Empowerment, desegregation, and civil repair

Black students' overall admittance rate to medical school has remained consistent over the last 40 years and continues to lag behind that of other racial/ethnic groups (Association of American Medical Colleges [AAMC], 2021b). The persistent inequities in K-12 and higher education systems and historical exclusion of Blacks from medical education have impacted many aspiring Black doctors' abilities to matriculate without enrolling in post-baccalaureate programs, which adds time and cost. The purpose of this narrative study was to explore the stories of Black medical students who completed a post-baccalaureate program to improve their profile to gain admittance to medical school. The researcher sought to understand Black students' perception of their community cultural wealth (aspirational capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, resistant capital, and linguistic capital; Yosso, 2005), including if/how community cultural wealth was employed to navigate their transitions to the dominant institutional structures of medical school, as well as the development of their professional identity. The overarching question that guided this study was: What stories do Black medical students who completed a post-baccalaureate premedical program tell about their capital and professional identity formation in medical school? Three sub-questions guided the study: (a) How do Black medical students who attended a post-baccalaureate program describe their need for the post-baccalaureate premedical program? (b) How do Black medical students who attended a post-baccalaureate premedical program describe their capital in medical school? (c)How do Black medical students who attended a post-baccalaureate premedical program describe their professional identity formation? The researcher conducted interviews and administered a demographic survey to seven participants. The major themes included the process of becoming, the evolution of self, and the weight of being Black in medicine. The study's findings, results, interpretation, and conclusions led to the development of three categories of recommendations. The first recommendation for practice is in the form of structure redesigned for the AAMC to improve equity based on the systemic issues within the education system. The second recommendation offers programmatic suggestions for institutions with linkage post-baccalaureate programs. The third is the recommendation for future research on post-baccalaureate programs. Collectively, these recommendations will improve the experience of Black students who attend post-baccalaureate programs and equity among all students, especially those who attend predominantly White institutions. Keywords: Black medical students, post-baccalaureate programs, community cultural wealth, social capital, narrative study.

This dissertation considers how racialized differences educational experience transition with Black students as they perform the expectations of college writing curriculum. I address the question: in what ways can a first-year writing curriculum centered on civic responsibility aid in smoother transitions from secondary to postsecondary academic writing for Black students at predominantly White institutions? My study applies racial and critical race methodologies framed within the tenets of critical race theory, institutional whiteness, and the absent presence of race in composition studies. I apply the methodologies in three key ways: analyzing transition practices through racialized perspectives; evaluating general education writing curriculum through institutional whiteness; and examining the rhetorical education and writing education experiences of transitioning Black American students today and historically. Through these approaches, I argue that, due to its focus on academic writing as one resource for influencing community development, applying a curriculum of civic responsibility to first-year writing courses can effectively address Black students' complexities in transitioning to college-level writing at predominantly White institutions. The dissertation includes five chapters. Chapter One reviews scholarship on race and academic writing, transitioning from secondary to post-secondary writing, and community-based writing pedagogy. Extending from that review, Chapter Two uses the critical race theory principle of counter-story, or the unique voice of color, to review historical models of Black American-centric education from the Civil Rights era. Chapter Three presents the results of an institutional analysis I conducted of the policies and curriculum designed for transitioning students at one institution. Chapter Four demonstrates the need for race-consciousness and civically responsible curriculum by discussing the qualitative interview responses of nine Black American students at the aforementioned research university. I conclude the dissertation by exemplifying the potential for a writing curriculum of civic responsibility entails at both the program level and course level. For Black American students living in a society with a racial social system built on whiteness as most desired and blackness as most disgraced, teaching academic writing practices as one of many resources to build communities can prove critical in helping Black American students transition to academic writing at the college level.

