Black Jeremiads: Maria W. Miller Stewart’s Jeremiah Appropriation for Liberation

The prominence of politicians as the leading spokespersons for the African American community in the United States is a relatively recent historical occurrence. Before the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, which brought voting rights to previously disenfranchised Americans, the number of African Americans in elective office was negligible. Indeed, from the 18th century through the 1950s, other African American professionals, especially ministers, journalists, lawyers, and educators, served as the leading spokespersons for the social, political, and economic interests of African Americans in the United States. Together this group of educated professional elites served as an intelligentsia for the African American population. They provided cultural meanings, values, ideals, and objectives drawn both from their extensive training and from the social experiences of the masses and elites of African descent in this society (Cavanaugh, 1983; Franklin, 1984; Marable, 1985; Wilson, 1980). While average Blacks, north and south, were actively involved in the creation of cultural values, goals, and practices based on their African background and their experiences in American society, the educated professionals articulated these values and objectives in speeches, sermons, essays, editorials, magazines, and books that were distributed to the public at large. These cultural spokespersons or intellectuals not only presented their opinions about the most pressing issues facing the African American population, but they also debated these issues in public forums. Often they organized and led social and political movements to obtain specific cultural objectives. From abolitionism to the recent civil rights movement, African American ministers, journalists, lawyers, business owners, educators, and other professionals provided the leadership for African American communities at the local and national levels.1

This essay presents a narrative about the Jackson School in Smith County, Texas, utilizing the voices of former teachers and students who experienced its origin and evolution between 1925 and 1954. It covers the significant events in the story of the school as remembered by African American community members who participated in the day-to-day life of the school. community members of Jackson Heights, Texas faced overwhelming odds in the struggle to provide quality schooling for the community's children. Their stories of sell-sacrifice and effort provide encouragement for today's educators and add to the understanding of the history of African American education. stories of these people, from a retired tenant farmer to a retired administrator, give depth and understanding to how a community was able to develop the resources and commitment to provide excellent education in spite of outside political pressures, unequal distribution of funds, and inequitable treatment within the wider community. Although t his essay only addresses the period of time before desegregation, Jackson School continues to be supported by the Jackson Heights community. Community members continue to refer to our although the Jackson School currently serves as a primary school for the entire district. Men and women from Jackson Heights drop by the school on a regular basis to have lunch in the cafeteria with the children and share memories of their school. While few written records exist to document the evolution of this school, the personal memories are rich and vivid and provide evidence of the individual and collective efforts to develop social and human capital for the community. Former teachers and students of Jackson School describe a highly successful school with strong community ties, and extensive parent participation. As Peter Coleman reported in studies about school and community, The most important task facing the school in the immediate future is collaboration with parents in building active communities of learners. (1) Michael Fullan indicates that schools and community ideally would function as a unitary whole. (2) That ideal notwithstanding, Coleman found that most schools today exist in constricted worlds where parents and the wider community are outsiders, seldom engaged in reciprocal relationships with the school. Today's educational and community leaders seek ways to develop and maintain mutually beneficial relationships, but succeed infrequently. (3) Former teachers of Jackson School tell of the essential contribution of resources by the Jackson Heights community that encouraged the development and maintenance of these mutually beneficial relationships. This cultural capital contributed by the community allowed the teachers to fulfill their personal and professional commitments to the children, the school, and the community. It was the material and spiritual support from the African American community that sustained the teachers and allowed them to meet their individual and collective goals. CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND EDUCATION In examining Jackson School, two recent studies provide understanding of the system of education in place throughout the South during this time period and tell of the interactions of African American culture, community, and education. Vanessa Siddle Walker studied the history of an African American school community in a small town in North Carolina from 1933 to 1969, the period of legal school segregation. (4) While acknowledging the gross inequalities present in the segregated school systems of the South, she chose to study the successes of the school within the framework of its challenges. Using historical ethnography and drawing on state and local documents and interviews with former students and teachers, Siddle Walker explored parent involvement with and advocacy for Caswell County Training School, and the ethic of caring demonstrated by the teachers and principals of Caswell County Training School. …

