Path to Integrated Public Schools in District of Columbia

My name is Katie Douthitt; I am currently a senior at George Mason University. 

I am taking the class The Digital Past, History 390. I am using Omeka to use an exhibit and simple pages, discussing my research question for the class. 

My research question is "How did African Americans that migrated from southern states to the District of Columbia affect the public school systems during the 20th century? What were the causes and effects of different legal debates on integration of African Americans into the public school system of the District of Columbia?"

The importance of this research question is to discover the impact that the migration of African Americans made not only on the District of Columbia but its public education system. This impact in the long run gave way to opening the doors to desegregating the public school system around the United States. The constant upkeep of individual and major lawsuits against the Board of Education caused the United States Congress to eventually allow desegregation in public schools, changing the course of education for the United States. 

 

Initially starting this project I started with research. I wasn't exactly sure what my final research question would be and how I wanted to phrase it. I knew that I wanted to focus on the public education system in the District of Columbia and how it transitioned from being segregated to desegregated, what were the causes and effects of this? I found most of my primary resources from JSTOR and Corbis (for images). The one part of the project that was continuous was the amount of research there was to do and how much information there is, if searched for carefully. I found it difficult to find various primary and secondary sources on the topic. The most challenging part was to have my research be primarily focused on the District of Columbia. I always ran in to information about desegregation/segregation spread across the United States. Narrowing it down to just the District of Columbia was one of my biggest challenges since the topic was specific. 

I took a lot from this research project. I knew it was unfair and even horrible that our government made segregation/slavery even legal but I didn't know to the extent of how bad it truly was. I found it very interesting to read about all of the different cases that went on in order for desegregation of public schools to become legalized.