Anand

Building Partnerships to Hear Freedom's Heroes Within Our Community

Michelle Fine (the Graduate Center, CUNY)

Tiffany Perkins (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

and David Surrey (Saint Peter’s College)

Each morning, 10 yellow school buses end their circuit through Montclair, New Jersey to drop off 149 of Renaissance Middle School’s 225 students. Ali, grandson of Charles and Marjorie Baskerville, is among the group of students who arrive by bus. Ali’s grandparents with other community activists, almost forty years ago, began the long and hard fight for school integration in this northern town. After court battles, parent meetings, community resistance, and ultimate victory, the struggle resulted in a public school system dedicated to both “choice” and integration. To those who retain the memory of struggle, Montclair’s school buses and their routes, almost thirty years old, are a regular reminder of the magnet school plan implemented in 1977-1978.

We wondered if any of our 225 students recognized the buses as visible symbols of victory and accomplishments for their own families, friends and neighbors who, like Ali’s grandparents, brought integration to the very segregated community of Montclair. We wondered what it would take, in the classroom, to show students that the South was not the only place where this struggle occurred; that Montclair went through its own history of desegregation. This is the story of the enthusiasm of seventy-five public school seventh graders in the Renaissance School, some of whom were the children and grandchildren of the participants in this struggle, and four educators who investigated their town’s past through an oral history project to better understand its present and future.

Renaissance School is a racially integrated, explicitly detracked, rigorous small school filled with faculty dedicated to youth, to rigor, and to social justice. As a faculty, every effort was made to build curriculum through the rich diversity, history and experience of the town. The theme “Movements and Migrations” organized the seventh-grade curriculum. The students had explored the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Westward movement. To build the oral history project into the curriculum — for all students — we decided to offer a weekly oral history course for four sections over nine weeks, in which students would conduct up to thirty interviews of people involved in the desegregation efforts and document and present these oral histories in book form to be shared with school and local community. The result was a chronicle of the inequity as well as the possibilities for change, a book entitled, Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town. Since its publication, the youth have presented their work from the book in communities throughout the Northeast.

The players

This project might be thought of as a university-school partnership, for it was indeed, or a glorious collaboration among friends, colleagues, and community members committed to education for social justice. Bernadette was the principal, long respected in town as an advocate for intellectual excellence and racial justice. Michelle teaches at the Graduate Center, was on sabbatical, and offered to co-teach the Oral History class. Tiffany was a graduate student, prepared to work with the youth on the interviews and the coding. David, on the faculty at Saint Peter’s College, volunteered his research on the civil rights struggle. As educators, we have spent our professional lifetimes challenging the very stratifications cemented by tracks. We have committed our work in middle and high schools, and in college and graduate training, to what might be called “detracking,” – that is, the creation of educational communities in which rigor and critical inquiry are joined; the joys of rich educational practice are accessible to all; and one in which class, ethnic, and race diversity are delightful opportunities, not a reason to separate. We were privileged to work in a school born of the desire to defy tracks and educate all at high levels.

Laying the groundwork

We started by asking the students to read James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem:”

Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous luxury. They seem to feel that because they fought on the right side during the Civil War, and won, they have earned the right merely to deplore what is going on in the South; without taking any responsibility for it, and that they can ignore what is happening in Northern cities because what is happening in Little Rock or Birmingham is “worse.”

We watched portions of Eyes on the Prize, read Freedom’s Children, and discussed these histories of racism in Arkansas and Alabama. Students were shocked by the brutality of Little Rock and awed by the strength exhibited by protestors and those who refused to take “no” for an answer. The class then listened to Montclair’s own Arthur Kinoy, civil rights activist and lawyer, who riveted us with national and local stories of oppression, resistance, and McCarthyism.

As progressive educators, influenced by the provocations of Paolo Freire, Maxine Greene, Myles Horton, the Freedom Schools, Howard Zinn, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin, we were eager for students to engage with historic and contemporary struggles for race and class justice. In order to immerse the four cycles of students quickly into the history of the struggle, we arranged to have the Montclair Times, the town's weekly newspaper, scanned for articles relevant to desegregation from 1947 to 1972. At the beginning of each nine-week cycle, students reviewed one or two articles individually and then collectively they produced a timeline. Names of significant participants in the struggle were jotted down; events, dates, places were noted. Early in the fall, a small group of students wrote a letter that appeared in the local newspaper, inviting bus drivers, teachers, students, crossing guards, shopkeepers, parents, children, and teachers who observed or participated in the late 1960s integration struggles to contact the school for an interview. Key documents were indexed. Students designed interview questions, role-played difficult and easy interview sessions, and argued productively about language.

