in Raleigh, North Carolina. The last, not integrated until 1978, was the Louisiana School for the Colored Deaf and Blind. By the turn of the century, dozens of these doubly segregated spaces—often mixed campuses for deaf and blind students—stretched from Maryland to Florida and as far west as Texas. The confluence of race and disability in the lives of blind and deaf children of color in the Jim Crow South necessitated the creation of these educational spaces. Public schools opened by freedpeople, northern missionaries, and the Freedmen’s Bureau after emancipation excluded deaf and blind students, while state schools for the deaf and blind excluded Black students. Based on Freedmen’s Bureau and state government documents, school records, newspaper articles, and limited student reminiscences like Mary Herring Wright’s Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South, this paper seeks to explore some of the basic contours of these educational institutions. It asks: How did the educational experiences of blind and deaf students of color differ from those of their white counterparts? Were material and pedagogical resources distributed differently across southern schools for the blind and deaf and what effects did this have? What roles did teachers, administrators, and parents play? How did the shifting historical context—from Reconstruction through the end of the “nadir” period of African American history in the 1920s—impact these institutions? And, finally, how does a focus on these doubly segregated schools challenge or confirm dominant narratives in the histories of education, race, and disability?