Abstract
Discussions of Black history and school desegregation in many K-12 schools have been narrowed to a few heroic figures and moments. Historic representations are currently challenged by a nationwide movement to uphold White supremacy and deny the violent history of racism in the US. The revisionist claims are challenged in this qualitative narrative research project that presents stories gathered from 10 Black educators in Augusta, Georgia, who recount their stories of desegregating schools and institutions as students or educators. This oral history narrative project imagines these stories as the basis for engaging K-12 teachers and students in creating new curricula.
Introduction
Although African American history is part of the K-12 curriculum, the complexity and diversity in the experiences of African-descended people in the United States is rarely represented (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). Recognizing all of African Americans’ experiences in the US challenges the popular understanding of America, its place in the world, and its moral standing, and thus this full description is generally not welcomed (Hannah-Jones, 2019). The current political organizing around teaching “Critical Race Theory” in K-12 educational settings and the bogeyman that it represents for politicians and fearmongerers around the country demonstrates that the sanitized version of US history and the defense of white supremacy are at stake (Stovall, 2018). Teachers need to be equipped with a rich understanding of the circumstances that African Americans have endured, the economic and political as well as individual, and deliberate forces that created those circumstances, and the triumphs and achievements of African American communities despite the challenges (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). One way to disrupt popular discourses that claim the moral authority of the US and uphold white supremacy is to teach local stories that enhance national examples of resistance, struggle, and achievement in Black communities. We use the words African American and Black interchangeably in this paper to describe people and community in Augusta, Georgia, where people self-identify as African American and Black, and are multigeneration residents of the US. We also follow the authors when referencing research literature as they have used these terms. The experiences of those in the community who personally advocated for change in order to create access and greater justice remind teachers and their students that we are all responsible for creating the communities we want to live in.
The stories presented in this paper are from an oral history project conducted in Augusta, Georgia. The South is often described as monolithic (Williamson, 1984), behind the times, conservative, racist (Griffin & Doyle, 1995), and is considered an outlier among US regions. These stereotypically Southern ideologies, however, can be found in many regions of the US, and have recently found political traction in national elections; at the same time the racial and educational ideologies in the South are more complex than preservice teachers often are able to express (Evans-Winters & Twyman Hoff, 2011; Au, et al., 2016.
The stories told in this oral history research project highlight the brave acts of educators and students in many settings: teachers who took the first steps to create meaningful educational experiences for their newly desegregated classrooms of students, community educational efforts in which media distortions and omissions were countered through forms of public pedagogy, and student responses to experiences of new and hostile school environments. In addition, they remind us of the costs of these efforts, as well as the gains achieved. They also remind us of the slippery forms of backlash that have sprung up since the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision (Brown, 1954), and the insidious ways that discrimination continues to assert itself (Mattia, 2021). These stories seem relevant and important for us, as teacher educators in Augusta, Georgia, as we struggle to engage students in conversations that counter discourses that uphold white supremacy, or the “majoritarian stories” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) of this place. These discourses can be found in the language of our students and in the local media presentations on questions regarding school curricula and student activism. “Everyday schooling in America rests deeply on this history [of white coloniality], which positions Eurocentric values and the impetus to control and erase BIPOC at the center of what we view as standard, decent, and desirable for intellectual acuity” (Lyiscott et al., 2020, p. 368). Because of the resurgence and political support of the erasure of Blackness in our national discourse on race and education, it is ever more imperative to highlight history that complicates a simple narrative about the Black experience in the US or the history of this region.
Many texts in the fields of curriculum studies and foundations of education focus on educational contexts that are not in the South or that do not have the same specific history that this region does. It is important to share the specific history of the struggle for educational access with our students, who, although many of them grew up here, do not know or have not been taught in schools about this history either. Some of our students may have been taught that the counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) about racist experiences in schools and other social settings are not “academic knowledge” (Banks, 1993; Yosso, 2005) and therefore should not be discussed in educational settings. Counterstories are described as “both a method of telling the story of experiences that have not been told (i.e., those on the margins of society) and as a tool for analyzing and challenging the stories of those in power and whose story is a natural part of the dominant discourse - the majoritarian story” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 156). The stories in the oral history narratives of the participants in this research challenge the stories that define academic knowledge and history of education in the CSRA and Augusta, Georgia. As teachers in this region, they, and we, need to know how to contest color-evasiveness (Annamma, et al., 2017), and “acknowledge race-related patterns in achievement and the potential role of racism in the underachievement of students of color” (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006, p. 40). We use the term color-evasiveness here, although previously the field of education has used the term colorblindness, and that term will appear in some of the quotes we present below in reviewing the literature. Annamma et al. (2017) have taught us that “the inherent ableism in this term equates blindness with ignorance” (p. 154), and the use of ableist language “perpetuates non-recognition [that] allows for the subordination of dis/abled people and misses the intersections between being socially constructed racially as the other and dis/abled” (ibid., p. 154). In transitioning our language to use the term color-evasiveness, we resist reiterating the prejudice that views disabilities as deficits. We and many of our students need to learn to tell the stories that counteract stereotypic images that have been used to maintain power over oppressed groups (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). They, and we, need access to the stories of the specific ways that African Americans in Augusta, Georgia, have fought for and won access to education over centuries, in order to be supporters of parents and students and teachers still engaged in that fight.
Of course, such knowledge and engagement in struggles is not, and should not be, confined to Augusta, Georgia alone, nor merely to the African American community, as it is of great significance for us all; for the entire humanity is experiencing issues relevant to unfairness, inequity and injustice, which are manifested and expressed in various ways. The stories told by African Americans in Augusta, Georgia, as well as other similar stories may become a point of reference for all forms of injustice that challenge human dignity both of individuals and groups of people.
