When schools reopen in person, some for the first time since March 2020, will families of color want to send their children back? During the coronavirus pandemic, many parents of color opted out of public schools altogether. The number of Black parents who home-school, for example, shot up in 2020 from 3.3 percent to 16.1 percent, the highest of any demographic group.

And many Black parents plan to keep their children at home this fall, not only to keep them safe from the coronavirus, but because staying home offers a way to navigate the systemic racism in schools that is traumatic and may impede their children’s learning.

This isn’t the first time Black parents have opted to exit the existing school system rather than accept an inadequate education. Black parents faced similar questions two centuries ago — and their answers led to the creation of urban public-school systems in the United States. Today once again, we have a rare chance to step back and look at schooling as it could be, not only as it has been.

In the late 18th- and early-19th centuries, cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York had a patchwork of school options. Most schools ran on tuition dollars, with families paying directly for the kind of schools they wanted. For poorer White families and for all non-White children, there were few options. Churches ran tuition-free schools for some children, but there were not nearly enough of these schools and they tended only to teach children of their own denominations. Children with no church connections were out of luck.

White elites saw this as problematic because they feared that illiterate children would grow into criminal adults. So they founded philanthropic organizations to provide segregated, tuition-free schools for Black families. In New York, the Manumission Society opened its first free school for Black children in 1787. In 1799, elite Philadelphians organized the “Philadelphia Society for the Free Instruction of Indigent Boys.”

Pennsylvania’s state government recognized the need for tuition-free education for low-income families, organizing its first “Public School” district for Philadelphia in 1818. As in New York, Philadelphia’s schools expressly mandated that African American children be included in the new tuition-free schools, though in Philadelphia it took four years for city leaders to open a segregated school for Black children.

This first generation of free schools was not popular. To be sure, Black parents wanted schools for their children. They often made great sacrifices to fund and maintain schools of their own. But they did not like the specific kind of school provided by White-run charity organizations, and they let the leaders of those schools know it.