Black Education Research Articles

Fabulachia: urban, black female experiences and higher education in Appalachia

This article draws on focus group conversations with black female college students attending a small, liberal arts institution in Kentucky. Based primarily on group interviews and discussions, as well as observations and analysis – a theoretical domain (referred to throughout the article as ‘Fabulachia’) emerged as a site-specific outcome of events and ideas regarding race, gender and identity experienced by the research participants. Specifically, ‘Fabulachia’ functions as a theoretical hybrid space in which urban (e.g. ‘ghetto fabulous’) black college student-voices find a sense of empowerment as they construct their own narratives of leaving ‘the hood’ to attend college in rural Appalachia. This project revises and updates previous research on race and rural identity/ies in order to situate the urban black female experience into an Appalachian context. Drawing on hip hop feminism and urban education based theoretical paradigms, the Fabulachia study seeks to give voice to black females in contemporary Appalachia, with attention to their self-proclaimed ‘ghetto fabulous’ identities honed in and through their urban upbringings. The unique experiences of (Fabulachian) black females are an important and largely absent part of larger conversations of the growing body of Urban education research that seeks to situate the black student/black youth and schooling experience in the US. In the Fabulachia study, a group of black female students shared personal narratives (part-oral history and part direct response) to prompts and queries about the role of hip hop culture, race and gender identity in their lives. They also discussed and debated what it means to be a black female in contemporary (often racist) Appalachia, and about how their families and urban surroundings influenced their processes of being and becoming in the context of higher educational achievement.

Beyond a Bachelor’s

Advancing the education of Blacks is of paramount importance. Black students are underrepresented in graduate degrees in Science Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Much attention has been paid to undergraduate retention but very little to graduate degree preparation, a requirement in many professional fields. Given the popularity of the field of psychology, the most popular undergraduate major, and the underrepresentation of people of color in graduate programs, we present a case study of a university-sponsored graduate bridge program, EMERGE. We highlight essential program components including university buy-in, economic considerations, program leadership, mentorship, cultural engagement, and academic preparedness. The implementation of these elements in to the EMERGE program are discussed as well as its demonstrated effectiveness in increasing application competitiveness and doctoral admissions. The program can serve as a model bridge program for all fields of post-baccalaureate education.

“No Time for Messin’ Around!” Understanding Black Educator Urgency: Implications for the Preparation of Urban Educators

Studies of effective Black educators describe the teacher’s sense of urgency as the guiding perspective that manifests in their authoritative, insistent manner. Although the bulk of this work offers snapshots of insistence in practice, less is known about the perspectives that undergird Black educator urgency. Using collaborative inquiry methodology framed within an emancipatory theoretical perspective, this article describes the sociocultural factors that give rise to the sense of urgency perceived by Black educators. Findings revealed that the factors that contributed to Black educator urgency were rooted in the educators’ culture-specific perspectives. Discussion and implications for teacher educators conclude the article.

A grammar for black education beyond borders: exploring technologies of schooling in the African Diaspora

Education has been a technology used to sustain black abjection across the African Diaspora. Employing Mills’ Racial Contract and Althusser’s theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) through a racial lens, this article will discuss how white supremacist education has been used to promote the misrecognition of black subjects as sub-human. German colonizers’ recruitment of Booker T. Washington to develop cotton schools in Togo, West Africa will be explored to highlight this phenomenon. Beyond this, the article demonstrates how members of the Diaspora have resisted white supremacist education, through what I have termed as Educational Diasporic Practice. This concept will be explored through the work of Chinua Achebe and Carter G. Woodson. Ultimately, this article recommends a global language of blackness as context for educators and researchers concerned with schooling experiences of black students.

