title: Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954
author: Zoe Burkholder
description: <br />"What makes this study valuable is its application of that [whiteness studies] literature to the history of progressive education, to the largely neglected history of the intercultural education movement, and, to the extent possible given the sources available, to how evolving academic ideas find their ways into actual public school classrooms. This is a solid intellectual history that should attract readers well beyond historians of education."--<em>American Historical Review</em>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  ![cover](resources/_cover_.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
  # The Bouquet
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Charles W. Chesnutt
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
  MARY MYROVER's friends were somewhat surprised when she began to teach a
  colored school. Miss
  
  
  Myrover's friends are mentioned here, because nowhere more than in a Southern
  town is public opinion a force
  
  
  which cannot be lightly contravened. Public opinion, however, did not oppose
  Miss Myrover's teaching colored
  
  
  children; in fact, all the colored public schools in town -- and there were
  several -- were taught by white
  
  
  teachers, and had been so taught since the state had undertaken to provide
  free public instruction for all
  
  
  children within its boundaries. Previous to that time there had been a
  Freedman's Bureau school and a
  
  
  Presbyterian missionary school, but these had been withdrawn when the need for
  them became less pressing.
  
  
  The colored people of the town had been for some time agitating their rig