After the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), the social position of Southern Negroes became worse. Negro leader Booker T. Washington, advocated gradual economic advancement of Negroes which was possible only if they relinquished their demand for political and civil rights. He believed that only self-reliant Negroes could more efficiently engage in the struggle for social equality. Other Negro leaders strongly opposed these tactics of gradual development.William E. B. Du Bois, historian and intellectual, was more radical in his ideas. He believed that Negroes must be united in their constant protest against discrimination in the white society and should insist on getting full political and civil rights immediately as well as the right to be educated according to economic circumstances and intellectual abilities. He highligted the advantage of higher education as only educated Negroes could set realistic goals for the Negro population and lead them in their struggle for social equality. Although Washington and his opponents had the same goal, their methods to achieve it differed. Washington strove to reach that goal indirectly, without creating white opposition. African-American literature depicts the reality discussed by politicians on the ideological level and transfers it into the spheres of intimate human drama giving it a moving quality and emotional recognizability. The principle of authenticity, one of the principles of poetic realism, requires an artistic and detailed analysis of reality which leads to the principle of criticism. The Negro author essentially becomes a critic of the reality he has used in his work. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p123

Antoine M. Garibaldi, Howard University* In this, the 18th annual Charles H. Thompson lecture, Dr. Garibaldi charts African Americans' forward and backward movement in education since the 1954 Brown decision, noting both the obstacles and success factors that have shaped the contemporary Black experience in U.S. schools, colleges, and universities. He provides a sweeping review of K-12 data, examining the relationships between race, poverty, school location, course-taking patterns, and parental expectations on Black students' academic achievement. He also assesses African Americans' standardized achievement and college admissions test performance, college enrollment, and postsecondary and graduate degree attainment, highlighting the significant role of historically Black colleges. Over the last four decades, notable progress has been made in the educational attainment and achievement of African Americans. More African Americans are attending elementary and secondary schools; African Americans are graduating from high school at higher rates; more African American students are attending college, graduate, and professional schools; and there are more African American professionals in leadership roles as a result of expanded educational opportunities. Those positive results are due in large measure to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That celebrated case was argued by Howard University alumnus Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice, and a host of other legal and educational scholars who were determined to reverse the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. The Brown decision not only opened the nation's school doors wide, it also provided the impetus for the elimination of separate-but-equal laws in employment, housing, voting rights, and related civil rights areas. Ironically, however, as we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the integration of de jure segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, most of our nation's public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago; and legislative attacks on affirmative action threaten the numerous gains in educational opportunity and civil rights made possible by Brown. Thus, there are fewer reasons to celebrate because of the perplexing signs of missed educational opportunities; declines in educational performance; lower than expected four-year college-going rates; and uneven undergraduate, postgraduate and first-professional degree attainment by gender for African Americans. Today I will describe the status of educational attainment of African Americans four decades after Brown, with an attempt to balance the gains and declines in progress so that prescriptions can be developed to remedy the educational problems that exist in our schools and communities. SCHOOL ENROLLMENT DEMOGRAPHICS As shown in Table I, the total U.S. public school enrollment during the 1993-94 school year was 43.5 million students, and the total private school enrollment was approximately 5 million students. Ninety-four percent (94%) of African American students, or almost 7.2 million young people, were enrolled in the nation's public schools, while the remaining 6%, or close to a half-million students (462,105), attended private schools (Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 1997). African American students represented 16.5% of all public school enrollments, and they accounted for 9.3% of private schools' student bodies. Though African Americans' 16.5% share may seem small when compared to the 66% of White students enrolled in public schools, it is important to note that approximately 30% of Black public school students are enrolled in schools in large central cities with populations of more than 400,000 people, and more than half of all Black public school students (56.2%) live in the South (Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 1997). …

