Writing Autobiographies on Brown in the History Classroom
Tracey Weis, Millersville University
About fifteen years ago, I heard Anne
Firor Scott, W.K. Boyd Professor Emerita at Duke University, recount an exercise
that she assigned to incoming Duke students: “How did your hometown respond to
the Brown decision?” Students were required to consult local newspapers
and public records, to interview relatives, neighbors, teachers, and public
officials, and to carry out other research to address this query. Intrigued by
this investigation, I devised an autobiographical version of this writing
assignment for students at my northern campus. For the past several years, I
have launched sections of my African American History II course with a
first-person version of Scott’s inquiry: “How has race, and especially the
Brown decision, affected your educational history?” It began as a first-day
in-class writing assignment, but the most recent iteration asks them to draw
upon course readings and library research resources to illuminate their personal
experiences of race and education, from elementary grades to present-day college
years. Students submit their first drafts near the beginning of the semester,
reflect on historical readings and class discussions, and then revise their
autobiographies by the end of the course. Student postings on our electronic
discussion board make their reflections more public than traditional writing
assignments, sparking discussions about how our perspectives have been shaped by
different experiences of race and education.
At the beginning of the semester,
most of my students at this predominantly white northern university find it very
challenging to connect their educational experiences to Brown, a decision
that seems so distant in both time and space from their daily lives. Many, but
not all, of the students grew up in small rural communities in eastern
Pennsylvania, although a few came from suburban districts in adjoining cities
such as Philadelphia and Wilmington. Most of those from rural districts were
able to count on one hand the number of students and teachers of color
(African American, Latino, and Asian American) in their elementary and middle
schools. Several white students echoed the comment of one who acknowledged that
“It wasn’t until I came to Millersville that I had my first exposure to African
Americans.” Because of the racial homogeneity that prevailed in most rural
communities, many white students claimed that they did not “remember thinking in
terms of race in primary and intermediate schools.” Most saw the present, as
well as their past, with color-blind lenses. "I saw African Americans as
no different than myself and I never took notice to the racial differences that
were there,” explained one, while another announced that “we never had any
problems with racial issues at my school and the white students weren’t treated
any differently than the other racial groups.”
Yet, a few anecdotes, tucked into
these white students' accounts, disrupt their optimistic narratives of
color-blind tolerance. One young white woman recalled an incident from her
middle school years, which muted the presence and agency of African-American
students in her predominantly white community. "One classmate's father," she
wrote, "was the head of the KKK and he was arrested and made the front page of
the paper. . . At lot of my classmates asked this student if his father could
sign their newspaper with his picture on it. This episode did not seem to affect
[the sole African-American student at the school] but it left me with a lasting
memory." Curiously, however, she ends her account by concluding that "At this
point in my life there was still no significant affect of the Brown
decision in my educational history."
By contrast, when
reading the autobiographies of African-American students against these
optimistic accounts, a very different picture of desegregation in northern
schools emerges. One Black student who titled her initial draft, “A Rocky Road,”
recounted the difficulties of being one of the few students of color in a
predominantly white grade school. "The
African Americans labeled me as acting 'white' while the Caucasians accepted me
for who I was. . . I was in a constant battle between identifying with myself
and my heritage." She strongly identified with the few black students who
attended white schools in David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road,
and concluded that "Overall, my life was a battlefield and I never
knew when I was going to get shot down.” Still another Black student saw her
educational background revolving around the following quote from an interview in
Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis's My Soul is My Own: “I was continually having to
prove myself, but I took all that in stride because you know you’re a pioneer in
the field and you have to go with the flow of it.” The quest for an equal
education, a conspicuous theme in the autobiographies of the Black students,
seemed irrelevant in the stories told by most of the whites.
When Beverly
Tatum, the social psychologist and author of "Why Are All of the Black
Children Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"And Other Conversations about Race,
visited our campus, she provided a valuable framework for understanding how
students' pathways through different stages of racial identity development shape
how they perceive their world, both in the present and in the past. Many white
students had embraced a "raceless" world prior to arriving at Millersville,
where most of them encountered significant numbers of black students for the
first time. Over time, these encounters forced many white students to reevaluate
their racial status in society. Some, imbued with present-day notions of
multiculturalism, came to regard their own friendships with African Americans as
one of the major outcomes of Brown. “I have met five wonderful
people whom I have become great friends with here at Millersville. Because they
are African American I have the opportunity to learn something new about their
culture every day, whether it is in their language, or their home life.” A few
other white students realized that they did not begin to understand the impact
of Brown until they came to Millersville. As one noted, “It is
hard to say what the campus would be like without the integration of
African-American students. I can see how I missed out on an important
perspective in my classes.” While most white students grumbled that
predominantly white schools denied them friends and perspectives on
African-American history and culture, only a few grasped the impact that
desegregation had on their African-American classmates. "They had no role models
in the school system," wrote one white student, comparing the experience to
David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road. "We had all white teachers,
administrators, and staff. I cannot imagine the feeling of isolation the [black]
students must have had just because they felt like they stuck out. This cannot
be good for a teenager who is trying to fit in and form their own identity."