We find the woman, figuratively, struck in the face daily by contempt from the world about her.... Through it all, she is courageously standing erect, developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes. She is maintaining her natural beauty and charm and improving her mind and opportunity. She is measuring up to the needs and demands of her family, community, and race, and radiating from a hope that is cherished by her sisters in less propitious circumstances throughout the land. The wind of the race's destiny stirs more briskly because of her striving. (Gertrude) Elise Johnson McDougald, 1925 (1) The lives of African American activists who taught in York City during the first half of the 20th century have been conspicuous by their absence from the historical accounts of teachers and teaching, labor organizing, and social reform movements. Biographies of York City's progressive era educators, social reformers, and union organizers depict a generation of women who were white and largely privileged. (2) In turn, historiographies of African American teachers, while they increasingly represent the lived experiences and perspectives of the teachers themselves, have largely focused on education in the South. (3) The lives and experiences of York City's African American educators who assumed leadership and worked for social change before 1950 warrant further attention. This essay profiles a different generation of women, the relatively unknown stories of three African American female educators and community leaders who lived and worked in from the 1920s through the 1950s. The collective careers of Lucile Spence, Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, and Layle Lane spanned forty years and encompassed progressive era social reforms, teacher union organizing, and civil rights work. Socially conscious and militant, these seamlessly incorporated their work as educators as part of a larger project for racial and economic justice and community uplift. In this essay I situate their educational philosophies, writings, and political activities in light of key events in during the 1930s and 1940s. BLACK CAPITAL: HARLEM IN THE 1930s By 1930 had become the largest and most diverse urban black community in the United States. From 1920 to 1930 the black population of increased by over 158 percent to 186,000. By 1940 it would reach 267,000, with 33,000 school-age children. (4) While the majority migrated from the South, one quarter of Harlem's residents were foreign born, immigrating from over fourteen Caribbean nations. As prominent religious leader Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. noted, Harlem became the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere. (5) In the landmark 1925 issue of Survey Graphic that officially launched a new phase in the New Negro literary movement, philosopher and literary critic Alain Locke described as another statue of liberty on the landward side of York. (6) While acknowledging the distortions of life found in the white press, Locke concluded that, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort, or colony, though it is in part all of them. It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital. (7) Part myth and part reality, this uptown neighborhood in York City represented the best and worst of what the United States had to offer her citizens of African descent. (8) It was a mecca for African American writers, intellectuals, and musicians, such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Robeson and scores of lesser known artists who arrived in the 1920s and participated in Harlem's Renaissance. (9) Political activists James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, socialists and labor organizers A. Philip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith, and intellectuals L. …

In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately argue that the newspaper created an identity as citizen for free and emancipated blacks alike through its inclusion of evidence of blacks’ education and knowledge of historical texts; black men’s economic and agricultural literacies and black women’s domestic skills; and the community’s understanding of civics. Scholars within periodical studies, who have focused primarily on Victorian Britain, have argued that periodicals provide a unique space for historically oppressed populations to enter public discourse. This project links literacy studies, periodical studies, and African American studies by extending this reasoning to the literacy practices of African Americans and by investigating how the staff of the New Orleans Tribune sought entrance to public discourse but also circulated a counterdiscourse that challenged dominant stereotypes of blacks. Simultaneously, this project questions how the lack of scholarly work on the Tribune, “the most important Negro newspaper of the Civil War era,” continues to remind researchers that the erasure of African American resistance and agency is not unique to Reconstruction, but is replicated through tellings of history and accessibility of archives within the academy today. An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune uses the newspaper to retell the history of African American literacy in Reconstruction New Orleans as one of agency and oppositionality. Ultimately, I argue that the Tribune used self-representations of blacks’ literacy practices to rhetorically construct an African American discourse community that was worthy of citizenship and therefore suffrage.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Persistent Problem of Colorism: Skin Tone, Status, and Inequality