Back to the Woodshop: Black Education, Imperial Pedagogy, and Post-Racial Mythology under the Reign of Obama

For centuries, European thinkers, and their contemporary white followers, have run rampant in the halls of academia prematurely championing the success of liberalism to speak to the experience of those historical groups of people excluded from modernity, while simultaneously celebrating the universal embrace by the supple bosom of whites’ anthropologically specific ideas of reason and humanity. This philosophical impetus has solidified the political regime of integration as not only the most desirable but also the most realizable condition of Black (co)existence in America. The education of Black Americans has been collapsed into a single ideological goal, namely, how to mold these Blacks into more functional and productive members of American society under the idea of equality established by Brown v. Board of Education. Unfortunately, however, such a commitment elevates the ethical appeals made by Brown, which focused on higher ideals of reason and humanity found in liberal political thought and the eventual transcendence of racial identity, to moral code. This ideology, instead of attending to what Blacks should learn or the knowledge Blacks need to have in order to thrive as Blacks in America, forces Blacks to abide by the social motives that aim to create good Negro citizens. When responding to the great debate over Negro education and Negro labor in the United States, Du Bois remarked: My thoughts, the thoughts of Washington, Trotter, Oswald Garrison Villard were the expression of social forces more than of our own minds. These forces or ideologies embraced more than reasoned acts. They included physical, biological and psychological habits, conventions and enactments. Opposed to these came natural reaction; the physical recoil of the victims, the unconscious and irrational urges, as well as reasoned complaints and acts. The total result was the history of our day. That history may be epitomize in one word—Empire; the domination of white Europe over [B]lack Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income and idea. The echo of this industrial imperialism in America was the expulsion of [B]lack men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery. (W. E. B. Du Bois— A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century: The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois—1968)

A Critical Review of Education for the New Frontier: A Promising Text for Educators, Researchers, and Students About the History of Black Post-Secondary Education

A Critical Review of <i>Education for the New Frontier</i>: A Promising Text for Educators, Researchers, and Students About the History of Black Post-Secondary Education

“Thank God for Mississippi!” How Disparagement of the South Has Destroyed Public Schooling in New Orleans—and Beyond

It is not uncommon to reference dire conditions in the South to make the nation appear more racially equitable and economically advanced by comparison. In this essay, I argue that the meanings and complexities surrounding commonplace disparagement of the South are not only troubling, but serve to advance the forms of race and class power ostensibly under critique. I do not contend that depictions of the South as racially oppressive are inaccurate or wrong. Rather, my purpose is to reveal that southern exceptionalism is a farce; the North has played a pivotal role in perpetuating White supremacy, which is a national problem, not a regional one. Second, disparagement of the South, seemingly premised on critiques of White supremacy, is likewise premised (with contradiction) on the marginalization of historic traditions of Black education and resistance. Third, when combined, these tendencies enable the most destructive forms of educational reconstruction to be advanced as solutions to what historically has been called the “Negro Question.” To develop my argument, I draw on critical theories of place and race; historical scholarship on the Jim Crow North and South, Black education, and resistance; analyses of popular culture, with a focus on historical and symbolic representations of the South; and a decade of research on school reform in New Orleans, where privately managed charter schools and alternative teacher recruitment—reforms bankrolled by White northern philanthropists—have been advocated as the means for refining southern space, uplifting the race, and modernizing public education to align with business. In the final analysis, I show how conceptions of place and region influence, often in unacknowledged ways, the racial dynamics of urban educational reform in the South and ultimately the nation, much to the detriment of African Americans.

John Brown's Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature

Before his execution in 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown wrote a series of prison letters that – along with his death itself – helped to cement the abolitionist aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom. This article charts the adaptation of that aesthetic in antilynching protest literature during the decades that followed. It reveals Brown's own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction, and the endurance of the emancipatory martyr symbol that he helped to inaugurate. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, black and white writers imagined lynching's ritual violence as a crucifixion and drew upon the John Brown aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom, including Frederick Douglass, Stephen Graham, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, black Baptist ministers, and black educators and journalists. Fusing martyrdom and messianism, these antilynching writers made the black Christ of their texts an avenging liberatory angel. The testamentary body of this messianic martyr figure marks the nation for violent retribution. Turning the black Christ into a Brown-like prophetic sign of God's vengeful judgment, antilynching writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries warned of disaster, demanded a change of course, challenged white southern notions of redemption, and insisted that African Americans must reemancipate themselves and redeem the nation.

A forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the Jim Crow South

A forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the Jim Crow South

Pursuing the Dream of Educational Equality

Pursuing the Dream of Educational Equality Gregg L. Michel (bio) Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xv + 366 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Tracy E. K’Meyer. From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954–2007. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xii + 221 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. More than sixty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the racial composition of American public schools has faded as a major educational concern for most Americans. Today, preserving—or even achieving—racial diversity in classrooms has taken a backseat to seemingly more pressing issues, as debates over student achievement, standardized testing, teacher training and accountability, and state funding have revealed. At the same time, Supreme Court decisions have freed schools and localities from the burden of having to address enduring racial imbalances in their student populations. The current debates about race, public education, and Brown itself inform Sarah Caroline Thuesen’s and Tracy E. K’Meyer’s compelling studies of race and schools in North Carolina and Louisville in the twentieth century. Each book situates Brown and its legacy in the broader historical context. By doing so, they shift our focus to alternative strategies for educational improvement and uncover different perspectives on Brown’s long and contested legacy. Brown was neither inevitable nor the only possible path toward educational advancement for African Americans. Thuesen’s work on North Carolina explores the long-term, deeply felt, but ultimately unsuccessful efforts by black educators, parents, and reformers to achieve equalization of black and white schools rather than the wholesale integration of public schools in the state. Similarly, K’Meyer’s study of Louisville shows that criticism that court-ordered busing and other strategies to achieve mixed classrooms were flawed, misguided, and deeply unpopular has served to obscure the reservoir of support for such policies that existed at the time of Brown and that persisted for decades after. [End Page 176] Taken together, the books simultaneously demonstrate that goals other than full school desegregation commanded support among African Americans, while reaffirming popular support for it once Brown made school desegregation the law of the land. Greater Than Equal focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, when black education in North Carolina expanded significantly and drew support from white political leaders. The growth and development of black schools reflected the importance African Americans attached to education and to schools as sources of community pride, personal advancement, and, most significantly, the rights of first-class citizenship. As the segregationist system hardened in the early twentieth century, political rights and civic equality, the typical markers of citizenship, were out of reach for most African Americans. With these avenues toward citizenship blocked, African Americans “looked to public education as their way back to the civic foundations of American life” (p. 8). But any hope of achieving such a goal required vast improvements to the quality of black schooling: more and better school buildings, better-trained teachers, broader curricula, and equitable funding. These gains could only be won with the support of white leaders who saw increased funding for black schools as a means of defusing black agitation and containing demands for full citizenship. The equalization campaigns undertaken by black communities throughout North Carolina starting in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s testify to the deep faith many placed in education as the key to citizenship. Yet their gains, while real, were limited and served to expose “the inherent limitations of any fight for equality in a deeply segregated society” (p. 2). Equalization efforts in North Carolina gained momentum in the years after World War I. Black leaders initially focused on redressing the inadequate number and poor quality of schools serving black children. The situation was especially grim in rural areas, where run-down, one-room schools impeded instruction and distracted students. In response, black leaders cultivated ties with state officials who proved willing to support African American schools out of a sense of paternalistic duty as...

Between left and right: Are descendants of slaves in Brazil still Black?

According to some social scientists, policies of affirmative action in higher education for Blacks in Brazil were only initiated in the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. However, other authors claim that the Cardoso government actually “played a major role” in the discussion and implementation of these policies. They also claim that the Lula government wholeheartedly supported policies promoting racial equality, as demonstrated by the creation of the Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality (Secretaria Especial de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial) in his first year in office. However, this article seeks to demonstrate that the racial question and/or racial inequalities, as well as proposals to combat racism, were neither part of the neoliberal market-oriented agenda of Cardoso’s administration nor did they play a significant role in Lula’s pro-social policy administration. Despite ushering in changes in Brazilian official discourse and regulatory frameworks on race, Cardoso did not explicitly support those policies. And, notwithstanding President Lula’s verbally explicit support for such policies and the creation of Secretaria Especial de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial, he failed to implement any policy of affirmative action for Black students in Brazilian public higher education institutions.