From the Editorial Board: Tangled Discrimination in Schools: Binding Hair to Control Student Identity Torrie K. Edwards School discipline policy is not implemented equitably in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (2014), Black students represent 16% of the student population, but represent 32–42% of students suspended or expelled; in contrast, White students make up over half of the student population, and yet only 31–40% of White students are suspended (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). In total, Black students are suspended and expelled more frequently than their White peers; only 4.6% of White students are suspended, while 16.4% of Black students are suspended. The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (2014) not only reports on racial disproportionality in discipline policy implementation, but also gender disproportionality. For example, its data show that boys make up nearly three of every four students suspended or expelled; additionally, although students with disabilities only make up 12% of student enrollment, they are subject to 25% of school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement. Significant literature has explored the broad impacts of discipline policy disproportionality on students of color (e.g., lost instructional time, school-to-prison pipeline, etc.), but few have focused on the impact of specific discipline policies. One of these specific policies that has not been studied extensively is dress code, which often regulates clothing, jewelry, and other choices in student appearance. The focus in this editorial is on dress code related to hair, hairstyles and accessories, a topic which has been a focus as of late on social media and in the news, as several recent school-based events have shown clear instances of hair discrimination impacting students of color in particular. In December 2018, a Black high school wrestler in New Jersey was forced to choose between maintaining his hairstyle and competing in a wrestling match. Under the guise of following a dress code policy, the referee publicly cut off the student’s locs before allowing him to compete. This event may seem extreme, yet public schools regularly control hair, hairstyles, and hair accessories through presumably less public dress code policies. Rampant in the news media are stories of students and young people being refused entry to (Kai, 2018) or sent home from school (Harris, J., 2016; Jackman, 2018; Lazar, 2017), having their natural hair cut off (Whelan, Jr., 2018), being threatened with disciplinary action (Pulliam, 2016; Taketa, 2020), or being removed from their extracurricular activities for hair styles or accessories deemed unacceptable in mainstream White culture (Lattimore, 2017). These examples underscore the politics of hair management (Banks, 1997) and the dominant narrative around hair that hooks (1989b) describes in which “black people, and especially black women.. .are not acceptable as we are.. .” (p. 5). Although Banks (1997) found the messaging of hair management to reflect experiences of power, choice, and/or self-hatred, this message is unquestionably, according to Oyedemi (2016), a form of cultural violence. This cultural violence is enacted on student bodies through hair regulations in dress code policies, and, until very recently was permitted in every state in the country. [End Page 53] In 2019, three states wrote legislation addressing hair discrimination in school: California, New York, and New Jersey. California’s law is the first of its kind. Passed in early 2019, this law took effect January 1, 2020. Formally Senate Bill No. 188, the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair Act (CROWN Act) is “an act to amend Section 212.1 of the Education Code, and to amend Section 12926 of the Government Code, relating to discrimination” (CROWN Act, 2019). Specifically, it “adds traits historically associated with race to the state’s list of classifications protected from discrimination” (Griffith, 2019). SB-188 explicitly protects afros, braids, natural hair, twists, and locs in both employment practices and educational policy, and is intentional in outlining the history and impact of racial discrimination in public arenas. In particular, Section 1b of the Act notes that Whiteness (e.g., European features and mannerisms) often guides societal understandings of professionalism by linking European features to professionalism; moreover, it names hair...

This article takes up the questions: (a) How do Black female adolescents define racism?, (b) What kind of experiences with racism to they report having in schools?, and (c) How can these perspectives and experiences inform educational reform efforts? The in-depth analysis of 18 student surveys and interviews revealed that most of the definitions of racism centered on prejudice, discrimination, and differential treatment; and most of the experiences the girls described regarding racism in school illustrated issues of prejudice, discrimination, and differential treatment as well as stereotypes, labels and low teacher expectations. Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Feminism, and Black Feminist Thought were used as interpretive theoretical frameworks. Implications for teacher education, secondary education and broad reform efforts are discussed. Keywords: Black girls, racism, high school, ideology ********** In June, 2016, the United States Department of Education Office of Civil Rights released an initial analysis of the 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). The dataset includes data from 99.2% of all school districts in the U.S., 99.5% of all public schools, and over 50 million students. Initial analyses indicate that Black pre-school students are 3.6 times more likely than their White peers to be given one or more out-of-school suspensions. In K-12 the trend continues with 18% of Black boys receiving suspensions and 10% of Black girls while only 6% of all K-12 students receive one or more out-of-school suspensions. Further, Black students are 1.9 times as likely to be expelled from school and are 2.3 times more likely to be disciplined through law enforcement than their White peers (U.S. DOE OCR, 2016). The extensive analysis of U.S. Civil Rights Data provides substantial evidence that there are issues of racial injustice in U.S. public schools. However, current policies and practices are overwhelmingly engaging in approaches that do not take a serious stance on issues of race, racism, or racial injustice. For instance, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in December 2015 continues the approach from the previous federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), of requiring disaggregated data based on race. Further, it requires actions be taken to limit school suspensions and curtail negative discipline policies (Brownstein, 2015) as well as to disaggregate data collected regarding school discipline policies by race (as well as by other sub-groups identified in the law). Although, those policies appear to be positive, The Civil Rights data above suggest that the groups most deeply impacted by these policies are Black students (boys and girls), yet the law takes no proactive stance regarding racial justice issues in its approach to changing discipline practices. By treating school discipline issues as colorblind (Bonilla-Silva, 2006), like ESSA does, current policies and approaches are not capable of overcoming serious issues of racial injustice in school and society. In fact, approaches serve to hide, minimalize and overlook serious issues of inequity based on race in school and society (Jackson, Sweeney, & Welcher, 2014; Lopez, 2007; Urrieta, 2006). Black adolescent girls are an important group that is often overlooked in schools due to approaches and the complexities of multiple intersectional identities, based on race and gender. For Black girls, being overlooked can include issues of disempowerment whereby they are faced with hegemonic representations of beauty and femininity (Annamma, Anyon, Joseph, Farrar, Greer, Downing, & Simmons, 2016; Muhammad, 2012), and are more likely than any other group of girls to be suspended and expelled from school (Annamma et al., 2016; Morris, 2012). Gender and racial stereotypes, in part, significantly contribute to the creation of such climates. Therefore, educational leaders and policy makers should pay close attention and engage in important work to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes for Black girls. …

