AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATORS MISCONSTRUEDAdam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 552. Cloth $29.95.

Abstract

Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in Segregated South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 552. Cloth $29.95. In A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in Segregated South, British historian Adam Fairclough offers a wide-ranging survey of African American teachers in all-black schools from 1865 to era before Brown v. Board of Education decision. This undertaking is ambitious, for as he notes, until now nobody has written history of black teachers as a group, tracking that history over a hundred years. (1) Indeed, his analysis of a variety of sources, including books, articles, and archival materials such as teachers' association records and personal correspondence, provides many insights into a century of African Americans' efforts to advance schooling and education in their communities in South, from late antebellum years to civil rights period. The earlier classic studies by Carter G. Woodson, Horace Mann Bond, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others described all-black public schools as inferior due to inadequate funding and facilities, lack of transportation, shorter school terms, overcrowding, and many other features associated with separate and unequal public schooling. (2) In 1970s new studies began to appear that challenged these earlier portraits, with narrative accounts that described positive learning environments created in all-black schools, despite racial oppression coming from larger society. The studies by Vanessa Siddle Walker, David Cecelski, Faustine Jones, V. P. Franklin, Carter J. Savage, Karen A. Johnson, and others describe how schools in many segregated black communities managed not only to challenge students academically, but also supplemented academics with a variety of extra-curricular activities to help instill self-discipline, deflect negative messages aimed at African Americans coming from white-dominated society, provide social welfare services to community members, and encourage their graduates to go on to some form of higher education. These studies revealed what was previously unknown to many outside these African American communities: Despite financial shortcomings, these all-black educational institutions presented opportunities for African American teachers to impact lives and minds of their students in a variety of positive ways. (3) Fairclough's secondary goal of offering a more balanced view of black schools and their communities is not achieved and this seriously detracts from overall value of work. Fairclough seeks to bridge these two traditions in literature and believes that the era of segregation was a distinct historical epoch with a beginning, middle, and end. Its history is best understood if it is told in full (7). He also seeks to counter more recent, hagiographic histories of all-black schools and their communities, many of which were either written by or include voices of former members of these communities. Fairclough believes these studies must be viewed with caution because they were written by individuals motivated by disillusionment over failure of large-scale public school integration, or by desire to reclaim and celebrate history of these all-black schools. Fairclough notes that NAACP's victory in 1954 Brown decision was bittersweet in that while it eventually opened previously all-white schools to both races, it led to closing of many successful and well-loved all-black schools. According to Fairclough, loss of these institutions, as well as loss of African Americans' positions of leadership within these schools, compelled many to try to reclaim (or perhaps to embellish upon) what had been lost. Divided into ten chapters, A Class of Their Own moves chronologically through a 100-year period, taking reader inside school buildings and into these teachers' classrooms, describing interactions among individuals and between various constituencies. …