Talking about Race in Education
Our theoretical orientations direct us to examine the historical conditions that led to the specific present that we encounter. In this present, many schools with predominantly African American students struggle on state measures of success (such as standardized testing) compared to schools with a more racially mixed student population, or a predominantly White student body (Logan & Burdick-Will, 2017). Regardless of the racial makeup of the student population, discipline statistics reflect the reality that Black students are punished more than White students (Nowicki, 2018; Krueger-Henney, 2019), and more often placed in special education (Annamma & Handy, 2019). Black students often have lower graduation rates, even in many schools with high graduation rates (McFarland & Hussar, 2019). Antiblackness, defined by Dumas (2016) as “cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness” (p. 12), appears in the curriculum as well as in the policies and pedagogies (Johnson, et al., 2017). Currently in our state, teachers and teacher educators are prohibited from discussing race, unequal social outcomes for different races, or racism in classrooms under legislation called the Protect Students First Act (GA HB1084, 2022). Given this context, it becomes even more imperative that educators are prepared to challenge assumptions that promote antiblack ideologies about communities and schools and offer teachers and students ways to examine the structural forces that create differing and inequitable school outcomes.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a framework developed in critical legal studies and used in education and other fields to examine race as a contributing factor to differing outcomes between social groups (Ledesma & Calderón, 2015). CRT asserts that race impacts social and institutional structures in the US. Among the tenets of CRT are beliefs that legal changes are unable to alleviate some of the disparities in treatment and outcomes between different racialized groups in the US (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006). Although legal changes are a first step in changing the treatment of Black students and other racially minoritized groups, the implicit biases in interpersonal interactions, as well as institutionally embedded forms of discrimination cannot be fully ameliorated by changed laws or court cases (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Leonardo & Boas, 2013). In addition, calls for equal opportunities fail to address historical inequities that mean that different communities have different access to dominant cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2000) or cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to draw on to create material and educational opportunities.
“Thus, one of the commonalities between CRT in law and education is a critique both of the inequities of the status quo and of a liberal ideology that fails to advance the cause of justice for people of color” (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006, p. 41). CRT has long advocated that education is a fundamental right (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Theorizing in CRT in education builds on the literature of multicultural education which claimed that “racially diverse students enter schools where their experiences, histories, and perspectives are largely excluded from school curriculum and learning opportunities” (Howard & Navarro, 2016, p. 256). Justice might be viewed as framing educational differences between well-resourced and underserved communities as an education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006), for example, rather than as a deficit within the underresourced community. “Critical race pedagogical practices…if used appropriately have the potential to empower students of color while dismantling notions of colorblindness, meritocracy, deficit thinking, linguicism, and other forms of subordination” (Ledesma & Calderón, 2015). Following the lead of Critical Race Theorists in education, in the findings in this paper we read the oral history narratives in this project to understand the ways that color-evasiveness, meritocracy, and deficit thinking have interrupted the trajectory toward equity in educational access and opportunities by privileging the concerns of White students. We highlight the function of a system of privileging White students in the educational systems in Augusta, Georgia, and the surrounding communities, even when the political and institutional discourse claims to support the advancement of students of color. A critical piece of this work is hearing the voices of students and teachers of color and recording their experiences within and in relation to powerful institutions and actors, in order to challenge the narratives that justify maintaining inequalities.
To that end, guiding principles in this research project include presenting the narratives of participating educators and leaders in public exhibitions and for use in classrooms, and adding to the academic conversation theorizing the need to diversify the presentation of African American history in curricula (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). There is value in hearing these experiences directly from those who experienced these changes in schools in Augusta and the “common experience of racism that structures the stories of people of color” (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006, p. 11, citing Delgado, 1990) that can help local educators disrupt the replication of these schooling experiences.
Context of the Study
The population of Augusta at the time of the interviews was 196,939 (2018). The demographic breakdown of Augusta in 2017–2018 was 56.7% Black or African American, 37.5% White, 0.2% Native American, 1.8% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 1.3% Other race, and 2.5% Two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 4.8% of the population (United States Census Bureau, 2018).
Augusta and its surrounding counties relied on the labor of enslaved African Americans for their economic development and growth during the Antebellum period, and many were centers of resistance to the ending of slavery and the acceptance of communities of Black people able to purchase their own land and develop their own wealth and institutions (Harris, 1998). Despite the overt segregationist and economic deprivation efforts and violence on behalf of White landowners, business owners, and civil and criminal court officials, Black leaders and communities created a deep and rich culture within this area. In Augusta, one historically Black neighborhood is now known as the Golden Blocks, and has been written about as The Terri (Dittmer, 1977; Harvey, 1973). Many national figures have been associated with Augusta, including Lucy Craft Laney, educational leader; Frank Yerby, author (Hodge & Jackson, 2010; McCoy, 1984); and James Brown, Butterfly McQueen, and Jessye Norman, performers (Mack, 2015; Rhodes, 2014).
Black educational leadership advocated for schooling options for Black students in Augusta, including Ware High School, a public high school for African American students which offered classes between 1880 and 1897 (Cumming, 1899; McCoy, 1984), and the Haines Institute, founded by Lucy Craft Laney, that taught academic and industrial lessons during the late 1800s and into the early 1900s (Dittmer, 1977; McCoy, 1984). By 20 years after the end of the Civil War, White and Black Methodist Church leaders had come together to form Paine College (History of Paine, n. d; McCoy, 1984), to serve the higher education needs of Black students. Under segregation, the African American population in Augusta developed prosperity and social, economic, religious, and educational institutions, and young people growing up within Augusta’s Black neighborhoods by the 1950s and 1960s felt insulated from the harshness of daily overt racism and discrimination (McCoy, 1984).
