Negro Education Research Articles

Colônias e responsabilidade moral

Tradução de: W. E. B. Du Bois, "Colonies and moral responsibility", in The Journal of Negro Education , Summer, 1946, Vol. 15, No. 3, The Problem of Education in Dependent Territories (Summer, 1946), pp. 311-318.

Unjust: Publishing Black and African American Children’s Books and School Availability

Traditional book publishing has a pronounced and unjust deficiency of Black and African American voices. White culture, thoughts, and rules are the standard in traditional publishing. Black and African American authors are not typically picked up by white-dominated publishing companies. In traditional publishing, mostly white literary agents are gatekeepers and acquisition editors shut the doors too frequently to non-white authors. Aspiring Black authors then resort to hybrid or vanity press companies that often use unscrupulous practices, charge exorbitant fees, accomplish little or low-quality work, and deny authors’ agency and full rights in the final disposition of a book. Because a majority of traditionally published children’s books featuring Black or African American stories or characters are written by or illustrated by non-Black people, the wide possibilities of adventure, celebrations, discovery, and friendship stories are not published for Black children. Instead, publishers favor stories about slavery, the civil rights movement, famous Black people, and hair tales as well as racially ambiguous characters. Regrettably, Black and African American culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Black or African Americans are not readily available to children in school and library settings consistent with schools’ community or student demographics. This article shares research findings and viewpoints of Kathy Anderson and Karen Bowlding, two Black children’s book writers and publishing consultants who are also parents. Black and African American students encounter education and cultural injustice because of the practices of traditional publishing companies, educators, and librarians. Parents and guardians can ameliorate these issues with discernment and action. Foremost, publishing company decision-makers must acknowledge their own racial biases that deny representation and authenticity to all children in our US classrooms.

The Development of African American Education and The Causes and Effects of Racial Educational Inequality

The Development of African American Education and The Causes and Effects of Racial Educational Inequality

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1915 Pennsylvania Suffrage Speaking Tour Scrapbook

ABSTRACT In 1915 woman’s suffrage was on the ballot in Pennsylvania. State suffrage organizations mounted a vibrant campaign using a variety of strategies in support of enfranchising the women of the Keystone State. Speakers played a central role in this campaign, including a four-month lecture tour by African American author and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She kept a scrapbook of her tour that reveals her recognition of its historical significance. Her scrapbook also highlights the role of African American women who worked toward the goal of voting rights for all in Pennsylvania. Finally, it illuminates the strategies used by Pennsylvania suffrage leaders. While the men of the state voted down the suffrage referendum in 1915, the hard work of suffragists, including Dunbar-Nelson and other African Americans, paid off four years later when Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution on June 24, 1919.

Why We Need a Long View of Abolition to End the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Drawing on experiential, literary and historical narratives, this article connects the long history shaping the school-to-prison-pipeline to the contemporary experiences of Black youth in today’s educational system. It maps abolitionism from its origins as a movement to end slavery through the ongoing Black freedom struggles that have challenged state and vigilante violence throughout the eras of Jim Crow and Civil Rights to today’s efforts to dismantle the prison state. By situating the criminalization of African American education from our nation’s founding until the present with particular focus on the post Brown years, the article stresses how policies that funded policing over education persisted through liberal and conservative administrations. This longer and broader historical approach to school discipline should help teachers, school administrators and policy makers devise anti-racist teaching practices that can resist the seemingly unyielding and ever adaptable strictures of white supremacy, most recently evidenced in the attacks on “Critical Race Theory,” “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” initiatives and so-called “wokism.” By listening to how those who have been enslaved and incarcerated regarded education, I join a chorus of voices suggesting how we might structure our pedagogical choices as a fugitive practice that looks for solutions outside the institution and imagines as yet unthought of alternatives to the ways punishment is incorporated into today’s public education.

Race and the Yale Report of 1828

AbstractThis essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability. The Yale Report’s vision for leadership and economic success not only excluded African Americans by default, but created a lasting binary that defined Black educational opportunities in the nineteenth century and beyond. The essay considers the near overlap between the writing of the Yale Report and the failed proposal to establish an African American men’s college in New Haven in 1831, placing the document within a key period in the history of American higher education in which education became highly commodified and racialized. Building upon scholarship on the Yale Report that has already considered its neorepublican aims, this essay opens the possibility of viewing the document beyond its immediate concerns with curricular reform and contemplating the elusive connections between American higher education, race, and power.

The Philosophy of Black Education and the Promise of Democratic Organizing

ABSTRACT: To progress toward fulfilling the “promise of democracy” articulated in the 1963 March on Washington requires America’s self-understanding as a diverse people full of tremendous potential and capacity to address our problems. To meet that challenge requires lessons from African American community and cultural organizing in the black freedom movement and the concept of pedagogical personalism from African American education, which affirms the inviolable dignity, worth, and potential of every person. The potential and the dignity of the people came alive in the Rosenwald schools and libraries, which were organized by a network called Jeanes Teachers, some of the most remarkable community organizers in American history. Most of them were educated in HBCUs. This legacy and its vision needs to be put into conversation with community organizing today.