A world of their own: a history of South African women's education

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorised the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harboured by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education--introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

The 2014 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium Presentation. School “Outer-gration” and “Tokenism”: Segregated Black Educators Critique the Promise of Education Reform in the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Principal D. F. Glover lost his job as a principal in South Georgia during tense years from 1968 to 1970 when public demonstrations for equality waned and multiple signals indicated school integration would fail to accomplish its original goals. Glover's dismissal resulted after repeated school protests. Eventually, he used his elected leadership in 13,000-member Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GTEA) to challenge continued educational mistreatment of Black school communities in an era when integration was expected to yield equality. Let it be written, he postulated, in 1968-69 Black students, teachers, and parents stated in no uncertain terms that we have taken too much too long. We have had enough. We can't stand idly by and see ourselves for generations to come entangled in webs.2Glover's words may have been influenced by his direct experiences with demotion, but they bespoke judgment of myriad Black educational leaders across state and nation. In speeches and prayers, Black educators stated explicitly challenges Black schools confronted as local Whites resisted desegregated in a variety of institutionalized ways. The prayers that began their professional meetings acknowledged hatred, mistrust, antipathy rampant in South and beseeched Almighty to bring people together. They acknowledged they were accountable to posterity for decisions being made that would affect the destiny of Black boys and girls, teachers, parents, and laymen. In public and private discussions that followed prayers, a familiar lament dominated: The Black educators confronted a battle bigger than them-one in which a larger civil rights struggle overshadowed their protests about inequalities in implementation of integration.3With few exceptions (Cecelski, 1994; Irvine & Irvine, 1983; Jones, 1981), perspectives of these educators and potential value to desegregation have remained largely lost in historiography of period. Following a widely accepted historical portrait that reduced Black educators to self-serving individuals who had no response to desegregation beyond a fear for their jobs, few scholars writing about desegregation have sought a more expansive view of their role in school desegregation or interrogated muffled cry for justice they repeatedly launched (Baker, 1996; Charron, 2009; Cobb, 2005; Fultz, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Kluger, 2004). Even fewer scholars have considered implications for education of Black children of their unheeded protest. This failure is ironic.Revisionist scholarship documents these educators increased literacy rates, decreased dropout rates, and increased college attendance. (Juergensen, in press). Despite limited resources, they created caring school climates that inspired generations of Black children to achieve academically and to assume their places as full participants in American dream (Foster, 1988; Jones, 1980; Morris & Morris, 2000; Noblit & Dempsey, 1996; Walker, 1996). Moreover, through their educational organizations, Black educators protested inequitable treatment of Black education in every generation from reconstruction to desegregation (Fairclough, 2007, Perkins, 1989; Picott, 1975; Porter, 1977; Potts, 1978; Walker, 2000, 2001, 2009a). The loss of perspective of these advocates as context for current desegregation and resegregation era is, arguably, as egregious an error as was firing of more than 31,000 educators during desegregation.This article resurrects perspectives of Black educators using GTEA as a case study to explore issues these educators sought to have engaged by nation and other public educational advocates during desegregation period from 1968 to 1970. It uses an historical ethnographic lens applied to files in private collection of organization's last executive director, Dr. Horace Edward Tate, to seek to understand events of desegregation as they held meaning to Black educators. …