In the ongoing campaigns to abolish legalized racial segregation in the United States, the nonviolent direct action protest strategy adopted by students at black and white colleges and universities in the South, referred to as the sit-ins, is considered an historically significant innovation. This act of resistance and civil disobedience had been practiced by previous generations of social and political activists. However, when the four black students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, who were heirs to a black and white radical tradition, decided to sit-in at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store, a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States was initiated. The southern college campuses spawned hundreds of willing to put their lives on the line in the cause of social justice. The sit-ins and the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented a turning point and historical marker in the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. (1) In the black freedom struggles in the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, launching of protests by black students also marked a turning point and the onset of a new phase of the larger anti-apartheid movement. The Soweto protests in 1976 demonstrated the degree of political consciousness even among elementary and secondary school children and signaled a renewed level of resistance to South Africa's white minority government. But even earlier in the late 1960s student activists in South Africa launched a new phase in the black freedom struggle in South Africa with the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement and South African Students Organization (SASO). Under the leadership of Stephen Biko and Barney Pityana, SASO mobilized black African, Coloured, and Indian students and, according to Gail Gerhart, raised the level of political education and ideological diffusion never before achieved by any black [South African] political organization. (2) In the black freedom struggles in the United States and South Africa in the 1960s, black activism played a significant role and made distinctive contributions to the larger campaigns for social and political change. In this essay I will examine black activism at three historically black, public universities in the 1960s and 1970s--Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the University of the North and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa--focusing on the patterns of protests and the responses of university and government officials to activism. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA While the launching of Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in December 1955 was generally considered the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the United States, sociologist Aldon Morris in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, published in 1984, argued that the bus boycott organized in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, and led by Baptist minister Rev. T. J. Jemison, served as the model for the protest launched in Montgomery almost two years later. In Baton Rouge, the mobilization of the black community through church leadership, the formation of alternative means of transportation, and the filing of lawsuits to challenge segregation on public transit in the state and federal courts in Louisiana served as the model for activities that would take place in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. Jemison became an important advisor to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association during their year-long bus protest. (3) According to Rev. T.J. Jemison, in the period between 1953 and 1960, African Americans in Baton Rouge made some attempts to desegregate eating establishments in the downtown areas, and these efforts were often led by students from Southern University. …