During the 1950s and 60s, as the Civil Rights Movement grew across the US and participants experienced violence directed at them in efforts to desegregate public facilities, students at Paine College and in Augusta’s insulated neighborhoods began to participate in actions to challenge the segregation of their own city and public institutions (Bostick, 2013). Desegregation of schools in Augusta, Georgia, and the CSRA required legal intervention, and took several years after the courts required it. Cummings (1899) in Augusta came 3 years after Plessy (1896) and was one of the desegregation suits that preceded Brown v. Board of Education and the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in the US (Dittmer, 1977). In the 1970s as the schools desegregated, Black students and teachers, as well as other community members, protested ongoing violence against Black people, but in many cases security forces and law enforcement were employed to maintain segregated spaces (Chandler, 2014; Terrell & Terrell, 1977).
This is the backdrop for education desegregation in the Augusta schools. The public schools in Augusta officially desegregated in 1967 (Acree, 1968) although the desegregation process was not completed until 1974 (Charles Jackson, personal communication). The beginning of desegregation in Augusta started 13 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision and 3 years after the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Because of existing and growing residential segregation, however, desegregation never meant that all students attended schools with those who are different races from themselves (Arnett, 2019).
In the present moment, the primarily African American (74%) city school district in Augusta (Governor’s Office of School Achievement, 2022) has been threatened with state takeover and decried as failing by some parents, teachers, administrators, and students (King, 2018). However, educational disparities in the state exist within this district, in which some schools achieve high test outcomes and offer specialized programming (U.S. News, 2022; Governor’s Office of School Achievement, 2022) and others struggle with attendance and employing certified teachers (Governor’s Office of School Achievement, 2022). In addition to the intradistrict disparities, funding and resource differences between this city district and its suburban neighbors is also stark. In the largest suburban district, some parents are able to donate funds to their child’s school in order to purchase new sports uniforms and band equipment (Carraway, 2017) and teacher starting pay is about $3000 more than in the city district (Bradshaw & Hannah, 2022; Columbia County School District, 2022).
Methodology
The Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) Education Oral History Project documents educational experiences in Augusta and the surrounding communities through times of change. Embarking on a qualitative narrative inquiry, we present counterstories as a way of understanding how the past has shaped the present moment in education. We used oral history to record lived experiences and personal reflections of events and their causes and effects (Creswell, 2012; Plummer, 1983) in the form of testimonios (Beverly, 2005) and personal stories. Some of these were chronologically connected (Czarniawska, 2004) while others departed from this structure as participants guided the direction of their oral history recounting in relation to their unfolding purposes. Told by a witness or protagonist, oral histories involve narrations of socially significant experiences, and often represent others who have lived through similar situations but rarely express them in writing (Zimmerman, 2004). We asked a broad question of a wide variety of participants, in order to understand the experiences of education in the CSRA through a historical lens, and to hear how participants identified moments of importance or change. We asked participants to describe their identities and roles in education for us and then asked an open-ended question, such as “What are some of the things that have happened or are happening in the area that are of historical and educational importance? And how have your efforts contributed to the education of people?”
Participants
The project involved interviewing community members that have contributed to educational institutions and aspirations in this small city. We sought stories from people who knew the historical significance of places, buildings, peoples, and events in the Augusta area. Beginning in spring 2016, 23 people were interviewed. They were identified using snowball sampling and participant self-identification. Starting with colleagues teaching at the university, we asked to hear more detailed recollections of short, interesting anecdotes that we had heard about our local schools and educational leaders. When we asked, we found that most of these stories are not officially recorded in textbooks and are not taught in local history courses. These initial participants noted our interest in the stories and suggested others who they knew had interesting experiences to share. Suggestions pointed us to previous coworkers, notable members of the community from past eras, and people who were known to hold institutional memory for local institutions. Twelve men and 11 women, 10 of whom identified as African American and 10 of whom identified as White, as well as three people who are immigrant adult arrivals to this country participated. All worked in some capacity in education, including art museums, as working artists, and in religious settings. Each of the three researchers conducted face-to-face interviews, each roughly 1 hour or more in duration. Stories narrated by these 23 participants were video- and audio-recorded and have been transcribed and archived. Because we initially sought stories of education and educational change in the CSRA, we did not limit participation to Black educators. However, as we began discussing the interviews we realized that the stories of desegregation were “hidden histories,” (Graham, 2022), those stories that are known within families or among friends, but not officially recorded as the history of the place or taught within schools. The stories selected for this analysis represent those that to the researchers demonstrated a robust rebuttal to the taken-for-granted narratives of educational deficits and failures attributed to Black neighborhoods and families (Au, et al., 2016) in Augusta.
The stories of the 10 who identified as African American contributed to the findings presented in this paper, six women and four men. These educators have mostly worked in or attended school during the 1960s and 1970s when the first integration efforts in Augusta were underway. They were in their 50s to early 80s at the time of the interviews. They had first-hand knowledge of the social and political efforts made to address segregation and racism in schools of the Civil Rights era, both the successes and the failures. While we have analyzed the corpus of stories that we collected in other publications, as we read and wrote about the complexity of the stories told about education of African Americans in the CSRA prior to and during desegregation, we decided we needed to use a Critical Race Theory-informed analytic lens that would allow us to develop an analysis around the counterstories participants were telling (Bhattacharya, 2017). As we engaged with CRT and counterstories we made the analytic decision to let the stories of the African American participants stand alone in this paper.