Fine Arts &amp; Africana Studies

Fine Arts & Africana Studies John McCluskey Jr. (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution John McCluskey, Jr. (speaking) with Courtney Bryan, Eric J. Henderson, and Erica R. Edwards Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 566] Africana studies is strategically placed to embrace the fine and performing arts into its curricula. This is a challenge evident from the insistence or responses of students, colleagues, and interested observers of university curriculum-building over the years. From their inception the placement of history and literature at the core of the emerging field (not yet a discipline) has been consistent from programs and departments across the country. In the majority of programs, the fine arts (creative writing, dance, music, film) came late to the curriculum core. This, despite the powerful currents within the concurrent Black Arts movement of the late 1960s and 1970s particularly in poetry and short dramas. There may be many reasons for this historically, but in my brief remarks I plan to focus on only a couple. I fashion no hierarchy among those programs with or without a strong presence of fine arts. Specifically, I want to offer commentary on the practitioner of fine arts in the academy. The classical ideal of the liberally educated man and woman emphasized a curriculum that would result in an individual deeply conversant in the humanities—philosophy, history as approached many years ago, religious studies, literary history and criticism, as well as social history, economics, and political science. These would be taught by those with terminal degrees in the fields. Whenever possible, this notion was held by the curriculum builders at early African American colleges. In addition to their tireless and stoic efforts at pushing the agenda of industrial education during the early-twentieth century, among others Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington invited Black writers and musical performers to their campuses. In his ringing conclusion to his masterful essay, “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Du Bois says succinctly on the teaching mission of the first generation of Black colleges: “Teach workers to work. … Teach thinkers to think. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist or a brickmason, but a man.” If I qualify that only slightly to mean a “complete human being,” the challenge is clear to the mission of Black education, then and now. How might the teaching and learning of the fine arts play a role in Africana studies, specifically, in developing that complete person? Indeed how might the arts enter into the discussion of pedagogy and the very ethics of program building? Decades later, enter the placement and role of the practitioner of the fine arts among the faculty of Africana studies. As the professoriate professionalized itself during the past century, there arose among American university faculties a growing anxiety among the creative artists—the poets, choreographers, painters, playwrights—and those who taught history, criticism, and theory in literature, art, and dance. Leaving aside the stereotypes of the creative artist—disorganized, given to emotional outbursts, helpless before the tedium [End Page 567] of the day-to-day, such as faculty meetings, fidgeting in anticipation of inspiration (the list goes on)—there was the suspicion of rigor. I mean here both the suspicion of rigor as an instructor and the suspicion of rigor afforded to the creative works by a colleague. The bias within the notion of a spontaneous poem or piece of choreography is as wide of the mark as the notion of the naturally gifted elite athlete. The hours of endless revising to achieve a distant perfection parallels the hours of endless practice to reach the “top of one’s game” in basketball or swimming or figure skating. Those who have taught creative writing workshops will attest to the effort to guide and coax a body of polished prose or poetry from our students. Those who have been students in these workshops can also attest to the attention to detail, perseverance, and hopefully deep respect for the craft. Again the professionals who write know that the perfect line in cadence and sense is the line known as the horizon. Still the bias remains. That stance which looks askance at the...

“A Narrative to the Colored Children in America”: Lelia Amos Pendleton, African American History Textbooks, and Challenging Personhood

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. …

“Such a Great Light”: Letters to Louisa and Abba Alcott from the Holley School for Freed People and the Story of Winnie Beale's Emancipation