IntroductionYoung Black males in America have traditionally been viewed as a high-risk population. A significant number of Black males drop out of high school, are (or have been) in the penal system, in gangs or have died a violent death much too young (Ferguson, 2001). Considerable amount of public discourse and literature has focused on Black boys through a lens of pathology or deficits (as debunked by Brown & Donnor, 2011; Ferguson, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Noguera, 2008). Correspondingly, much of the historical scholarship negatively concerning Black males in American education has permeated the public domain, research, and, perhaps most importantly, the perceptions of educators and Black males themselves. This article seeks to challenge the dominant narrative of negative academic characteristics of Black males, by adding to the expanding discourse focusing on positive Black male academic achievements.Since the landmark civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended the doctrine of separate but equal, public schools have been trying to resolve the issue of how to best educate Black students. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 helped codify the Brown decision in public schooling, but there were still pockets of resistance to Black students being integrated throughout the country, and not just in the South. In the 1970s and early 1980s in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, bussing for integration became a mechanism for trying to achieve better educational outcomes for Black children (Fluehr-Lobban, 1990).In the past few decades, a significant shift has occurred in scholarship surrounding Black males from deficit models to scholarship focused on positive strength-based assets of Black male students (e.g., Darling-Hammond et al., 2007; Davis, 2003; Davis & Jordan, 1994; Fergus, Noguera & Martin, 2014; Giroux & Schmidt, 2004; Baldridge, Hill, & Davis, 2011; LadsonBillings, 2006; Noguera, 2008; Noguera & Wing, 2006). Darling-Hammond (2007), LadsonBillings (2006) and Noguera (2008) have articulated how notions of inferiority found in earlier literature focusing on the study of Black males in education fixated on students' deficiencies rather than their positive achievements. The prevailing belief is that deficit-based thinking has hampered policymakers, educators and in many ways, Black males themselves, into believing their deficits were too significant to overcome and most importantly said criticisms were accurate. Therefore, the belief is that a self-fulfilling prophecy helped reinforce in many young Black male students that there was little hope of attaining positive academic achievement.This article contributes to the growing shift in the literature toward more positive discourse surrounding Black males in general and positive academic achievement specifically by examining the experiences of high-achieving Black male participants and the factors that helped contribute to their acceptance and attendance in college. One of the ways young Black males counter the toxicity of negative influences and expectations was through persistence. Despite the fact that these young Black males have often had to navigate through a history of racial discrimination in this country, challenges in family structure, low income, and in many cases, extremely violent neighborhoods, communities and schools, they still experienced positive supports and maintained positive attitudes that allowed them to persist and realize positive academic achievement. Central to this persistence and positive attitude were specific types of trust. In order to create more positive educational outcomes, it is critical to examine why some young Black males succeed in the face of adversity while many of their peers do not.Literature ReviewAccording to a Forbes Magazine article from 2013, trust is the most important element in business and is the basis for strong relationships (Peshawaria, 2013). …

