Eleazer, America's Tenth Man: A Brief Survey of the Negro's Part in American History (Atlanta: . Conference on Education and Race Relations in Box 3 of RBE Papers, VUSC. From these records, an understanding of CIC's educational initiatives to improve race relations But that promoting improved race relations was only one of the CIC's goals, and its activities emphasized at least as much the need to combat the racially discriminatory practices that still existed in the South.
McAlister's last name was misspelled as "McAllister" on the cover of the Race Relations Course. An examination of the records of the Arkansas State Teachers College program in race relations for the winter of 1932 may shed interesting light on how the CIC's educational initiatives were implemented. One is that professors' reports on the results of their work on race relations are often disappointingly vague.
Johnson's The Negro in American Civilization (1930) and historian and critic Benjamin Brawley's A Social History of the American Negro (1921). And two books recommended by the committee, Jerome Dowd's The Negro in American Life (1926) and sociologist Edward B. Johnson.123 Perhaps most interestingly, the professor of Race Relations included among his reference books not only W.E.B.
The Poetry Unit reported that the unit's achievements included children's recognition of Black poets. This overview was probably written by Maude Carmichael, the professor of the class (who attended the second Peabody conference in 1932, but not the 1931 conference that would have preceded her teaching in this course). The two-week unit on race relations in the Teachers College Social Problems course also highlighted many of the points that the CIC considered important.
Hess, the head of the Teachers College Music Department, went over to the black elementary school to form a choir. The most revealing indication of the influence CIC ideas had on this unit was the heavy emphasis placed on reading population problems in the South. A particularly interesting exercise done by some of the students in the Modern Problems classes (and probably then shared with the rest of their class) was intended to drive home this point.
The program chair concluded, “I think there is not one of the students who does not have a much broader view of race relations as it relates to the Negro. The program chair submitted the paragraphs of seven of the club's 45 students to the CIC. Many of the student essays submitted to the competition were not, in fact, about history.
Eleazer], College Courses in Race Relations: An Attempt to Meet the Challenge of the Southern Situation (Atlanta: Conference on Education and Race Relations, 1939).
74 Assessment
Education led to immediate action to rectify the complaints, but Eleazer believed this was not the end of the story. Such a position may sound somewhat naive, but one point that many skeptics of the CIC fail to appreciate is how potentially dangerous opposition to the status quo was in the South during this period. After all, Myrdal was right that the Commission's work was radical for the South of the time.
But the very same African-American researchers Selig cites who want racial education to address inequality and discrimination are many of the same ones who wrote Eleazer praising CIC's efforts. To your careful and skillful efforts I attribute the effectiveness of the great training program. Selig cites Bond, who wrote seven years earlier, doubting the value of the CIC's work and expressing skepticism about the likely effectiveness of state-level curriculum revision because.
Johnson was at the time director of the Department of Social Sciences at Fisk University. To me it reads more like a description of what others think than of his own opinion of the organization. Gilliard, who wrote within a few years of the first printing of the pamphlet, “I hope you will continue to publish.
Eleazer responded to an inquiry by a representative of the Philadelphia-based Emergency Peace Campaign as to whether "the Peace Campaign could do anything about Negro suffrage in the South" by explaining that a problem existed but recommending that the Peace Campaign make no effort in this area . But a more careful reading of the letter indicates that Eleazer's concerns were grounded in his realistic assessment of how and whether change can happen in the South. Throughout his preparation of the CIC's teaching materials, Eleazer aimed for judicious use of the latest scientific and social science evidence, emphasizing the findings that advanced his case but ignoring the facts he did not want to see raised.
All of these efforts were in service of Eleazer's goals, which also reflected those of the CIC from at least the late 1930s, namely to inform students about the problems in Southern race relations in order to gain their support for expanded efforts. 235 For a discussion of the substantial transformation in American and Southern society resulting from World War II, see Michael J. Looking back from today, the reach of the CIC's educational programs remains impressive, as does the extent to which the Commission strove to to bring about a substantial transformation in Southern racial attitudes using pedagogical techniques intended to be long lasting.