Participants talked about their life experiences, education, and activism in various communities, in one- to two-hour interviews that were audio and video recorded. Educators represented here have worked in museums, as nurses, as teachers, as professors, and as journalists. The intersections of professional roles in medicine, business, journalism, or military service and their community role as an educator within religious or cultural institutional settings provide depth to their stories. Drawing from curriculum theory (Pinar et al., 1995), we understand education as all kinds of experiences, events, and circumstances that allow people to see things differently, as they gain new perspectives. It is the transformation of experiences in ways that enable new perspectives and insights (see Jarvis, 2009; Illeris, 2009). Such transformation and reorganization of experiences (Dewey, 1916) shape the way we understand education. Through their autobiographical narratives we get glimpses of the importance of things, opinions, views, and happenings in the Augusta area, as well as how education and society influenced each other.
Analysis
Analysis was conducted using narrative readings of the data and writing around ideas that recurred in the oral history narratives of the participants (Freeman, 2017). Following line-by-line coding in which significant stories about African American schools in the CSRA caught the attention of the researchers, we gathered to examine these narratives about Black communities advocating for education more thoroughly. Although we didn’t go in looking for specific narratives, many stories around experiences of segregation, desegregation and their aftermath caught our attention, especially in national context involving the rise of white supremacy. Each of the researchers did her own reading and writing and we gathered to compare our analytic notes. We drafted narratives about students’ experiences in educational settings when segregated learning spaces were integrated, and stories of teachers creating innovative classroom lessons in response to community conflict over racial integration. An interview with Dr Mallory Mallender, retired professor at Paine College and historian, as well as a journalist during the 1960s and 70s, prompted us to look at missing narratives about struggle to integrate institutions in the CSRA. Our readings and meetings led us to see the importance of the complexities of the stories of desegregation in the narratives, and to hear the ways our participants were telling us that the usual histories told of the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the desegregation of schools, and the history of education in the Black community in the CSRA, left out many of the nuances and losses experienced by African American students and communities. In a second round of reading and writing, we engaged Critical Race Theory in order to better understand and make sense of our interpretations as we focused on the eras after the Civil War and desegregation in the schools of the CSRA and integration of classrooms for both students and teachers, and the political and disciplinary repercussions in the community (Bhattacharya, 2017). The interview recordings and transcripts, readers theater community performance, and a student-created short documentary film are publicly available on a university Web site (https://www.augusta.edu/education/teaching-leading/oral-history-project/index.php). We made the findings available as curricular material in public performances of the readers theater and the documentary film during the 2018–2019 academic year.
Researcher Positionality
The three authors are outsiders to this place. We did not grow up in Georgia, and only one of us grew up in the South. One of us grew up outside of the US. We all are White women. None of us arrived with the specific historical knowledge that our participants have shared with us, nor have we read about it anywhere since the beginning of this project. This positionality limits our understandings of racialized experiences and of racism, and, although we had heard anecdotes that made us curious about changes that had happened in schooling in Augusta, we felt that we could not easily access that information or learning. This created in us an impulse to conduct this study. We wanted to know more about Augusta, the place where the three of us, at the time of the collection of the stories, lived and worked and taught future educator, its people and important history. Thus we started learning through gathering people’s stories, since not many ways—or at least none that was apparent to us—of getting rich grassroot experience and personal testimonies were available to us.
Those who live in dominant demographic positions rarely learn to view the world from others’ positions, because the world is set up for us to travel through it easily (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012). We know that, like everyone who grows up or lives in the US, we have been conditioned by the discourse of antiblack racism because that is the perspective that pervades the discourse (Lyiscott et al., 2020). We have a shared investment in critical theoretical traditions and inquiries, rooted primarily in the foundations of education and curriculum studies (Pinar et al., 1995). Our commitments to equity and anti-oppressive pedagogies come from our work that explores discourses of sexuality and gender in education, ethico-political questions about the project of education through curriculum theorizing about matters of peace, justice, nonviolence, and epistemology, and the role of oral history research to understand contested history and conflictual violence—all of which is bounded by the idea and the method of currere, which provides a framework for that autobiographical reflection on educational experiences that basically shape our self-understanding in our democratic society (Pinar, 1975). We come to Critical Race Theory and this research in an effort to better understand our own roles in continuing to reinscribe stories that maintain existing power structures and how failing to acknowledge the persistent nature of racism enables its tenacity to infiltrate our common-sense understandings of our social structures and relationships.
We understand that there are other stories about educational efforts and experiences of Black community members that we have not heard, and that will not be told to us. We represent whiteness that has been and continues to be violent, we represent the teachers and schools that have blamed Black community members for their exclusion, and we may not be trusted with those stories or experiences. In addition, our position as white women undoubtedly makes us interested in stories that dispute “truths” that we have been taught, and the limitation of our own education in this area may make these stories more groundbreaking to us than they are to others in the community. Finally, as teachers we will have to constantly be aware of how we present these stories and ourselves in relation to them. The stories are not ours, and the narrators of these stories are the experts, even when we write or teach about them (Smith, 1999). We are only able to do this work with the collaboration of Augusta-born educators, who helped us with making connections with participants in the research and also created spaces for us to present the narratives in public performances of the readers theater and the short documentary film. Community collaborators pointed us to participants with stories they thought would be valuable for us to hear, and participated in the public performances. Our students, many African American Augusta natives, performed in the readers theater and created the documentary, and their families and friends engaged in conversation with all of us about these stories. Through this study and incorporating these counterstories into our teaching, we hope to continue to be in dialogue with colleagues and students about deconstructing the hegemonies to begin to imagine greater justice in institutions that serve us.