Reviewed by: The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement by Jon N. Hale Dwana Waugh The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. By Jon N. Hale. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 300. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-231-17568-5.) In The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Jon N. Hale deftly argues that many civil rights advances "were not won in the halls of Congress on Capitol Hill but in the rooms of grassroots schools across Mississippi" (p. 71). Hale examines the development, implementation, and legacy of the Mississippi Freedom Schools from 1964 through [End Page 1018] the 1970s. The book explores seven Freedom School locations that served as viable, independent alternatives to the state's segregated public schools. Using Freedom Schools as a key vehicle for analysis, Hale identifies African American primary and secondary school students as crucial activists on the front lines for educational liberation. This book adds to the growing body of long civil rights movement scholarship. Hale uses organizational records, volunteers' memoirs, oral interviews, and a wealth of secondary sources to assert that Freedom School students learned participatory democracy from the everyday functions of their curriculum. The author's richly detailed account of the day-to-day work of Mississippi Freedom Schools demonstrates that black students studied and engaged in direct-action protest tactics, acted in plays dramatizing the stories of slain activists, canvassed for votes in their local communities, and advocated for the same academic curriculum that white students had in public schools. Remarkably, Hale traces the experiences of some of the volunteer teachers as well as a handful of students after the demise of the Freedom Schools. Many of the participants remained deeply committed to civil rights causes and activism. The author's examinations of the Freedom School curriculum and innovative pedagogy in chapters 4 and 5 are the most exciting aspects of this study. Hale illustrates the challenges posed by racial and gendered stereotypes. Organizers perceived Freedom Schools as a safer space for incoming white female volunteers. Many of the white volunteers brought their racial prejudices to bear by assuming the "inferiority of black education," often leading to an initial dismissal of students' academic abilities (p. 91). Between 1965 and 1966, the schools suffered from growing racial divisions between students and teachers. Students felt abandoned by some of the Freedom Summer volunteers who returned home in 1964. White volunteers who remained experienced fatigue and faced the shifting, separatist ideologies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Yet Hale demonstrates that daily interactions between predominantly white teachers and predominantly black students shifted racial perceptions and resulted in candid, eye-opening conversations. While there is a dearth of studies of the day-to-day work within integrated schools, Hale's study offers an examination of early faculty desegregation not often reflected in desegregated schools until after the Supreme Court's decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968). Freedom Schools provide insight into the early relationships between a black student body and white teachers as well as early implementation of "culturally relevant teaching" (p. 211). While Freedom Schools continued as an alternative to segregated public schools in Mississippi until 1966, the 1964 student-led Meridian conference decided that black students would organize around existing public schools. Students joined the Mississippi Student Union (MSU), a statewide, student-led union, which used direct-action tactics to demand equity within public schools. It is not clear how and why black students chose to abandon Freedom Schools. Students' choice of public education over alternative Freedom Schools may indicate their interest in compelling the state to act in behalf of their educational interests, undergirding Hale's argument for the continuity of students' civil rights activism. [End Page 1019] Hale's account is a welcome addition to the study of educational, civil rights, and southern history. Understanding the curriculum and pedagogy of Freedom School volunteers offers a glimpse into practical classroom strategy for diverse learners in this age of global diversity. Moreover, the study also signals a sense of hopefulness that training primary and secondary schools for participatory democracy can address the...

Reviewed by: Opting Out: Losing the Potential of America’s Young Black Elite by Maya A. Beasley Susan E. Chase Maya A. Beasley. Opting Out: Losing the Potential of America’s Young Black Elite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 225 pp. Cloth: $70.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04013-4; Paper: $25.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04014-1. This book addresses an important question concerning the persisting racial inequality in the United States: Why are well-educated African Americans still employed in only a narrow range of professional occupations? This is a problem in part because occupational segregation between well-educated Blacks and Whites accounts for much of the income inequality between them. Sociologist Maya Beasley argues that some—not all—young, well-educated African Americans are “opting out” of higher paying, White-dominated occupations to pursue professions in which African Americans are already well represented (nonprofit management and social work) or racialized occupations that directly serve African American communities (nonprofit work in Black communities, civil rights law, Black product marketing, etc.). Maya Beasley is well aware that her emphasis on African Americans’ choices is bound to be controversial among sociologists. When explaining persistent racial inequalities, sociologists usually turn to macro-level phenomena that show how Blacks continue to be much more constrained in their choices than Whites. Along these lines, Beasley devotes substantial attention to the long-term effects of decades of structural constraints, including the limited implementation of civil rights laws, the dismantling of affirmative action policies, and on-going residential and educational segregation. But Beasley’s major contribution lies here: She integrates that macro-level perspective with a focus on micro-level phenomena (how young, well-educated African Americans choose among the options open to them) and meso-level phenomena (how organizational contexts influence students’ aspirations). In so doing, Beasley is able to explain why some young, well-educated African Americans are “opting out” and why others are not. Beasley interviewed 30 African American and 30 White students at two elite universities: Stanford and Berkeley. While the White students’ families were more affluent than the Black students’ families, most of the Black students were from middle-class backgrounds and their families had very high expectations for them. The major difference was that White students’ families were able to provide more specific support and advice about occupational options than Black students’ families. Beasley explains this difference in terms of the residential and occupational segregation of the Black students’ families. Despite their high expectations—and in many cases their own professional occupations—the Black students’ families did not have the same social and cultural capital as the White students’ families. For example, they were less able to give concrete advice about how to network in and get information about the corporate world. In addition, organizational differences between Stanford and Berkeley shaped students’ aspirations. Twelve percent of Stanford’s undergraduates are African American, and Stanford provides strong institutional support for the Black community on campus. By contrast, only 3% of Berkeley’s undergraduates are African American, and it offers some but less institutional support for a community among Black students. Beasley found that Stanford students were more likely to develop segregated social networks and that those segregated networks increased the likelihood that Black students would pursue racialicized professions or those in which African Americans are well represented. In particular, segregated networks encouraged students to be wary about racism they would encounter in White-dominated professions. While Black students who belonged to integrated social networks were also aware of the possibility of discrimination in those occupations, they expressed confidence in their ability to navigate such contexts. Interestingly, Black students from low-income families were less likely than their middle-class peers to be concerned about racism in the occupational world. Because low-income Black students already had a great sense of achievement—they had made it to elite institutions despite many obstacles, [End Page 408] including exposure to blatant and violent racism—they were confident that they could handle the less severe forms of racism they expected to encounter in White-dominated professions. Beasley pays particular attention to the underrepresentation of Black students in STEM majors. Nationwide...