Challenging the subpersonhood status of the Black race has been a primary purpose for African American historians and educators' writings of African American history (Brown, 2010; Mills, 1998). This writing agenda became more important as literacy rates of young Black children increased as they attended schools in great numbers after emancipation and into the new century. It has been well documented that mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century mainstream academic discourses (as well as popular culture) typically provided problematic constructions about African Americans' civility, morality, and intellectual capacity (Ernest, 2004; Gould, 1996; Hall, 2009; Woodson, 2000). These mainstream academic discourses were a part of an ongoing political that involved indoctrination and an ideological conditioning of African Americans to view themselves as fully human, not of equal worth, or as Charles Mills (1998) proclaimed: 'subpersons. ' Scholars have documented how these ideologies not only prevailed in the academy but were also reinscribed and constructed in primary and secondary school settings through social studies textbooks (Elson, 1964; Foster, 1999). What has been missing in the education literature, however, are thorough historical examinations of how school textbooks written by African American advocates, educators, and historians responded and repudiated the racialization of African Americans.Therefore, this article attends to the absence of relevant research by examining the textbook, A Narrative of the Negro (1971), written by a little-known and under-researched African American female public school teacher and clubwoman-Leila Amos Pendleton. Her work was originally published in 1912 and is used to illustrate how African American educators during the early twentieth century used African American history textbooks to challenge traditional ideas of subpersonhood (Mills, 1998). Mills' notion of revisionist ontology is used to provide a theoretical understanding to how A Narrative of the Negro constructed African American history. This author argues that Pendleton did not simply write an additive or contributionist history (Patterson, 1971). Instead, she challenged the racist definitions of Blackness of the early twentieth century through what Mills (1998) stated as the multidimensional and broad descriptions of the epistemic, and characteristics of humanity. Analyzing Pendleton's textbook showcases how she and other Black educators of the early twentieth century constructed African American history (through text and images) to challenge the subpersonhood status and racial theories about African Americans.The textbook was examined using literary analysis as the primary methodology. This process involved* reading the literature,* noting the themes,* discussing the themes, and* supporting conclusions with examples (Alridge, 2006).A page-by-page reading of the textbook was conducted, noting important elements that carefully identified historical content and themes, including the choice of topics, people, images, and events that represented narrative (Prior, 2003). Then, this author identified chunks of texts and images from A Narrative of the Negro that represented common themes about how African American persons were constructed by grouping words and images into categories. Through this process, coding of the textbooks began based on the three aspects of the theoretical framework, which included focusing on the moral, epistemic, and somatic characteristics of personhood. Last, the themes were compared with the racial theories of mid-nineteenth and early twentieth textbooks. Therefore, the analysis goes beyond simply focusing on the textual representation of African Americans in her textbook. Instead, this process allowed one to understand the document in relation to its milieu or social context (McCulloch, 2004, p. 6). The analysis of Pendleton's textbook, A Narrative of the Negro, examined how she constructed African American history (through text and images) to challenge racial theories and notions of subpersonhood about African Americans. …

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

Charles H. Thompson is best known as the founder and the first editor-in-chief of The Journal of Negro Education (1932-1963). Throughout his career, Thompson sought to extend educational opportunity in ways that were the good of Negro education as a whole. His main concern was in educating future leaders for service in African American communities. Therefore, he sought to shape curriculum and instruction at Howard in order to achieve that end. In 1939, Thompson suggested that there was a need for added specialization in African American higher education that would allow Howard to focus on educating gifted students of color. This article provides evidence that Thompson's model and methods are of continuing relevance.Keywords: higher education, gifted African American students, Howard University, leadership, low-income students, mentoring, student financial aid, Charles H. ThompsonAs arguably the most prominent dean in African American higher education during the era of segregation, from 1938 to 1963, Charles H. Thompson led a distinguished faculty at Howard University that was responsible for educating more students, and more gifted students, than any of its peer institutions. An unwavering critic of racial segregation, Thompson's ideas and ideals resonated powerfully among the African American professoriate of his day. As the founder and editor of The Journal of Negro Education (1932-1963), Thompson cemented his reputation as an activist and scholar while developing a coherent literature regarding African American education, educational inequality, and public policy (Ray, 2012). According to historian Michael R. Winston (M. R. Winston, personal communication, April 17, 1996), Thompson's model of leadership also resonated powerfully among his students at Howard University.During the era of segregation, a coterie of talented African American intellectuals such as Thompson responded to their exclusion from policymaking by transforming their classrooms, scholarly publications, and professional associations into sites that allowed them, and often their students, access into policymaking. Collectively and individually many of these scholars contributed insights that advanced the civil rights movement. Today, unfortunately, their ideas, methods, and contributions to the struggle to overturn segregation as public policy in the U. S. are often overlooked (Ray, 2012).This article focuses on Thompson's proposals for higher education that had implications for gifted African American students. It asks, what can we learn from his ideas that can be applied fruitfully today? How relevant are his ideas for current policies and practices regarding these students; and finally, what does his model of proactive advocacy suggest for contemporary scholars?FORMATIVE EXPERIENCESCharles Henry Thompson was born in Jackson, Mississippi on July 19, 1896 to loving parents, the Reverend Patrick Henry Thompson and Sara Byers Thompson. Both of his parents were teachers at Jackson College. Thompson's birth occurred during the year the U. S. Supreme Court sanctioned racial segregation by declaring in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the policy was constitutional as long as African Americans were provided with separate but equal public accommodations. Historian Horace Mann Bond (1934/1966) had found that before 1896 the segregated African American and White public schools in the South operated at or near parity especially in those counties that were sparsely populated by African Americans. As the southern education movement gained momentum in the early 20th century, and the New South rose on an influx of northern capital, this parity in educational opportunity vanished (Anderson, 1988). To provide enhanced educational opportunities for the region's White youth, White school officials aggressively diverted the funding that the various segregated states had appropriated for African American education. Bond described the bargain struck by the region's planters to support White public education in the South in exchange for the political control of the various state governments. …

