Negro Education Research Articles

Exclusion and Urban Public High Schools: Short- and Long-Term Consequences of School Suspensions

Critics of school disciplinary policies have long noted that African American, male, low-achieving, and special education students experience higher rates of school suspensions and expulsions. However, research that seeks to estimate the effects of suspensions on student outcomes rarely accounts for the preexisting differences that distinguish students who are and are not suspended. Using quasi-experimental methods and longitudinal data from New York City, we estimated the associations between suspension and academic outcomes and found that, even with more sophisticated methods, the negative relationships between suspension and outcomes persist. Specifically, we found that suspended students had weaker attendance, course completion rates, and standardized test scores; were more likely to drop out; and were less likely to graduate within 4, 5, or 6 years.

U.S. Empire and the “Adaptive Education” Model: The Global Production of Race

Following World War I, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a large-scale commercial philanthropic endeavor called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. They specifically promoted the “adaptive education” model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. They relied upon the sociologist and educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, to advocate for the transnational development of the model. Juxtaposing Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater, the author finds that two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. According to Jones and Du Bois, why did the U.S. racial state decide to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention? Furthermore, can this dynamic be conceptualized within a theory of race that conceptualizes the U.S. racial state as a nation-state?

African American pre-service physical education teachers’ learning about aquatic courses

The purpose of this study was to describe how African American pre-service physical education teachers engage themselves in learning aquatic content. This study used a case study design in andragogy theory. Seven participants (four males and three females) had very little experience and/or swimming ability prior to enrolling in the basic aquatic course. In fact, four participants had encountered near-drowning events and consequently experienced a fear of swimming. Data were collected from the participants while they were enrolled in a basic aquatic course and again while they were enrolled in the intermediate aquatic course. The data sources included self-reflective journals, a series of semi-structured face-to-face interviews and e-mail correspondence. The data were analyzed using a constant comparative method. Four significant themes were present: (a) drowning prevention lessons; (b) self-guided learning; (c) independent versus dependent learners; and (d) overcoming racial stereotypes. Based on the pre-service teachers’ interpretations of their aquatic experiences, we suggest physical education teacher education programmes should create learning experiences within aquatic courses that not only enhance future physical education teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, but that also increase their awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and social justice issues that may be faced when entering the physical education profession.

Love and Justice: African American Women, Education, and Protest in Antebellum New England

African Americans who pursued higher education in antebellum America often faced harassment and violence. Historians link the struggle over African American education with broader protest strategies, with African American men taking center stage. This essay enlarges the narrative on African American education and social protest by examining how young African American women students contested racism and white supremacy. Focusing on the controversy that surrounded the first high school for young African American women in New England, this essay argues that young African American women deployed an ethic of Christian love as a form of social protest. These women named racial prejudice as anti-Christian while also advocating for a just and loving nation inclusive of African Americans. Though white opposition eventually shuttered the school, this essay shows how African American women’s activism in the antebellum era is part of a longer genealogy of social protest.

The Politics of African-American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity. By Kenneth J. Meier and Amanda Rutherford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 221 pp., $23.72 (paper).

The Politics of African-American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity. By Kenneth J. Meier and Amanda Rutherford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 221 pp., $23.72 (paper).

Social Justice and Resilience for African American Male Counselor Educators: A Phenomenological Study

In this phenomenological study, the authors interviewed 4 African American male counselor educators about their social justice efforts. Resulting themes were lifelong commitment to social justice, reaction to resistance, professional and personal support, and the meaning of social justice work. Findings suggest that social justice work can increase professional resilience for African American male counselor educators.

“Recruited to Teach the Indians”: An African American Genealogy of Navajo Nation Boarding Schools

This article is a personal and intellectual history of colonial education in the United States. The author—an African American from Atlanta, Georgia—taught elementary school in the Navajo Nation from 2005 to 2007. He was not, however, the first person of African descent to teach on the reservation. Using genealogy as method, the article demonstrates how Indigenous land, Black labor, and racialized education intersected across six generations, culminating in an earlier migration to Navajoland, when hundreds of African American educators staffed Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding and day schools after Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregated schools across the U.S. South.

