Biscuits and Crumbs: Art Education after Brown v. Board of Education

Abstract

The question at the heart of this reflection on the Brown v. Board of Education decision is one proposed by my former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, William Watkins. He asked graduate students to keep our attention on Who's got the biscuits? And, by extension, to remember to ask, Who's getting the crumbs?This is a personal as well as political topic of interest for me: I was a student who benefited from and sometimes suffered through public schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. Now, I am an educator of student art teachers who are working in public schools across the city of Chicago, and each year I visit between 20 and 30 public elementary and high schools.It may have seemed clearer at the time of the decision how to answer questions about biscuits and crumbs in relation to education-all black and brown children attended schools that were only shadows of the schools that many, but not all, white children attended, when children of color were allowed to participate in public education at all. Many white students were getting the biscuits, and most children of color were getting the crumbs, in education as in other areas of social life. School desegregation seemed like one potent solution to the larger problem of systemic and pervasive racial inequality.In a recent issue of Rethinking Schools, focused on the Brown decision, I was reminded of the role young people have played in the fight for educational justice, through an account of the work of a student from that era. Barbara Johns was a high school student attending Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, a community in Prince Edward County. In 1951, she was a junior, and her school consisted of three tar-paper shacks. In the winter the shacks were so cold that students had to study wearing coats. The school had few resources-for example, its science classes had no microscopes. Parents asked the county for a new school, which it said it would provide, but didn't. Barbara and her brother John began meeting with other students, secretly, to develop a plan for addressing the problem of their school. They thought that they probably would not get a new school themselves, but hoped that their work would benefit their younger sisters and brothers.This is what they did: They made a fake emergency phone call to their principal, which asked him to attend an off-site meeting. After he left the building, they delivered notes that asked all the teachers to bring their students to the auditorium for an assembly. When everyone arrived, Barbara addressed the room, announcing that the students had called the meeting. Teachers tried to stop the assembly, but students made them leave the room. After a discussion about the school, and the possible consequences of taking action, all 450 students followed Barbara Johns out of the building on strike. They then contacted lawyers at the NAACP. The story, as concluded in the article, ends with the NAACP explaining that they couldn't help Barbara and her colleague students get a new, equally resourced, but still segregated school, but would sue for integrated schools for all the children of Farmville. The Moton High School case was eventually joined by other cases, and made it to the Supreme Court with the new name of Brown v. Board of Education. But Barbara was right about not seeing the benefits of her work-the Ku Klux Klan threatened her life, and she was sent to live in Alabama. Even after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Prince Edward County refused to integrate. Instead, it closed all its public schools for 5 years. White children with the means attended private schools. Black children attended no schools.I re-tell this story here for a few reasons. First, it shows young people, those directly affected by bad schools, who identified problems and solutions. Their actions included some creative subterfuge, and their allies were not the school's adults. Next, it shows the limits of solidarity based solely on race-when whites closed Prince Edward County's public schools they made evident their willingness to sacrifice poor whites along with blacks to avoid sharing any resources. …