Likewise,
according to Tatum, many of my black students who had attended desegregated
schools were dealing with different issues raised by their experiences of
immersion in black, and then white culture. A black student, whose essay
was titled "From Chocolate to Oreo," reflected on the differences that she had
encountered at her segregated elementary school compared to her desegregated
high school. "Since most of the students and faculty were African American,
great effort was taken to show us that we do count!" Invoking Carter G. Woodson,
she wrote: "Let us, then, study this history, and study it with the
understanding that we are not, after all, an inferior people, but simply a
people whose progress has been impeded." At her segregated school, "they taught
us about our heritage all year long," but at the desegregated high school, black
history education was limited to the month of February. This student's draft,
posted on our course's electronic bulletin board, provided a pivotal segue into
a broader inquiry on the absence of African-American presence and agency in the
teaching of United States history and culture.
By the close of
the semester, students had incorporated reflections from other students'
autobiographical postings into their own revisions, along with historical
content from our class readings and discussions.
The reluctance to recognize racial
difference, so marked in the initial drafts of white students, yielded, in most
cases, to awkward acknowledgements of both difference and inequality as students
rethought the impact of Brown on their educational and social lives.
Many students decried the “minimal knowledge of African-American history, music,
art, and literature” expected of high school graduates. One white student
reported that “we were never taught the outcome of white supremacy, meaning the
oppression of a people in slavery, sharecropping, and the Jim Crow laws.”
Because we were not taught how “a culture tried to maintain itself in the shadow
of adversity through the great movements of people and culture such as the Great
Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights Movement,” she
continued, “it was a bit harder to ward off ideas of white supremacy.” By
excluding African-American culture from her school’s curriculum, she contended
“the school is…teaching inequality.” The revised essays brought students back to
a more nuanced, albeit indirect, reconsideration of the original intent of
Brown. Recounting that she had taken three buses to get to and from high
school each day, the author of “From Chocolate to Oreo,” remembered that
“teachers and friends who didn’t have to travel such a far distance seemed very
shocked when I told them about this, but to me it was just something that I had
to do if I wanted to receive a good education.”
Interestingly, two interrelated themes dominated both the early and final drafts of the autobiographies: the vital importance of the African-American experience in the national narrative, and the perceived value of interracial contact and friendship. The striking salience of these two themes for today’s college students confirms, in many respects, the prescient analysis advanced by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 when he asked “Do the Negroes Need Separate Schools?” Writing after Plessy and before Brown, DuBois argued that the proper education of African-American students required, among other things, “knowledge on the part of the teacher, not simply of the individual taught, but of his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group” and “contact between pupils, and between teacher and pupil, on the basis of perfect social equality.” Writing recursively about their collective experiences of race and education, my students drew on the insights of Du Bois and other scholars to investigate the protracted implementation of Brown and the seemingly intractable problems of continuing segregation and emergent resegregation. Reaching across the color line, black and white students sought to reconcile their own experiences in varied northern schools with the historical and contemporary inequities in education. Making room in our classrooms for students to probe the complex and contradictory consequences of Brown will help us all to understand the personal and political significance of school desegregation as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision.
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:
Cecelski, David. Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Du Bois, W.E.B. "Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?" Journal of Negro Education 4 (July 1935):328-35.
Etter-Lewis, Gwendolyn. My Soul is My Own: Oral Narratives of African American Women in the Professions (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997)
Weis, Tracey. African American History II: 1865 to the Present, syllabus available at:
http://muweb.millersville.edu/~history/faculty/weis.html
Woodson, Carter G. “Some Things Negroes Need to Do,” Southern Workman, 51 (January 1922), 33-36 quoted in Thomas C. Holt and Elsa Barkley Brown, Major Problems in African American History, Volume 2: From Freedom to “Freedom Now," 1865-1990s. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000).