“What were the teachers like after integration?” asked a white girl eager for some good news in the midst of the raunchy evidence we had about “white” behavior.

“No, let’s say, ‘Did your teachers take out their racism and anger on you because you were colored?’” challenged a bi-racial boy eager to get to the root of the problem. We spent much time talking about the “bias” embedded in each question, and students tried them both out, only to learn that the questions you ask do, indeed, generate, in part, the responses you receive.

In preparing for the interviews there was a long conversation about the language of racial categories, whether to use “colored,” “Negro,” “Black” or African American” when speaking with older interviewees. Later in the year, Ali returned to this topic when he asked his friends, “You know, given what my grandmother and her friends did [for us], how come we use ‘Nigger’ so easily, when it was used to put us down?”

As they reviewed the papers, they began to pose critical questions about history and journalism: “Why is the Black Student Association protest called a riot, but the white parents meeting is just a meeting?” They came to see the language of “neighborhood schools,” “worries about small children on buses” or “community control” as polite ways for community members to insist on segregated schools. “Did the kids have a problem with integration, or was it just the parents?”

Lessons Learned

We designed this oral history project to be intimately local and then provocatively global; but foremost so that it would connect our students, historically and today, to their town and the history of activism that constitutes this community. We knew that if young people spent time with the “everyday heroes” of Montclair, they would come to recognize the power in working for social justice and to witness the change one individual can make in establishing a more equitable society. They read from speeches delivered at school board meetings:

I have three children in our school system and I attended the Town Commission meeting… It is high time now that someone stood up and told it as it is, characterizing the real problem by its right name – pure, simple, naked, unabashed white racism… As a white man I am not here to defend black youth… I am here.. to defend the interests of my own children who attend Montclair school. I have every confidence that all of our children, black and white, can resolve this question as they will resolve many of the decisive questions of our time which our own generation has bungled. It is some of the parents and certainly the bigoted troublemakers who constitute the real problem. (Irv Winkler, Board of Education, 1968.)

They interviewed community activists, like Lydia Davis Barrett, who remembered her childhood of segregated schooling:

When I went to Glenfield (middle school) I won a lot of awards for academics… My parents were both college graduates so you had to sign up for whatever kind of program you wanted at the high school. And I signed up for the college prep program. When I went to pick up my schedule, I had cooking as a major and sewing as a minor, but I had signed up for college prep… My father had to leave his job for a day. In those days fathers didn’t leave their jobs for a day to go to school in order to make them give me back the college prep program... [When I started getting low grades at the high school], my father made a fuss… only to learn that although I graduated top of my class at Glenfield, I had been receiving the curriculum for students who were [classified] as Negro.

We learned how everyday people became activists; that a bus could symbolize political struggle and then victory. We learned, too, that middle school youth – across class and race lines – could become brilliant social historians; that oral history has the potential to breathe open a classroom filled with smarts in many bodies; and that the struggle for full integration is never over.

Across the year, students came to see that what is taken for granted today in their lives has a long national and local struggle in its shadow. They started to question their own lunchroom and their futures. “What’s going to happen when we hit high school, will we “split” again by race?” “Why were some whites so scared to go to school with Blacks?” “Why were some Black students so hard on other Black children who were academically achieving?” “Why were/are there so few Black educators, even today?”

As educators, Bernadette and Michelle noticed a heavy silence about other conversations too terrifying to approach, conversations only whispered to us, alone, after class, sworn to an unstated secrecy:

“What counts as smart—and is it genetic?”

“Why do I pay such a heavy social price because I’m interested in school and I’m African American?”

“Why are the Special Education students mostly Black boys?”

“I don’t even know how to participate in this conversation as a bi-racial student.”

“Why do people have judgments of me because I am African American and most of my friends are Caucasian?”