Findings
The findings point us in the direction of further research and encourage us to interrogate our understandings and assumptions about local history and race relations here in Augusta, Georgia. Although standards of politeness in mixed(-race) company often demand an insistence of a lack of racism and a comfortable co-existence here between differing racial groups, in fact, the stories that our oral history research project tells belie this comfortable stasis. A persistent and reproduced understanding of White racial privilege and supremacy underlies much of what was reported to us, both in terms of the historical decisions and movements, and in terms of the present-day discrepancies. Stories from educators, in schools and in the community, are presented below.
Educators: Activism in the Schools
CRT reminds us that racism is a pervasive and ongoing part of American society and that in order to address the injustices that racism creates we have to acknowledge the power of racism and the work that it does institutionally to allow some groups advantages over others (Ladson-Billings, 2021). CRT also points out that the owners of property also own the knowledge production and discourse, and therefore tell the story in a way that maintains power structures (Bhattacharya, 2017). It is worth addressing these injustices even if these steps may not eliminate antiblackness (Dumas, 2016) from our institutions. CRT reminds us that racism seeps unconsciously into many interactions, and creates differential value for different groups, so color-evasiveness (Annamma, et al., 2017) is neither desired nor possible and awareness of race and its meanings is a powerful tool with which to interrogate institutional structures (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006).
The neighborhood known as the Golden Blocks is the home of many of the stories presented here and has seen a history of advocacy for Black education that stretches back for generations. Educators in Augusta can learn from the legacy of activism and educational innovation dating back to the 1800s. Lucy Craft Laney, a renowned educator, built the Haines Institute, a co-educational school for Black children in Augusta founded in 1883. Corey Rogers, the historian at the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History in Augusta, tells of her legacy: Well one thing to understand about Lucy Craft Laney is that she was a national figure of prominence. That’s one thing that I often like to stress when people come to the museum or people ask me about Ms. Laney. Ms. Laney was not this obscure educator living in Augusta with this backwards school that only catered to a certain clientele. At the height of its popularity, the Haines Institute was a nationally recognized school with a very comprehensive education - very detailed outlined programming that Ms. Laney crafted from the very beginning…I think that the first thing to understand is that Ms. Laney created what we today would call a comprehensive style approach to education. So um, many schools that have a comprehensive education where they offer various tracks from vocational to more classical style, business, a little bit of everything, Ms. Laney had this all the way back to the late 1800s – early 1900s. So, in that case, she was a visionary where she created a school that catered to the various needs of her community. In other words, she recognized early that not everybody could go to college. She recognized early on that not everybody would work well with their hands. So she created a school that offered various avenues for different people, so I think that’s very important.
Mr. Rogers draws a line from the educational innovations created by Ms. Laney to the educators interviewed in this oral history project. They are part of a tradition of education within the Black community, and they work to overcome the exclusions of Black children from educational spaces that Ms. Laney challenged in her era. The obstacles that Black communities have faced when seeking to send their children to school stretch back hundreds of years, and Black activists have been creating structures to overcome the obstacles for just as long. The struggle for Black freedom and Black educational equity did not just take place in the 1950s and 1960s, nor did it just take place during the Civil War.
These struggles, led by Black educators, have been happening throughout the history of the US, and throughout the history of our local site, Augusta, Georgia. Rogers also recounted And so um, Ms. Laney, after graduating from college in 1873, saw education as the vehicle toward equality and so it, it, it was certainly the climate in the country – the climate certainly lent itself to allow Ms. Laney to create these institutions. Now, what really made it even more profound, more pronounced rather, was the fact that many of the before mentioned plantation owners, Confederate officers, Whites who felt themselves disenfranchised because of the Civil War, um many of them begin to take back power both legally and illegally after the Civil War. So, as reconstruction began to dive in - now all the sudden um you have this era that sort has upsurged in where African Americans are targeted. Schools are burned; churches are burned; Black men are kept from voting usually by terrorist tactics … you see the rise of groups like the Ku Klux Klan … and this ushers in, what we call, the period of Jim Crow. Period of legal segregation. And I think this period of legal segregation even gave Ms. Laney even more fuel to do what she did. Because now she sees that America is creating this system of sort of a pseudo-slavery; an extension of slavery, a second class citizenry, and Ms. Laney wanted to assure that African Americans had all the tools necessary to compete in any given situation especially with um these dual systems being set up in the deep South. Where you have White over here and people of color over there. So, she, she recognized the time she lived in; adjusted accordingly in terms of her mission; but never let the time period which she lived in dictate what she should do. I often like to say she faced a lot of racism, of course, and she also faced a lot of sexism, and none of that mattered to her.
Black educators have always had to struggle against the annihilation of the Black community, either through violence and terror or the erasure of the cultural knowledge and talent of the community through miseducation (hooks, 1994; Foster, 1997). The role of Black educators as leaders of educational movements and as national figures in conversations about educational justice and local leaders for community survival is not widely enough known among practicing and potential educators in local colleges of education, or the school districts. The specifics of these stories can help communities understand the wealth of resources available for education in Augusta today, and also encourage educators to envision different ways forward in the struggle for educational opportunities for all students (Loder-Jackson, 2015).