Negotiating the Aims of African American Adult Education: Race and Liberalism in the Harlem Experiment, 1931–1935

This paper examines an “experimental” program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)—who believed in the value of liberal adult education for democratic citizenship—and several prominent black reformers who led the program. I argue that the program represented a negotiation between these two groups over whether the black culture, politics, and protest that had developed in 1920s Harlem could be deradicalized and incorporated within the funder's “elite liberalism”—an approach to philanthropy that emphasized ideological neutrality, scholarly professionalism, and political gradualism. In his role as the official evaluator, African American philosopher Alain Locke insisted that it could, arguing that the program, and its occasionally Afrocentric curriculum, aligned with elite liberal ideals and demonstrated the capacity for a broader definition of (historically white) liberal citizenship. While the program was ultimately abandoned in the mid-1930s, the efforts of Locke and other black reformers helped pave the way for a future instantiation of racial incorporation: the intercultural education movement of the mid-twentieth century.

(Re)Defining the black body in the era of Black Lives Matter: the politics of blackness, old and new

ABSTRACTAs a social construction, race has been defined differently for various racial groups. The construction of the “black body,” over time, has been fraught with societal, scientific, biological, and educational conceptualizations about the members, who comprise this group. These racial ideas have challenged the humanity, rights, and sociolegal incorporation of “black” persons into American society. In order to grapple with contemporary understandings of the “black body,” we should assess the historical discourses, public policies, and vast contexts, over time, for which the “black body” has struggled to assert its equality and liberation. Through the analysis of unconventional political contexts, such as African-American education, and particularly, historically black institutions, such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) and Jim Crow black public high schools, (African)American political development can understand how race influenced the political decisions affecting the democratic experiences, agency, and responses of black Americans to their groups’ racial construction and treatment. Such studies can move black sociopolitical experiences beyond historical lore and situate them within the contemporary context of Black Lives Matter’s arguments, politics, and public policy interests.

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play": Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism

"Why I Wrote the Phyllis Wheatley Pageant-Play"Mary Church Terrell's Bicentennial Activism Lurana Donnels O'Malley (bio) Sometimes I joke in rehearsal, "If this was truly a period piece, I'd be in chains somewhere." —OKIERIETE ONAODOWAN Hamilton: An American Musical, the groundbreaking creation of Lin-Manuel Miranda, broke that ground in part by casting actors of color as key historical figures of the American Revolution and its aftermath. On Broadway, African American actors played three US presidents: Okieriete Onaodowan (James Madison), Daveed Diggs (Thomas Jefferson), and Christopher Jackson (George Washington).1 Jackson, however, was not the first man of African descent to portray George Washington on the American stage. More than eighty years earlier, in 1932, a black man played the role in a production that explored the relation between America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved: Mary Church Terrell's Historical Pageant-Play Based on the Life of Phyllis Wheatley.2 As critic Lyra D. Monteiro notes about Hamilton, there is "a truly damning omission in [Hamilton]: despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage, not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play."3 In contrast, the 1932 production of Terrell's script placed the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley front and center as an enslaved African American character with agency and impact. Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) was an African American educator, writer [End Page 225] suffragist, and civil rights activist. Terrell (figure 1) was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman in the United States appointed as a member of a board of education, in Washington, DC. Although Terrell was a prolific writer (the author of numerous essays and articles in addition to her autobiography), to my knowledge she wrote only two scripts, both intended as contributions to the 1932 bicentennial celebration of George Washington's birthday: a pageant about the African American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War and a biographical pageant-play on Phillis Wheatley. The former was never staged; the latter was performed as part of the official Washington, DC, festivities for Washington's bicentennial. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Portrait of Mary Church Terrell, courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives, Howard University, Washington, DC. Terrell's stated goal for both historical pageants was to combat the negative and demeaning images of African Americans she had encountered in other plays and pageants planned for the Washington bicentennial. In Phyllis Wheatley, Terrell exposes the injustice of authentication rituals, as Wheatley is again [End Page 226] and again asked to prove the validity of her talent as a writer. Ironically, Terrell herself faced such judgment from two sides: from black critics opposed to the Washington bicentennial's representations of African Americans and from production staff and supporters who questioned the historical authenticity of her pageant-play. Although the production faced numerous obstacles and was considerably downsized from the original plans, the performance, created by a dozen artists and staff members, featured a cast of more than two hundred African Americans, most of them public school youths performing for their own community. Phyllis Wheatley was ultimately the only staged birthday bicentennial event to place African American history at center stage and in a positive light. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Engraving of Phillis Wheatley, 1773, attributed to Scipio Moorhead. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC. As Terrell knew, the historical Wheatley (figure 2) was not only contemporaneous with Washington but also had an unusual connection to him. In October 1775, Wheatley composed a poem in honor of General Washington and sent it to him at his headquarters in Cambridge along with a brief note; in February 1776, Washington wrote a reply to thank her for it.4 Wheatley's poem first appeared in print in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776; titled "To his Excellency [End Page 227] George Washington," the panegyric praises Washington but also requests that he be guided by the...