Equal

Beginning roughly with the sit-ins in the late 1950s and continuing through the tumultuous Black Student Movement of the late sixties, black college students have been the cutting edge of the mass movement style of black struggle against racial oppression in the United States. The activist minority of young black students gave impetus and support to the series of protests that propelled the Civil Rights Movement to success, sparked the Black Power Movement, and, in part, provided the model for the anti-war movement and even the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s. Black student activism was most manifest in the waves of strikes and demonstrations on college campuses in the mid to late sixties. The strikes varied from the five-month siege at San Francisco State College to the thirty-six-hour shotgun display at Cornell University. Such strikes and demonstrations appear to have reached their peak in 1969. According to Student Protests 1969, a study by the Urban Research Corporation, there were 292 major student protests on 232 college and university campuses in the first six months of 1969.1 Black students were involved in more than half of those protests, usually with little if any white participation. Black campus protests were commonly related to some issue of black recognition (only 2% of the protests of Blacks involved the Viet Nam issue), and violence of any kind, contrary to the images of the media, occurred in less than one-fourth of the protests.2 Although in 1969 Blacks were less than six per cent of the U.S. college student population, black students were involved in more than half of the protests occurring during the peak year, 1969.

Mainstream education research and policy is dominated by social science orientations that primarily rely on positivist theories, models, and interpretations of the mathematical competence of African Americans or Blacks (terms are used interchangeably). Contemporary scholarship and national discourse surrounding the education of Blacks often center on the notion of pathology, a view largely supported by deficit perspectives (Martin, 2009a; Stinson 2006). As Martin has pointed out, research and policy is a site where degradation of African American children occurs (Martin, 2009a, p. 1) in part because of the on-going discussions of racial achievement gaps and comparisons to White and Asian American students.An official and public conversation about achievement gaps has been going on at least since 1969 when The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began reporting racially disaggregated achievement data (see National Center for Education Statistics website at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/). Most policymakers and researchers use NAEP data to make consequential claims about U.S. students' outcomes - Black students' outcomes in particular. The claims can be consequential because school districts, teachers, and even families and students themselves view the interpretations of the standardized assessments as normative, correlated with intelligence, and generally disconnected from institutional issues and contexts.There are explanations in the literature for why achievement gaps exist. Some researchers point to factors such as inequitable distribution of quality teachers (Adamson & Darling-Hammond, 2012). Others position Black parents negatively, blaming them for placing low value on early education (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Still other scholars contend that the U.S. does not have an achievement gap at all, but an educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Mathematics education research and policy continue to use achievement gap language in decontextualized ways despite a growing body of literature that suggests race-comparative approaches position Black students at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of ability (Martin, 2009a, b, c). These approaches do not address issues of identity and power, which are important for decentering the assimilationist perspective in many education policy documents (Gutierrez, 2008). The perspective can be viewed as assimilationist because there is little recognition of the linguistic and cultural resources that marginalized students bring to the classroom or to the discipline of mathematics (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 361). Moreover, there is limited effort by mainstream education research and policy to understand what it means to learn while also being Black (Martin, 2012). Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 2000; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) points out that race and racism are endemic in U.S. society; therefore, it is critical to analyze the intersection at the teaching and learning of and the story of race to interrogate ways race influences Black people's educational experiences and production of mathematical knowledge.The rise in national focus on the achievement of Blacks using state and national summative assessments can be marked by important legal decisions beginning with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. What did the education of Blacks look like before these legal decisions? While very little is known about the education of Blacks pre-Brown, there is some documentation of important issues we might find at that intersection of teaching and learning and race during segregation (Russell, 2014). The field also knows that new narratives describing the segregated schooling of Blacks, mainly in the South have challenged the master narrative that reduced all Black schools and students to unilateral inferiority (Anderson, 1988; Siddle-Walker, 2009). …