After this era in the 1800s when Augusta had thriving black schools led by Black educators, the district established segregated elementary schools for Black students after the closing of Ware High School, but high school options for Black students would not be provided again by the district for several decades (Dittmer, 1977). Later, as they desegregated, school districts and the white educational and political leaders exerted an effort to control the narrative, and thus the knowledge production, about race. Judy Carter, a leading educator in Augusta, grew up in a segregated town, McCormick, South Carolina. Her mother was a maid, and she never dreamed of attending college. Her Black elementary and high school teachers, however, saw her potential, and pushed her to apply and get accepted to Paine College, a historically Black college (HBCU) in Augusta. After she received her teaching certificate, she applied to teach in the Black, segregated schools of Augusta. The superintendent suggested she could teach in a White elementary school, however, as the first wave of integration happened. She accepted, wanting employment, and eager to work. Immediately, she faced harassment from a parent, who called to complain to her using racist language, and to request that Ms. Carter be moved to another school. This parent tried to use her privilege to keep her child from being taught by a Black teacher, and to disrupt the new knowledge being created by Black teachers taking positions of authority in schools—as teachers fit to teach all students, perhaps “the best teacher your child will ever have.”
Dr Carter faced challenges to her teaching from her first moment in the school, although not primarily from the students. She learned that although the parent did not show up to transfer her son out of Dr Carter’s classroom, she did circulate a petition in the neighborhood to remove Dr Carter from teaching there. Many of the children reported that their parents had not signed, but many others reported that their parents had signed. Undeterred, she began teaching Black History during Black History Month, and each year received a reprimand from her principal and the superintendent. But in February, this is my first year teaching Black History Month, so I asked my students, sixth graders, now they are pretty mature when they want to be. I said how many of you know anything about Black History and what Black people have done to build this country. And nobody raised their hands. They didn’t know anything about Black History. Um, so I said, this is what I am going to do. I’m going to the library and I’m going to get some books and I’m going to bring them to the classroom and put them on the table and if you would like to get one or more and read it that’s fine. But you don’t have to. It’s not mandatory. So they said, Okay. So I brought the books in and put them on the table and I couldn’t get them on the table fast enough. They were picking them out, picking which one they wanted to read and they took them home.
This free reading challenged the ideas that were dominant in White society in Augusta and the rest of the country, ideas that centered Whiteness as history and Black accomplishments as peripheral and not part of the official curriculum (Banks, 1993). The artwork children made to depict what they had learned about Black history was later removed by the principal and destroyed. And Dr Carter was told by the superintendent, “Ms Carter, you are really upsetting some of the parents of the children in your class. You’re teaching Black History and they don’t want their children learning about that stuff so what I’m going to ask you to do is teach what’s in your social studies book.” Parents, and some school personnel, did not want children learning about African American lives or narratives of US history in school that challenged a racial hierarchy that elevated Whiteness. Black teachers engaged in activism that countered segregation and miseducation through their presence and through the curriculum.
Student Activism in Schools and the Community
Activism on the part of students did not always have integrated schools as a goal. Black students integrating schools in Augusta viewed narratives about integration as contradictory to their own desires and experiences. One narrative tells the story of the first years of integration in which a select group of students was moved from Black schools to White schools. Although the dominant presentation in history texts about integration encourages the belief that Black students experienced only positive changes once they were allowed into White schools, narratives from students during the era describe a very challenging change, and one that tainted their happy educational trajectory with bitterness. Juanita Burney, a student at Lucy Craft Laney High School, moved to the Academy of Richmond County in her junior year of high school, leaving a strong, supportive community. She says, I can describe it in one word, challenging. It was very challenging because we had to cope with the fact that in our own hearts, we preferred to be somewhere else. It was crystal clear it was the wrong segment and they didn’t want us there. And that segment span students as well as instructors. Um, I did well simply because God blessed me with a good mind and the ability to just be able to do most of the academic work. But had I been a mediocre student ...out of the two years I probably had three instructors that I thought were accepting, welcoming and willing to assist us. And that was it, when I went they were still playing Dixie in Assembly and that was difficult for me. I couldn’t participate in it, I sat and observed but that was difficult. Its grammar and eat broccoli, I had not been exposed to broccoli very much but it seems like every other day they served it in the cafeteria. So the food eating plan changed. I found the lunches to be quite different from what I was accustomed to coming from Lucy Craft Laney [High School] where there was good soul cooking every day. Not the healthiest but it certainly was wonderful and good. So it was challenging. I had been asked to actually document the experience, of the Richmond Academy Nine [the original students who integrated the high school], and I plan to do some of that but it’s going to be difficult in a way, because it was rather traumatic and two of my fellow classmates that went are now deceased, but there are others that just don’t want to talk about it. Just don’t wanna look back, don’t wanna look back.
Ms. Burney’s account makes clear the difficulty of this journey for even the most talented students. They moved from attentive teachers in welcoming classrooms to indifferent and even hostile contexts. They had to face visible and overt racism every day, in the form of public ceremony as well as in interpersonal interactions. The sense of connection that she felt to her educational institution was ruptured, and even the food seemed strange and not nourishing. Although she succeeded academically, her success was due to her own attributes and strengths, and the support of her family, and not because of what the school setting offered her. Ms. Burney’s story exposes the experience of many students who participated in integrating schools, in which even students who are in the same building, legally allowed access to the same educational setting, may not receive the same educational opportunities. Her own narrative in this memory contradicted what she was being told at the time, and what is now presented as the result of integration – that the education that she would receive at the White school was better than the one she was getting at the segregated, Black school (hooks, 1994).