How Alta Vista Became Prairie View: Lawrence Washburne Minor and the Beginnings of Public Higher Education for African Americans in Texas

How Alta Vista Became Prairie View: Lawrence Washburne Minor and the Beginnings of Public Higher Education for African Americans in Texas

What Purpose Education? Anna Julia Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s Differing Views on Education

ABSTRACT: This article discusses Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s advocacy for African American education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper and Washington had very different opinions about the purpose and kind of education African Americans should receive. Each saw education as central to African Americans’ success and inclusion in the American nation. Cooper perceived education as an opportunity for self-actualization and a way to resist political oppression and racial discrimination. Washington had a more pragmatic approach to education, seeing it as a utilitarian tool to help create a Black labor class to reconstruct a New South. Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) and “Educational Programs” (ca. 1930s) and Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech (1895) and Up from Slavery (1901) provide readers insight into their ideas about the purpose of education. Cooper and Washington were two of the leading voices debating the question, What purpose education? Was education meant to be emancipatory and liberating, as the enslaved and their descendants believed and hoped it would be? Or was it meant to be pragmatic and utilitarian, as those seeking economic solutions to their problems thought it should be? The answers to these questions would have long-lasting effects on the lives of African Americans.

Impact of Pharmacist-Led Health Initiatives in Rural Alabama

Perry County is a predominantly African American community in rural Alabama. The prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension is higher than average in the Perry County population. The Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Clinic, a collaboration between Samford University McWhorter School of Pharmacy, Sowing Seeds of Hope, and the Perry County Health Department, partnered with the Perry County Department of Transportation (DOT) to offer DOT employees, mostly African American men, health screenings and education delivered at times and locations convenient to their work schedules. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the impact of a community partnership with pharmacist-led health interventions on modifiable cardiovascular risk factors in participants lacking access to other community health initiatives due to work obligations. This study was a retrospective chart review evaluating changes in blood pressure and body mass index (BMI). Participants included DOT employees 18 years of age and older who participated in at least two health screenings 12 weeks apart. Over the course of the intervention, the average systolic blood pressure decreased by 6 mmHg, and the average diastolic blood pressure decreased by 4 mmHg. The baseline BMI average of 35.1 kg/m2 had dropped to 34.5 kg/m2 at 12 weeks. Although modest, the reductions in blood pressure and BMI indicate a potential for cardiovascular disease risk reduction. Lessons learned from this pilot project can inform the initiation of similar programs intended to decrease cardiovascular risk. Pharmacist-led interventions combined with community support can lead to positive cardiovascular results among rural communities.

The Inequities Embedded in Measures of Engagement in Science Education for African American Learners from a Culturally Relevant Science Pedagogy Lens

Although African American educators strive to ameliorate racist and/or sexist barriers to learners’ science engagement in U.S. education, examples of applications of culturally relevant science instruments to measure African American learners’ engagement in science are hard to find in the literature. Inaccurate perceptions about student engagement in science education continue to exist, including assumptions about the prevalence and effects of low socioeconomic status, limited content knowledge, and a lack of interest or motivation of African American learners compared to white learners. Most exemplars of student engagement in science focus on the cognitive, behavioral, and social mores of white, male, cisgender, middle-class learners and their reactions to teacher pedagogy. This article reports on a qualitative study of three African American female and male secondary science educators’ narratives of “engagement” in science amongst systemic inequities in the northeastern and southeastern U.S. regions. To better understand African American learners’ science engagement, I combined socially transformative science curriculum approaches for African American students using five types of mastery with the concepts of culturally relevant science pedagogy as the facilitator of racial equity. A critical-arts-based research methodology was used to craft participants’ autobiographical data and drawings into a literary métissage of the participants’ experiences, memories, and culturally relevant pedagogical strategies. Themes included: (1) teachers’ recognition that their interest and positionality impacted their engagement in science; (2) their understanding of how identifying as scientists informed their career choices and modes of participation; and (3) their observations about how mentoring and vision influenced students’ attitudes about engaging in science. The major finding was that critical incidents that teachers experienced when they were students in K-20 schools influenced how they became engaged in science and constructed their culturally relevant practices as science educators. The implications of this finding for pre-service and teacher leadership development for equitable teaching and learning will be discussed, and recommendations for using culturally relevant science practices and navigating power dynamics will be provided.

Relational Supervision: Jegnaship And Eldering As Emancipatory Pedagogy For Black Teacher Supervision

The case delves into the historical and cultural roots of African education, emphasizing the vital role of elders and community in the learning process. It examines the impact of African educational philosophies, particularly from the Nile and Niger river valleys, on the development of character, humanness, and spirituality. The case explores the adaptation of these philosophies by African people during the Middle Passage and their application in Western contexts for the supervision of African American teachers. By interweaving culture, history, education, and storytelling, the authors aim to highlight the unique contributions of African American educational experiences. They argue that these experiences provide valuable strategies for the liberation struggle and the transformation of Black teacher development. The case also explores contemporary issues in the teaching profession, such as the limited presence of African American educators, pedagogical negligence, and professional marginalization, proposing culturally-centered tools for community preservation and well-being. The central theme is the importance of relational supervision rooted in African and African American cultural knowledge, which is seen as key to nurturing Black novice teachers and fostering their professional development.