A Plea for Emigration by Mary Ann Shadd

Reviewed by: A Plea for Emigration by Mary Ann Shadd Jennifer Harris (bio) A Plea for Emigration mary ann shadd Edited by phanuel antwi Calgary: Broadview Press, 2016 96 pp. Almost twenty years have elapsed since Richard Almonte's critical edition of Mary Ann Shadd Cary's A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West (1998) made the work central to the study of nineteenth-century black Canadian studies. The new Broadview edition, produced under advisory editor Phanuel Antwi, will be celebrated for making the text readily available to a new generation of students and scholars. Shadd Cary's 1852 work, composed as its extended title states "for the information of colored emigrants," provides an overview of living and working conditions in Canada, covering a variety of social, economic, legal, and environmental matters of interest. Hardly impartial, Shadd Cary stages a reasoned argument for the superiority of Canada over other possible sites of emigration including Mexico, South America, the West Indies, and Africa. While popular mythology forwards a narrative of black Canadian settlement by destitute refugees from slavery, Shadd Cary's publication draws attention to those settled African Americans in the North who, post–Fugitive Slave Law, might arrive under different circumstances. While most contemporary readers are probably less interested in soil quality and crop yields in Canada, it is noteworthy that Shadd Cary expected her readers to study this information and weigh it against their existing knowledge of US agriculture and costs. Indeed, her thorough delineation of Canadian conditions highlights the seriousness with many such individuals, families, and communities researched and debated relocation and its potential benefits and drawbacks. Humorously, Shadd Cary is not above countering the misinformation about Canada spread in southern states with statements equally driven more by ideology than exactness—I doubt many natives of Virginia, having survived a winter in the Dawn Settlement, would agree with her claim that the "climate is healthy and temperate." The edition includes a short unsourced introduction, providing a brief biographical sketch of Shadd Cary, touching on her career as publisher [End Page 212] and editor of the Provincial Freeman. Her text itself is positioned within the genre of settler guides, highlighting the historical circumstances that made a pamphlet explicitly directed to African Americans a viable prospect. The author has chosen to avoid the impassioned debates of the period that weighed Canada as a space for black settlement against other possible locations, instead letting Shadd Cary's own words on the matter stand. Her conflicts with other black Canadian leaders, which motivate some of her commentary, are referenced in the introduction, though not expanded on significantly. Crucial supplementary information about Shadd's contemporaries and debates is also glossed in the footnotes. However, an overview of the wider black population in Upper Canada and its operations is absent, with the edition again defaulting to Shadd Cary as the expert on such matters. Secondary materials are organized in the "In Context" section, including accounts of African American life in the United States by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Martineau, demonstrating why Canadian emigration might be desirable. A section of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, without which Shadd Cary's pamphlet would not have been produced, is also included, inviting readers to reflect upon the stakes for many of those whom Shadd Cary is addressing. Excerpts from the Provincial Freeman usefully document Shadd's editorial stance on a variety of issues. That the Provincial Freeman is now open access might facilitate additional teaching and learning activities for those wishing to further position the text within Shadd Cary's oeuvre. There's no doubt that Shadd Cary's text is important, imagining Canada as a space of ongoing black settlement, and attempting to articulate what black Canada might be beyond a space of refuge. This idea of Canada as a home complicates many understandings of the nation as simply an antechamber for African Americans, and should resonate with those students and scholars interested in transnational black studies and migration. Shadd Cary's discussion of education, discrimination, and various settlements of African Americans will be of interest to historians, while scholars of print culture will appreciate renewed attention to Shadd Cary's career. [End Page...

Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education by Christi M. Smith

Reviewed by: Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education by Christi M. Smith Mary Ellen Pethel Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education. By Christi M. Smith. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 316. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3069; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3068-7.) In 1878 John G. Fee stated, "'Those who pray together and study together will not fight'" (p. 5). Nearly 140 years later, readers of Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education will surely wonder what could have been if Fee's vision of educational integration had succeeded. Christi M. Smith examines the narrow window of time between the end of the Civil War and the normalization of codified segregation as various individuals and groups worked passionately to diversify higher education. Ultimately Smith argues that while racial coeducation was achieved in certain institutions, the increasingly competitive collegiate world, coupled with lack of federal support and enforcement as well as subsequent reliance on private organizations, led to the demise of racial coeducation. The interplay of these actors and forces against the backdrop of deep-seated racism, classism, and patriarchy led to coexistent but separate systems of higher education for African Americans, working-class white men, and women. As Smith notes, "more doors were opened, but they did not lead to equal opportunities" (p. 17). Chapters 1 and 2 provide context for U.S. policy after the Civil War. Higher education emerged as the most culturally acceptable form of rehabilitation and reform compared with other options such as military occupation, political rights, and land redistribution. Here Smith focuses on the "anti-caste" movement, which viewed race as but one category in a larger social order based on rigid stigmas determined by inherited traits rather than the merits of one's work or potential (p. 2). Even so, the expansion of land-grant colleges and public-private partnerships with organizations such as [End Page 459] the American Missionary Association (AMA), the General Education Board (GEB), and the Freedmen's Bureau did democratize higher education to an extent. College enrollment increased 278 percent between the end of the Civil War and the start of the twentieth century, but this growth did not lead to a single model. Chapter 4 delves deeper into the coordinated but at times disorganized efforts of the AMA, the GEB, and the Freedmen's Bureau. Chapter 3 documents three institutions far ahead of their time and some of the most successful experiments in racial coeducation: Berea College, Howard University, and Oberlin College. It is arguably the strongest chapter in the book. Backed by rich primary sources and data, it carefully navigates the evolution and development of each school. Smith rightly points out that there was no predetermined protocol for integrating these schools. In 1908, 5–10 percent of Oberlin's enrollment consisted of African Americans, Berea's student population was approximately 50 percent white and 50 percent black, and Howard was predominantly African American but maintained some white students. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with issues relating to white and black women and the cultivation of a male black elite, at the time often referred to as the Talented Tenth. These chapters yield great insight into the competing forces that controlled the intellectual experiences of Berea, Howard, and Oberlin students as well as those of wealthy white men who attended traditional universities. Readers will also see the formation of parallel systems of higher education in the late 1800s that remained in place until after World War II. From its first words to its final sentence, Smith's book speaks to the trials and tribulations, the victories and setbacks, and the immediate and long-term strategies of schools committed to creating an inclusive learning environment between Reconstruction and the early Progressive era. Reparation and Reconciliation uncovers a lost chapter in history that demands our attention if we are to use the past as a guide for current social and cultural divides. Most textbooks refer to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in one paragraph and the introduction of Jim Crow in the next. Smith's...

Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Hilary Green

Reviewed by: Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Hilary Green Daniel B. Thorp (bio) Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890. By Hilary Green. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 258. $125.00 cloth; $35.00 paper) Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 adds nicely to our understanding of the extended nature of Reconstruction in the American South. Remaking the racial patterns of political, social, and economic life in the former Confederacy did not end with the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau and federal troops during the 1870s. Nor did the [End Page 544] full weight of Jim Crow laws immediately come crashing down on African Americans with the official end of Reconstruction in 1877. Rather, former slaves and their children continued pressing to gain the full privileges of citizenship—privileges to which they felt they were entitled and that they believed they had been promised at the time of their emancipation. As the title suggests, Educational Reconstruction considers this process through the lens of public education in the urban South. Specifically, Green focuses on the cities of Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama, and explores the emergence and development of schools for African Americans through three distinct periods. The first two chapters detail the initial establishment of schools for freed-people by northern philanthropic societies, the Freedmen's Bureau, and freedpeople themselves. The next six chapters explore the transition to state-supported education that occurred after 1870 in both Richmond and Mobile and the "quality school campaigns" waged in each to effect improved conditions in the cities' racially segregated public school systems. Finally, an extended epilogue analyzes factors behind the failure of Congress to enact the Blair Education Bill in 1890 and the subsequent ascendancy of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model of industrial education for southern blacks. Green's research draws heavily on a variety of public records from the local, state, and federal levels; the archives of numerous religious and philanthropic organizations; and newspapers from Boston to New Orleans. From them she is often able to present the hopes and fears of African American educators, voters, and parents in their own words and demonstrate convincingly their belief that a quality education was essential to their campaign for full freedom and citizenship. That campaign, however, was never in the hands of African Americans alone. Green demonstrates convincingly that between 1865 and 1890 southern blacks found and worked with a changing array of white allies in their effort to secure a quality education for themselves and their children. These white allies did not control black efforts to improve their schools; in both Richmond and [End Page 545] Mobile African Americans knew what they wanted, articulated their demands clearly, and worked for them tirelessly. The presence and commitment of white allies was important, though. Indeed, Green maintains, it was the presence in Virginia of the Readjuster Party that explains why blacks in Richmond enjoyed greater success in their campaign for quality schools than their counterparts in Mobile did. Educational Reconstruction makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of southern society during the final third of the nineteenth century. It joins the work of scholars such as Steven Hahn and Michael Perman in demonstrating that black and white southerners continued to negotiate the boundaries of a new reality for years after federal troops left the region. In one regard, however, Green's interpretation of educational reconstruction may require a corrective. She views the triumph of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model as one of rural black southerners over their urban brother and sisters, yet in Southwest Virginia, at least, rural blacks also objected loudly to the shift from a more classical education to an industrial model. That notwithstanding, Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction offers a valuable study of the long and determined effort made by black southerners to achieve educational equality in the decades immediately after the abolition of slavery. Daniel B. Thorp DANIEL B. THORP is an associate professor of history and an associate dean in Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences. He is the author of...