Historical Introduction1One night in Lottsburgh2 on Virginia's Northern Neck-maybe it was April, probably in 1876-Sam Blackwell (ca. 1815-?) sat with his fellow nightschool students in the classroom of the Holley School as his teacher, Caroline Putnam (1826-1917), aloud the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). As Putnam reached a stopping place, Blackwell interjected: is the most familiarest book ever heard (letter 7, below). Caroline Putnam is known to historians as a founder of the school-one of the early schools in Virginia for freed people after the Civil War. It certainly makes sense that she would have been reading the Douglass Narrative; Frederick Douglass (1818-95) and Caroline Putnam knew one another as fellow members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Douglass was one of the prominent abolitionists whom Putnam had asked to serve as bondsmen for her installation as Lottsburgh's postmistress. The Narrative was a text with which Putnam was intimately familiar. While less is known about Sam Blackwell, one may well imagine the impact of the Narrative on him. Given that the conversation took place in the night-school classes at the Holley School, Blackwell and his fellow students were likely emancipated slaves-eleven years after the end of the war and thirteen after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, there were still many freed people in the area seeking an education for themselves and their children. The 1870 census for Lottsburgh, Virginia, shows that Samuel Blackwell (age 56) was a farmer and a resident of Lottsburgh and husband to Mary Blackwell (age 55), with Virginia (age 20), Novella (age 11), and Auther (age 12) also in the household.3 The form suggests that Samuel was literate (as the boxes for cannot read and cannot were not checked for him, as they were for Mary and Virginia) and notes that Auther attended school within the year-no doubt also at Holley School.It is likely that Sam Blackwell was related to Glasgow Blackwell (dates unknown), who had, back in November of 1868, welcomed Putnam when she had first been installed as the new schoolmistress.4 Said Glasgow Blackwell in his address to the assembled, They told me they would break my fingers off close to my hand if they catched me with a book in it. But now our children will have this good chance to learn to write, . . . and they will have to come to our children to get their business done (qtd. in Herbig 243-44). Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative, had instructed the reader in the crucial importance of his own literacy in making his escape from slavery possible: I wished to learn how to write, as have occasion to write my own pass (280). While thanking his young teachers, however-the hungry little urchins of the Baltimore streets-Douglass made clear that he would not name them, as it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to in this Christian country (278). As Caroline Putnam this story to Sam Blackwell's class, certainly he would have understood that education-forbidden under slavery to his kinsmen, to Frederick Douglass, and to himself-would help to make his life, and that of his community, more navigable, though it would still be condemned by many, for both student and teacher.The blacks of Lottsburgh, Virginia, however, were clearly ready to face the risks and challenges of getting an education. As Heather Andrea Williams writes in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom about her findings related to postbellum black education,It made perfect sense that someone who had climbed into a hole in the woods to attend school would, in freedom, sacrifice time and money to build a schoolhouse. It rang true that people who waited up until ten o'clock at night to sneak off to classes on the plantation would want to establish schools in the open as soon as they possibly could. (5)It would have been a self-evident truth to the enslaved and ultimately emancipated people of the South that education would be essential to their very survival, let alone their economic advancement. …

Black Males and Adult Education: A Call to Action

In this concluding chapter, the editors offer their reflections on the key themes of this volume and implications for future research and practitioners of adult education.

Snip, Snip: Reflections on Hair, Loss, and Love

Hill L. Waters (HLW), a partnership birthed by two artist scholars, Dominique C. Hill and Durell M. Callier, is an intentional social justice venture. As two queer, black educators interested in co...

Coming From Behind: A Historical Perspective on Black Education and Attainment.

In our current reliance on "hard data," achievement test scores are used incorrectly and without warrant as the ultimate mark of educational progress. While it is true that a gap continues to exist, educational history shows that, overall, both Black and White students have participated steadily in increasing numbers in the educational system, whether the measure is the number of students attending school, the increasing length of the school years, literacy rates, or in the actual level of educational attainment over a period of more than 100 years. The data examined in historical perspective show that the American education system, through thick and thin, has served its students well. Those data also show that change comes slowly, in increments of just a few percent a decade. Expectations of rapid change are totally unreasonable when viewed against the historical data. In addition, the historical data show that the Black population has made progress more rapidly over time than the White population. As a result of more rapid progress, although there is still a gap between White and Black, the gap has narrowed considerably. We suggest the gap reflects history and culture. The small increments per decade argue that cultures change slowly and persist over time. We will discuss the history of Black education to suggest some reasons for the gap. The history will help us assess today's achievement gap and help us to understand how far our public education system has brought us.

Education Is the Key to Prosperity

The following article will discuss the history of formal education in Barbados and will situate how this emphasis on the equal access to education between the sexes facilitated the emigration of Black Barbadian educators, most notably Black women, in the mid-20th century. This article argues that the emphasis on education was a deliberate and calculated initiative by the Barbadian Government to assist in the socio-economic advancement of its Black population up to the mid-20th century. The author has chosen this period to reflect the mass emigration of Black Barbadians to Canada prior to liberalization of the latter’s immigration policies in the late 1960s and beyond. The article highlights that female and male Black Barbadian migrants capitalized on their educational background to circumvent and challenge racist international migration barriers. Moreover, the following will situate Black Barbadian educators in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s.