The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program

Why and how to engage with African American faith communities in brain health research?

This article examines the benefits and tradeoffs for African American professional educators and students that resulted from the profound Brown v. Board of Education decision. It addresses the impact of the Brown decision immediately after it was rendered for African American educators and students and the legacy of Brown for both of these groups during the previous 50th years. The article also presents the findings from a study of 36 current and recently retired African American high school principals in North Carolina and Alabama to determine their perceptions of the legacy of the Brown decision for both African American educators and high school students. Additionally, the article presents the views of a small sample of these principals who were interviewed regarding the degree to which African American high school students are currently involved in student leadership roles and school activities. Results of the study indicated that the vast majority of the respondents believed that Brown had benefited both African American educators and students; however, they indicated that it had some unintended consequences such as a precipitous drop in the number of African American teachers to serve as role models, competent professionals, and authority figures for students-both Black and White. Furthermore, they perceive that, particularly in integrated high schools where White students are in the majority, the curriculum usually does not adequately address the history, contributions, culture, and experiences of African Americans. Moreover, the principals perceive that African American students in fully integrated schools, with few exceptions, are underrepresented in school leadership roles and are often reluctant to run for elective leadership positions because they usually do not believe they can win. INTRODUCTION On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., the United States Supreme Court rendered its momentous decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). The fundamental public policy that the court unanimously ruled upon was straightforward: segregated schools (established and maintained by state action) were inherently unequal. The court clearly said, through its ruling, that but was, in fact, a contradiction in terms-official state sanctioned segregation was a violation of the protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which forbids any state from making or enforcing any laws which deny any person within its jurisdiction the protection of the laws. Prior to the Supreme Court's ruling, dual and segregated school systems had been established and maintained for African American and White students. These schools systems were primarily in the southern states where Jim Crow laws had prevailed after reconstruction. Ironically, the rationale for establishing and maintaining de jure segregated schools had been also formalized by the United States Supreme Court in another momentous decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, which legitimized the principle of separate but equal (1896). The case evolved from a suit filed by Homer Plessy, a Black man who had filed suit after he had initially been fined for sitting in the White section of a railroad car in Louisiana. His case questioned the constitutionality of an act of the General Assembly of the State of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for railway carriages for the White and colored races. Plessy contested the decision all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the state's but doctrine. In the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court gave racial inequality and segregation an air of legitimacy for over a half century. Moreover, it served to institutionalize racial segregation and social norms, particularly in me South, in both public and private arenas. Not only did the decision condone and maintain racially railroad cars and other modes of public transportation, it virtually assured segregation in schools and school activities, courthouses, waiting rooms, public beaches, swimming pools, restaurants, bathrooms and drinking fountains. …