The Baron and the Bear: Rupp's Runts, Haskins's Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever by David Kingsley Snell

Reviewed by: The Baron and the Bear: Rupp's Runts, Haskins's Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever by David Kingsley Snell Jamal Ratchford (bio) The Baron and the Bear: Rupp's Runts, Haskins's Miners, and the Season That Changed Basketball Forever. By David Kingsley Snell. Foreward by Nolan Richardson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. 312. $29.95 cloth) March 19, 2016, marked the 50th anniversary of the so-called Glory Road game when the all-black starting five from Texas Western College defeated the all-white University of Kentucky team. It was so-called due to its play on Rupp's words during his retirement press conference and, because Tennessee State A&I (now University) won three consecutive National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) basketball titles against all-white teams from 1957–59. In fact, the 1958 TSU title team had four players that played in the NBA. The 1958 UK title team had three on their roster. Talent and [End Page 511] meritocracy were moot because the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) prohibited historically black colleges and universities access to their tournament. I digress. Coach Don Haskins with Dan Wetzel co-authored an accessible book that became a major Hollywood motion picture. Glory Road made forty-two million at the box office and ESPN gave it the 2006 ESPY for best sport film. In 2002, Cotton Productions released a 45-minute documentary called And the Wheels Turned: The 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship. Intriguing occurrences in the black and white film footage took place at the twenty-four minute, fifty-five second mark in the documentary. There were three signs and one read "Big Blue." There also was a sizable section of majority white-male spectators that waved anywhere from ten to fifty Confederate Flags. Media and subsequently Hollywood needed an antagonist that seemingly represented an exclusive, segregated past in American sport and society. They found their culprit in Adolph Rupp. Allegations, innuendo, and conjecture swirled. Rumors circulated that Rupp said "he would not lose to a team of blacks, of coons." As of 2016, no one can confirm truth in these allegations. Nevertheless thanks to Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford, Frank Fitzpatrick, and a slew of others, Rupp was framed after his death in 1977 as the architect of racism and segregation in an American sporting past. Armed with oral interviews, secondary sources, and media accounts, journalist David Kingsley Snell de-clutters myths about Adolph Rupp the racist and writes a readable, climatic narrative on the 1966 NCAA basketball national championship victory of Texas Western against the University of Kentucky. Nolan Richardson, former Texas Western player, head coach, and 2014 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, provides a powerful and thought-provoking Foreword. In the Prologue, Snell problematizes master narratives and their impact on memory particular to Rupp and Haskins. In the Epilogue, Snell challenges revisionist interpretations on race and sport, and infuses primary accounts with critical analysis in ways useful for casual sport fans, undergraduate students, and experts on [End Page 512] sport in history, journalism, and sociology. These three sections and his central argument and exploration of a championship game that paralleled an Emancipation Proclamation within the athletic Civil Rights Movement, are the most significant contributions of the book. Although Snell investigated a misconstrued topic, there were notable omissions in the text, and room remains for future scholarship on Adolph Rupp, sport, and the politics of integration. The book lacks historiographical depth. Numerous scholars and journalists have written on race and basketball in the last ten years, including works on UCLA, Bill Russell, John McClendon, and the NBA. More importantly, there are missed opportunities that could have resulted in this book becoming the definitive treatment on Rupp and race. Discussion on his engagement with Freeport High School, the Kentucky Negro Education Association, Don Barksdale, Jim Tucker, CUNY, Solly Walker, coverage by black presses in the 1950s, and a post-championship game interview with Standard Oil would have significantly strengthened his argument. These quibbles aside, Snell has written a valuable book with engaging stories on both Texas Western and Kentucky that, at minimum, should reignite debates on who Rupp was, and...

Unmasking the Big Bluff of Legitimate Governance and So-Called Independence: Creolizing Rousseau through the Reflections of Anna Julia Cooper

Abstract This article explains what is meant by the creolizing of ideas and then demonstrates it through exploring a political observation about political illegitimacy made by eighteenth-century Genevan social and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and creolized when the nineteenth-century African-American educator and social critic Anna Julia Cooper argued that the ideal of independence that lay at the core of political doctrines of republican self-governance relied on forms of willful blindness that cloaked the ongoing dependence of all human beings on one another. In conclusion, the article considers what Cooper's expansion of Rousseau's insight and creolized readings of political philosophy imply for our pursuit of just political institutions today.