African American education in the Global South: tracing the influences of industrial training in early twentieth-century Fiji

ABSTRACT While Fiji was a British colony, in the early twentieth century, education to Indigenous Fijians was delivered by missions including the Methodist Overseas Mission of Australasia. As argued here, education delivery was influenced by policies for African Americans. Policies from Tuskegee Institute in the American South were transposed to Nausori, where i taukei (people of the land) and Indo-Fijians were encouraged into industrial mission schemes, away from traditional communal lifestyles. This article illustrates how contemporary educational philosophies for and by Black men and women were part of a broader education network that acted as a locus of colonial reform. While some in the colonial hierarchy considered his emphasis on agricultural training appropriate to their vision of Native Fijian advancement, concurrently, Fijians themselves – passing through the mission system promoted competing forms of modernisation. They used missionary education, including influences of Washington’s approach, to speak back to British power and authority.

Black doctoral student research participants: A mixed‐method systematic literature review

AbstractIn this study, we use a mixed‐method systematic literature review of articles that include African American counselor education doctoral student participants in the research. From this corpus of inquiry, we provide an opportunity for counselor education researchers to lead the way with inclusive scholarship and the use of strengths‐based frameworks. We examine how to conceptualize research particularly for African American doctoral student participants and offer suggestions on how to write the discussion and implication sections in a way to promote innovation and excellence.

A journey of a Black Woman’s Archivist: Phyllis Ntantala, Margaret Walker and Queen Mother Moore’s quest for a Pan-African Liberation

ABSTRACTPhyllis Ntantala (7 January 1920–17 July 2016), anti-apartheid writer, political activist, educator, and mother, encouraged me to become a Black Woman’s Archivist. A Black Woman’s Archivist excavates and preserves the stories of black transnational women whose works create, impact, and contribute to multiple black radical movements. By using a portraiture methodology, I share the history of Africana women like Phyllis Ntantala, while highlighting my relationship to her and other Africana women’s experiences in Pan-African Liberation struggles. Phyllis’s story led me to my initial experience with the archive, which expanded my research on Africana women’s roles in Pan-African Liberation struggles. Her work encourages my current research on Margaret Walker (7 July 1915–30 November 1998), African American writer, political activist, mother, and educator who created the Conference of African Affairs in 1971 at Jackson State University that advocated against various forms of colonialism. There is also Queen Mother Moore (27 July 1898–2 May 1997), Pan African Leader, founder of the Reparation Movement, political theorist, mother, and educator. Emergent themes like anti-apartheid advocacy, education, and literary activism connect these transnational women. They contribute to a black feminist praxis and leadership within African Liberation Movements despite the normalcy of heteropatriarchy.

African American Historians of Education and the Griot's Craft: A Historiography

AbstractThis article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of African American education historians from the late nineteenth century to the present? Although much scholarship has been published on African American education, its history remains underrepresented in the study of educational history. Nonetheless, this historiography is burgeoning thanks to Black educational historians’ scholarship.

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street

Blake Hill-Saya, Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street

Mapping the Contours of Black Juvenile Delinquency: The Journal of Negro Education, 1945-1975

This essay draws on media studies methodologies to map the ways in which the Journal of Negro Education (JNE) defined juvenile delinquency both as a legal and social construct and how its contributors and approached the relationship between delinquency and schooling between 1945 and 1975. Situated in the mediatized history of social science and its role in defining issues of public concern, and in historiography that attends to the criminalization of black youth, this essay contends that the shifting meanings of what delinquency symbolized in the pages of JNE and its relationship to race allow us insight into how the liberal democratic state has approached who counts as a citizen, who can be included in the future of the nation, and how schools as total institutions are related to white supremacist notions of discipline and control.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Technical Education Policies in Colonial and Independent Kenya

Policy evolution on technical education in Kenya can be traced back to the recommendation of the Fraser commission of 1909. The Commission recommended education on a racial basis. Africans were to receive vocational and industrial education. The Phelps-Stokes commission in 1924 formulated plans designed for the education needs of Africans. The commission transferred to Kenya theories on Negro education developed at Hampton and Tuskegee institutes in the United States of America. The theories advanced that Africans’ cranial capacity was smaller than that of the Europeans and hence Africans were considered to be non-rational beings. Therefore, they stressed that education best suited for Africans was in manual skills. Following independence, the first education commission (Ominde Commission) established in 1963 addressed the issue of technical and vocational education. The successive education commissions adhered to Ominde’s recommendations. The national conference on education and training convened in 2003 emphasized the need for Technical and vocational education. The issue had to be captured by Kenya's education sector support program, the sessional paper no.1 of 2005, the technical education Act of 2013, and sessional paper number 1 of 2019. The education system had, therefore, to emphasize technical and vocational education as envisaged in sustainable development goals and vision 2030. It thus gave Technical and vocational education a legal framework for proper implementation.