To Sit or Not to Sit: The Supreme Court of the United States and the Civil Rights Movement in the Upper South PETER WALLENSTEIN* In the early 1960s, Ford T. Johnson Jr. was an undergraduate at Virginia Union University, a black college in Richmond, Virginia. So was his sister, Elizabeth. On Saturday, February 20, 1960, they and dozens of classmates headed downtown to participate in sit-ins directed at segregated seating arrangements at the eating venues in the department stores that lined Broad Street. What motivated the Johnsons and the other black students who participated in the sit-in that Saturday was a commitment to bring segregation to an end—beginning with the integration ofdowntown Richmond’s lunch counters. Whetherthe racial discrimination imposed in those stores reflected the express mandates of state laws and city ordinances or the private decisions of various enterprises did not matter to the demonstrators. Even if integrated service had been within the law, management at lunch counters and other establishments, relying on trespass laws, would still have called upon public authorities to eject demonstrators seeking desegregation. From that February in 1960 until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sit-ins took place across the South. Some led to desegrega­ tion without arrests, but in every former Con­ federate and border state, demonstrators were roundedup and arrested. Dozens ofcasesmade their way to the Supreme Court of the United States, addressing such issues as equal pro­ tection, due process, property rights, and state action. The Civil Rights Movement Most studies of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have focused on Deep South communities—notably Montgomery, 146 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY On February 1, 1960, a group of black students from North Carolina A & T College who were refused service at a luncheon counter reserved for white customers staged a sit-in strike at the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson, and Mark Martin are shown here seated at the lunch counter, as they remained throughout the day. Alabama, the cradle ofthe Confederacy, where activists such as Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. operated and institutions and organizations such as Dexter Avenue Bap­ tist Church and the Montgomery Improve­ ment Association fought for change. By con­ trast, this study highlights an Upper South community, Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1960s. On Monday, February 1, 1960, four young men, students at the North Carolina Agricul­ tural and Technical College, staged a widely publicized sit-in at a Woolworth Store lunch counter in Greensboro.1 Sit-ins had been oc­ curring for some time throughout the South, and preparations were underway for a protest in Nashville, Tennessee.2 But the Greensboro one was the first to capture the imagina­ tion of large numbers of Americans, particu­ larly black southerners. The Greensboro lunch counter sit-in was replicated in towns and cities across the South, including Atlanta, Georgia and Tallahassee, Florida.3 Before the month of February was out, sit-ins had taken place in several communi­ ties in Virginia, too. At first the protesters focused, as the Greensboro students had, on the practice of white stores excluding African Americans from eating facilities. Soon student protesters targeted other places where whites but not blacks could have access and gained widespread support among black residents of theircommunities. As inthe Deep South, racial segregation came under siege in the Upper South as well. The Richmond Sit-ins Begin The North Carolina sit-ins began on Febru­ ary 1. Black college students in Richmond did not take action for nearly three weeks after that, but they did not sit idle: they were carefully planning their own protest.4 On Saturday, February 20, at about 9:00 a.m., approximately 200 students converged on downtown Richmond. The group went first TO SIT OR NOT TO SIT 147 to the Woolworth’s store, on Broad Street at Fifth. Ignoring the small counter at the back of the store set aside for black customers, they occupied the thirty-four seats in the sec­ tion reserved for whites. Store officials quickly closed the white section. The students contin­ ued to sit, talking among themselves or read­ ing...

Race, parents, and schools: Understanding how parental racial socialization operates within schools as racialized organizations.