Grasping the Interplay between the Verbal Cultural Diversity and Critical Thinking, and Their Consequences for African American Education

The role language has in human learning has been discussed in the context of its impact on culture through African American communities. A strong link between thinking and language through the framework of question asking was reported. This essay improves upon Crogman and Trebeau’s (2016) Generated Question Learning Model by incorporating language and comprehension as major tenets. The proposed argument is centered on language as the determinant of structured thinking, which in essence brings about learning through sensory experience. Further, the case was made for issues that may emerge in learning when the cultural norms of the learner are ignored.

The Riot Report and the News: How the Kerner Commission Changed Media Coverage of Black America

In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what caused urban riots during the preceding summer in Chicago, Watts, Detroit, and other urban areas. About six months later, in February 1968, the commission released its findings, commonly known as the Kerner Report, attributing black frustrations to continuing discrimination in housing, education, economic opportunities, and other facets of African Americans' daily lives. The report famously argued that the United States comprised separate and unequal societies. A less known but equally important point of the report appeared in its fifteenth chapter, on news media. Thomas J. Hrach, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Memphis, focuses on this Kerner Report chapter to explore its background and implications for contemporary news reporting during urban unrest. As a former journalist, Hrach recognizes that, on the one hand, civil rights activists had used news media to advance their own agenda. On the other hand, he argues that blacks considered mainstream media outlets as part of a white-dominated social structure, with some even believing that media worked for white supremacists. Hrach eloquently sets up the background that led to the establishment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Led by the governor of Illinois, the commission frequently publicized its findings in small releases over time to keep itself in the news, and its members visited the riot sites so the reports could be more reflective of reality.

The Hidden Cost of Brown v. Board: African American Educators' Resistance to Desegregating Schools

This article focuses on the black community in Topeka during the first half of the twentieth century. Using archival sources such as the black press, letters from educators and administrators to state officials and newspapers, and correspondence from black teachers in Topeka, I examine the reasons some African American teachers, administrators, and families were hesitant to desegregate the public school system. Additional sources include the Kansas Historical Society’s archival holdings, including governors’ files and court cases, as well as the papers of Mamie Williams, an African American teacher. Some black Topekans feared desegregation because they believed it would harm students physically and emotionally. They also believed desegregation discouraged racial pride and forced children into environments where they were “merely tolerated.” Many black teachers emphasized the unique perspective they brought to their classrooms, stating that they were better able to empathize with their students. Desegregation spelled the possibility of demotion for black teachers, yet if they voiced concerns about potential job loss and desegregation, they risked being seen as hypocrites in the fight for racial equality. With their schools, teachers, and livelihoods at stake, blacks in Topeka initially resisted the efforts of white school boards and lawyers to take their schools away from them. In 1954, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” The legacy of desegregation continues to affect black students, communities, and the field of education over half a century later.

A Survey of Retirement Readiness Among African-Americans

This study addresses African-Americans’ retirement readiness and the factors that contribute to African Americans being prepared or not prepared for retirement. Specifically, this study explores the relationship between educated African-Americans’ financial literacy and their retirement readiness. To analyze this relationship, a binary logistic regression model was fitted to primary data collected from graduates, professors, and business professionals associated with a liberal arts university located in the southeastern USA. The researchers found that educated African-Americans who are more financially literate are more likely to be ready for retirement versus educated African-Americans who are less financially literate. This finding suggests that education does not equate to financial literacy. Moreover, millennials are more likely to be prepared for retirement compared to other age groups, and those who are single and those who do not work full time are less likely to be prepared for retirement.

The Politics of African American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity. By Kenneth J. Meier and Amanda Rutherford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 236p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

The Politics of African American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity. By Kenneth J. Meier and Amanda Rutherford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 236p. 34.99 paper. - Volume 15 Issue 3