The story of the resistance to integration, and its effects and lingering challenges, is hidden from the public discourse. The racism that made segregation possible is believed by many to no longer exist in this community. However, listening to Ms. Burney’s story we hear that it is still so present and powerful that some people who experienced it do not want to tell it for the purposes of recording it in history. This reluctance may stem from a fear that their story will not be believed, or that the telling will re-inflict wounds that haven’t healed, but have been covered over for many years (McGee & Stovall, 2015). Ms. Burney’s story complicates a narrative that has been used to maintain the centrality of White experiences and White benevolence in the history-writing of integration.
Mallory Millender, historian of Paine College, reminds us that there are important Civil Rights activists living among us in Augusta, and that few people know the specifics of their stories and they are not often celebrated for their roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Their activism is not remembered, and the silence that replaces their stories allows assumptions that White people here are good people and never tried to keep Black people from having equal access to institutions. And what I’m speaking of is the student leadership, I… the integration of Augusta. Paine [College] students virtually integrated Augusta, with the help with the local N.A.A.C.P. ... Sylvia Rice went to a conference in Northern Illinois University where they were giving student orientations on nonviolent demonstrations, and she brought back that philosophy to what was called a steering committee for student activity. And, they started in ... about February of 1960 and they started with bus demonstrations and on the first day, eleven of them were arrested for sitting down in White seats. ...Then they went to lunch counters. ...Now it wasn’t as simple. There was violence sometimes at those demonstrations. Students were stabbed and otherwise brutalized. But um, they saw the way the courts were ruling, and they gave up the fight. And once they did, the movie theaters integrated, the public library, the Imperial [Theater].
Millender’s recollections of the actions taken by Paine students counters narratives about the way that change happened during integration in Augusta, narratives that blame violence on the illegal activities of those engaged in civil disobedience (McEvoy & McConnachie, 2013). He emphasizes the necessity of working outside of the legal limits in order to accomplish what is desired when advocating for social change. His stories echo the stories of Judy Carter, who acted against her principal and superintendent in offering her students Black History lessons that were beyond what was offered in the textbooks. Millender’s (and Carter’s) narrative upends a discourse that encourages us to view history through the lens of the White desegregationist or voting rights activist. The hard work of change was primarily done by African Americans in the South, and the bodies that were on the line were Black bodies. The risks for undoing or counteracting racism have mostly been taken on by people of color, not White people (Warren, 2021). Viewing desegregation as a gain for Black students without examining the local complexities of that story fails to account for the risks and losses involved for students and teachers in our communities and for colleagues that we work with, and the risks and dangers of living in segregated cities and schools. It also fails to celebrate the accomplishments and joys of Black educators and students in our communities.
These stories about education, and racism and race in education, remind us that our recollection and popular understandings of how much racism has been overcome and undone are a continuation of the fiction that upholds the centrality of the dominant version of the story, and the institutional power that comes from that monopoly on knowledge production in schools. As the curriculum exploring and documenting the violences endured by African Americans in the US becomes further narrowed (Hartocollis & Fawcett, 2023; Teitelbaum, 2022) and teacher education programs are mandated to remove discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (McCray, 2023), teacher educators, teachers, and other institutional actors must join together with communities to hold this history and share it, publicly remembering that the narrower, sanitized version elides people, events, joys, sorrows, triumphs, and failures, and more importantly, fails to disrupt the power structures that maintain White supremacy.
Teaching Counterstories
The stories presented in this paper are counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to understandings of the Civil Rights Movement and integration of schools that eliminate complexity and struggle, and imply competition or a victory accomplished in the past. Renditions of this history that center Whiteness and elide the violence inflicted on Black communities re-inflict violence on narrators who remind us of these stories (McGee & Stovall, 2015; Warren, 2021). What these narratives tell us is that although there was a deep tradition of education, even public education, for Black students, and even though some of those efforts were supported by leaders in the White community, there has always existed a great deal of resistance to integration among White communities in Augusta and the surrounding area and support for the idea of White supremacy, which continues today. We can see that these ideas persist, in statistics about police violence against Black people (Hannah-Jones, 2019), in discipline disparities in schools (Krueger-Henney, 2019), in the discourses about achievement gaps and failure for Black children (Ladson-Billings, 2006), and in resegregation (Mattia, 2021). As a nation, we continue to let Black children and Black communities experience educational outcomes that are directly linked to greater risk of criminal justice engagement, poor health outcomes, lower employment possibilities, and less material wealth (Krueger-Henney, 2019). We must be shaken out of the complacency that allows educators to permit these outcomes for some of their students (Love, 2019) and take action to address the educational needs of all of the communities in our area.
Locally many of the counties in the region created private schools that were founded after the Brown (1954) decision by the Supreme Court, and before the culmination of integration efforts in the area, most during the 1960s and early 1970s. These schools continue to be attended primarily by White children that previously would have attended public schools in these counties [see for example, Thomas Jefferson Academy (1970) in Jefferson County, Edmund Burke Academy (1960) in Burke County, Augusta Prep (1970), Augusta Christian School (1958) both in Columbia County, John Hancock Academy (1970) in Hancock County]. These private schools leave de facto segregation in place for students in the public schools (Governor’s Office of School Achievement, 2022). With the growth of suburban areas in Columbia County and Aiken County, many schools are becoming resegregated. As Bell (2004) has pointed out, “the statistics on resegregation…painfully underscore the fact that many Black and Hispanic children are enrolled in schools as separate and probably more unequal than those their parents and grandparents attended under the era of ‘separate but equal’” (p. 114). As teachers (and teacher educators) we have a role to play in helping our community critically understand these local and national structural inequalities so that we can begin to address the injustices that have resisted previous efforts. We are teaching the activists of this and the next generation, and we are obligated to provide them with the best tools we can, so they can do the good work of fighting injustices.