We too were confronted with unexpected questions. Toward the end of the interview phase of the project, Dr. Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist at Columbia-Presbyterian, agreed to meet with our students. The daughter of a civil rights activist from a neighboring town, she used to “skip to school, every day, as a young child.” As a child she knew that her father was involved with a civil rights struggle. She did not know, that if he won, she would have to go to another school, with White children. He won. She told the class, “Integration almost killed me.” At that moment we realized that an unspoken, unchallenged bias had floated into the room and saturated our project and our interviews: that segregation was bad and integration was the victory. Fullilove offered another perspective on Brown. Unacknowledged were the pain, the loss, and the questionable consequences of integration, especially for African American children, families and teachers. In fast-track reflection, we spent much time reconsidering how every “solution” to social injustice brings with it other burdens and other struggles, especially for those most marginalized. We realized that African Americans in the Americas can never rest assured that racism has been put in its place; that racism and White supremacy do not disappear with integration; they merely take on new forms.

Epilogue….in the late Spring

Three African American students, sixth and seventh graders, were walking home from school and were stopped by the police. Their backpacks were searched. A passerby had called the police to say that a group of boys – one of whom had a gun –were throwing snowballs. Unsuspecting, these boys had stopped to purchase some chewing gum. The police insisted that they stand still to be frisked. A young White girl from Renaissance, on her way to dance class, saw the confrontation. She called her mother, who called Dr. Anand. She knew something was wrong. She would not witness passively.

As it turned out, the boys were fully innocent, and the police were asked to come to the school to speak with the school community, including the boys and their parents. Students, parents, and faculty across the school engaged in an analysis of the history, politics, and practices of police harassment of children of color. This incident occurred only two days after the Amadou Diallo murder by police in New York City in 1999. Soon thereafter, students and faculty organized a delegation of Renaissance students and faculty to visit stores that were “discriminately suspect” of young people and speak with them about their experiences. Some students conducted informal community-based research in which White and African American students entered particular stores and documented who was followed, who was asked to leave, who was offered help. These young oral historians sharpened their pencils and their critical consciousness. Keeping notes, they honed their research and activist skills.

Well beyond the years of formal segregation, post-Civil Rights Movement, we are thriving in a town well known for its embrace of integration. New Jersey Magazine declares Montclair “one of the nation’s best towns for multi-racial families.” Yet boys of color are still particularly vulnerable to police surveillance and harassment. But what separates this school from most is that here the administration and faculty decided this police search was a school-wide community assault, an issue in need of historic and social analysis, a dynamic to be studied and halted. A White girl witnessed and reported. The three boys and their families were embraced by a school collectively grieving the pain. An African-American police officer came to address the school, relating his own experiences of brutality suffered as a youth, at the hands of police officers, noting that that was the moment when he decided to become an officer.

At Renaissance Middle School, as part of their formal and informal education, young people across racial and ethnic groups and across social class categories and neighborhoods learned intimately and critically about the scars of exclusion and oppression, historically and today. They learn, too, that research, resistance, and community organizing are an ongoing part of a life educated for social justice. We – educators, students, and the community -- ended with insights and more questions: When you witness unequal or unfair treatment of a student by a teacher, by another classmate, in a store, on the streets, by a police officer, a church or a stranger… Do you simply watch and turn? Do you intervene? Do you report? Do you encourage?

The project taught me that Montclair wasn’t always the beautiful town it is now. Twenty to thirty years ago it still looked beautiful but with demons on the inside which grow smaller with every effort to integrate. Sankho

If it weren’t for integration, I’d be a totally different person. Jeremy

Since 1970, we have made (almost) great progress in becoming integrated. It took courage. Charmecia.

The project taught me that if you want something done, you can’t give up. You have to work hard for it. Andretta

Note: This research was generously funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.

From "Teaching Brown: Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities"
History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004)

Copyright by the History of Education Society. Reprinted with permission.

Resources

Anand, B., Fine, M., Perkins, T., and Surrey, D. 2002. Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town. Teachers College Press.

Baldwin, J. 1961. Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A letter from Harlem. In Nobody knows my name. New York: Dial Press.

Eyes on the Prize (PBS Video) Episode 4, 1986. Boston: Blackside.

Levine, E. 1993. Freedom’s children: Young civil rights activists tell their own stories. New York: Avon.