An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Poverty As Social Injustice

When Spender wrote "An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum," the world was in the midst of major cultural and political change. In 1954, in the landmark case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the schools was unconstitutional. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus to a white passenger, inciting a bus boycott by the African American community that ultimately led to desegregation on buses in 1956. Beginning in 1960, student sit-ins and other non-violent protests became a popular and effective way of desegregating lunch counters, parks, swimming pools, libraries, and the like. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The year Spender's poem was published, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin. This legislation was unprecedented.

Behind these major historical events, countless lives were changed or ended during this tumultuous time. The late 1950s and early 1960s unearthed an America that had been kept hidden for centuries. Although slavery had been abolished, African Americans were dying every year at the hands of racists. Equality was a seemingly futile hope not only in America but also across the globe. Poverty was rampant among African Americans, especially in the South. They were often undereducated and perpetually oppressed by white southerners bent on thwarting and hampering African American progress.

When the injustice of society's oppression is revealed, it is usually forced to end. Sometimes, however, such injustice takes new forms. For example, after Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, the oppressive conditions of slavery were converted into racial segregation and the denial of civil rights to African Americans. American society in the South had exploited African Americans as slaves and reaped economic benefits; after Reconstruction, society subjugated them once more, this time as an underprivileged working class without civil or human rights. During the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement — led by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy — struggled to free African Americans from segregation and discrimination. With civil rights, though, came another type of oppression: widespread poverty that affected African Americans in particular. The new social imbalance was touted as a struggle between rich and poor rather than as a racial issue. The U.S. economy still had its underprivileged working class, and the oppressors were off the hook because the so-called oppressed now had civil and human rights. The oppressed people's low place in society was said to stem from their own lack of ambition or intelligence. Poverty as a tool for social subjugation became extremely powerful, far more so than blatant racism.

Spender recognized this power. As a professed Socialist during the 1920s and 1930s, he was well aware of the oppressive power of capital. Much of his work conveyed the heavy politically charged ideologies of Communist and Marxist thought. The shifting perception of oppression from the 1950s into the 1960s fueled Spender's political commentary. In "An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum," he focuses on the power that capitalism holds over the children in the slums, rather than on race. Although some readers may assume that the students in the poem are African American, Spender was far more concerned with the economic and social implications of the new face of oppression than he was with its possible racial implications. Spender was first and foremost a leftist and a Socialist. His writing was influenced by global injustice and during the years before he wrote "An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum," there was no greater social injustice than lack of civil rights in the United States. His exploration of the social change occurring in the 1950s and 1960s reflects the turbulence not only of this era in American history but also of this era in global history.