Preservice teachers need curriculum that helps them critique deficit discourses that frame poor children and children of color as living in families that do not care about education (Au, et al., 2016). Without understanding that the Black community in Augusta has been fighting for educational opportunities for their children for at least 140 years (Dittmer, 1977; McCoy, 1977), White teachers may lack a critique of the discourse that frames the disengagement of some parents as apathy. They may also fail to understand the engagement of parents because it does not replicate a middle-class model of parental involvement that includes participating in the Parent Teacher Organization or attending prearranged parent teacher conferences, and may stereotype Black and Brown parents as uninvolved when it comes to their children’s education (Yosso, 2005). This stereotype limits teachers’ imagination about students and their families, and can lead to lowered expectations for some children (Pollack, 2012). Preservice teachers need to learn about the history of the communities in which they teach and how African American residents have engaged for a century and more in an effort to achieve equitable access to education.
Teachers in schools need access to curricula that guides them to age-appropriate ways to teach history discussing the violence and challenges faced by Black students and families in Augusta, not that long ago, as well as Black history that is not about violence or slavery (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). We argue that knowing this history makes us better citizens and critics of threats to our institutions in the present moment. It is therefore imperative that students understand this history. Students can learn to be critical thinkers about current events and history only if we provide them the tools of our disciplines that demonstrate how events get interpreted and how people experienced those events in real time (Muhammad, 2020). Students are not immune from hearing about violence and have been compelled to listen to stories of very recent terror and violence, such as the White supremacist rally that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, or shooting deaths of Black people in their homes, in their backyard, and in public parks, and similar discrimination or violence that Black people have experienced at the hands of their neighbors or police. Not teaching about these events and similar events in history leaves intact a story of completion about integration and the overcoming of racism. It fails to link the racism of the (recent and distant) past with the effects of racism today in the understanding of many in the US.
Principals in local schools also need support to challenge expectations of uncritical obedience from students and zero tolerance discipline policies that allow students to be permanently expelled from public schools. Breaking rules, being arrested, and disrupting the schedule was necessary for the changes that allowed for integration to happen (McEvoy & McConnachie, 2013). Principals need to be encouraged and supported to help students learn how to advocate for changes within the structure of institutions, and to challenge injustices (Lyiscott, et al., 2020). White supremacy and obedience as dominant discourses in schools and other institutions frame those who push against the structures of society as bringing whatever violence or consequences that occur on themselves. Currently, students who misbehave are not rewarded or remembered as leaders, but are punished and often tracked into disciplinary and criminal justice pipelines (Krueger-Henney, 2019). School leaders, with community support, could develop the leadership of students who speak up for justice. They can learn to listen to student complaints or see student disobedience as legitimate concerns about the institution, and respond with respect and conversation regarding the needs that students present. Stories like the ones in this project remind educators to look and listen to students who are telling us with their actions and words that our systems are unjust and our structures are not treating them fairly. The stories remind us that educational leaders and teachers must keep changing to serve their students, must be responsive to communities, and must be willing to examine their practices for injustices. Because power can transform in order to maintain power, so must the advocates for justice change their approaches and tactics in order to keep moving educational institutions toward equity for all students.
Dr Carter’s narrative tells a story of explicit efforts to control discourses about race and racism, especially so that White children could continue to comfortably believe in White supremacy. The racist narratives that positioned Black people as inferior and subjected within US society required ignorance about the history and accomplishments of Black people, in the US context and elsewhere. With critical knowledge about history and current events, youth might grow up questioning the social, legal, and educational segregation of Black people. It is abundantly clear in Dr Carter’s narrative that the parents, White teachers, and the White superintendent expressed the fear that White supremacy would be exposed as a mythology used to justify segregation and differential treatment. The recent and ongoing violence and segregation that affects Black bodies (and brains) demonstrates the malleability and pervasiveness of racism and its effects. Dr Carter demonstrated how Black teachers have taken on the work of helping their students critically understand the functioning of White supremacy in classrooms. Teacher educators and preservice and in-service teachers also need to learn how to help their students discuss and critically understand how claims of neutrality in curriculum support dominant narratives and historical understandings, and limit our knowledge of historical events that created the circumstances for today’s social structures.
Students and teachers together can start reading the stories, discuss them, listen to what the protagonists say, share thoughts, ideas, emotions, as well as understandings about why events happened, and even share their own personal stories relevant to situations of injustice they experienced or witnessed. We propose to let students get inspired from such projects and create their own small projects in order to learn from the protagonists. For example, using the oral history narratives from a previous project by one of the authors, students in one classroom got inspired and started their own oral history project. In the same way primary and secondary education students, as well as higher education students, including future teachers, can immerse themselves in such experiences: to start seeking stories, learn from those who have experienced history first hand, and also collect these stories and share them with others. This can be a way to start hearing and learning and eventually help bring change, justice, and equity (i.e., see https://voiceofwitness.org). This brings us back to the beginning of our project: the need to keep doing such work and continue immersing students and their teachers in it. In essence, this is about setting the foundations for students and their teachers to start understanding systemic racism, that is a CRT framework, and seeing and recognizing racial discriminations.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