Genomic medicine research is an important topic in the African American health care community. African American nurses and advance practice nursing professionals are poised to encourage and educate themselves and their communities about the importance of diversity in genomic medicine research. The Southern Nevada Black Nurses Association, a chapter within the larger National Black Nurses Association’s, recently engaged in the National Institutes of Health All of Us research program to educate their members about formularies and other treatment modalities that could clinically benefit African-Americans and other populations of color. During this event, the Southern Nevada Black Nurses Association discovered that National Black Nurses Association members held ethical, legal, and social concerns about engaging in genomic medicine research that align with respective concerns reported in the literature. In this review, we discuss National Black Nurses Association concerns and how they relate to qualitative themes emerging from the literature and a recent National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine event on disparities in access to genomic medicine. We conclude that researchers should engage with African American health community leaders to effectively engage the African American community in genomic medicine research and help ensure that genomic medicine does not exacerbate existing health disparities.

The main object of my paper is to co-relate the decoded signified idea of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mestiza Consciousness of Gloria Andalzua with the referential detail from the text Beloved by Toni Morrison. The co-relating factor of both these theories is based on cause and effect issues. The decoded signified ideas of African-American history, myth, folklore, cultural values and moral codes have impacted a lot to shape an inclusive conscious idea which is close enough to the concept of “Third World Consciousness”. European history and theories alone are inadequate to express the true sense of African American culture, literature and its moral values. Toni Morrison’s basic concern “is to move beyond the systematic or structural patterns” of those theories and history ( Rigney 7). The African American ethnic community has always suffered from an identity crisis caused by the past slave tradition, racism, sexism, dehumanized moral and cultural values. In Beloved, Morrison depicted an indigenous social, cultural, moral and literal value of life which aims for developing a higher consciousness, a kind of wisdom. Morrison attempted to break the boundary of subject-object duality that caged her for a long term. Through the text Beloved, Toni Morrison made a universal appeal to restore and re-establish the indigenousness of the African American community. But the sense of restoring and revaluing one’s indigenousness will remain an incomplete guidance unless one comes across with higher consciousness. In developing a sense of higher consciousness or a “new consciousness” the role of “Mestiza Consciousness” theory of Gloria Andalzua is an interdependent important factor. The most important legacy of an ethnic community is language. Basically racism or color line problems are the root cause behind the traumatic crisis of African American people. Undoubtedly, “there is no racism without language” (Pramod K. Nayar, 224) Morrison assumed the vibrancy of language which is a definite obstruction in reshaping a kind of higher consciousness among the African-American ethnic community. The decoded signified ideas of African American history, culture, myth and folklore develop a higher consciousness of protest literature and culture to reestablish indigenousness in an inclusive environment of lively experiences.

The African American community extends across the United States, representing various socioeconomic statuses, educational levels, religious groups, and other social factors. With a vibrant history and culture dating back to colonial America and beyond, African Americans have significantly contributed to the nation’s culture and systems. Statistics paint a picture of vast economic disadvantages, educational inequities, and additional negative circumstances within the African American community, but they do not outline the social and political systems that created these differences. Solely looking at the statistics also omits the accomplishments, feats, and strengths of those within the shared racial group. This chapter will explore the historical events that continue to impact the cultural values and practices of African Americans. Additionally, the chapter will define racial development, the impact of childhood adversity, and historical trauma. With the expansion of applied behavior analysis (ABA), this chapter seeks to provide behavior analysts and those implementing behavior analytic programs points of consideration specific to African American learners, families and communities.

African American faith communities are an important source of social capital. The present study adapted a theory-based social capital instrument to result in religious (e.g., from organized worship) and spiritual (e.g., from relationship with higher power) capital measures. Data from a national sample of 803 African Americans suggest the instruments have high internal reliability and are distinct from general religiosity. Measurement models confirmed factor structures. Religious capital was positively associated with self-rated health status. Religious and spiritual capital were negatively associated with depressive symptoms, but these associations largely became nonsignificant in multivariate models that controlled for demographic characteristics. An exception is for spiritual capital in the form of community participation, which retained a negative association with depressive symptoms. These instruments may have applied value for health promotion research and practice in African American communities.