For Us, This Is Not New: Evidencing Black Educational Responses to a Post-Truth Continuum, Pre-Brown

• In Event: 31.073 - Recentering Evidence: Examining Black Educational Narratives to Challenge the Idea of a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

For Black folks, education in the United States has always been a liberatory exercise. In the face of legislated and social attempts to limit Black access to US citizenship, education, and socio-political engagement, Black educators have consistently prepared their students for--and to be agents working toward-- a more equitable and inclusive society. Black educators’ curriculum development, pedagogies, and leadership paradigms prior to the 1954 Brown decision overwhelmingly evidence that Black educators’ responses to “post-truth” are not new.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate Black educators’ long-standing resistance to the “post-truths” experienced by their students. The study engages the following research question: “To what extent did Black educators respond to the “post-truths” of progressivist and civic engagement ideals (democracy) prior to 1954?”

Perspective(s) and theoretical frameworks

This study draws on twinned frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Bell, 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefanic, 2017; Dixson et al., 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998) and Afrofuturism (Barber et al., 2015; Eshun, 2003; Pogue, forthcoming). CRT’s tenet, counter storytelling, highlights Black intellectual themes of survival, resistance, and strategies that challenge the problematic implementation of progressivist and democratic thought for Black children. Afrofuturism emphasizes time’s malleability and allows us to transcend Western temporal restrictions and to objectively critique the limitations associated with conceptualizing a given era as “Post-Truth.”

Method and Data Sources

Researchers used archival data from a variety of Black educators’ professional organizational documents to identify the extent to which Black educators confirmed, challenged, and/or extended progressivist and democratic ideologies for resistance and uplift during the pre-Brown era.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions

History records that White supremacy, institutionalized in the South via Jim Crow legislative barriers, was designed to prevent Black people and their children from 1) benefiting from progressivist thought, and 2) exercising citizenship rights (Baker, 2006; Mitchell, 2008). Given the encroaching Progressivism rhetoric in educational discourse, Black leaders and educators capitalized on Progressivism to best serve their students’ interests.
For example, W.A. Robinson, author of “Progressive Education and the Negro,” and Associate Editor of the Bulletin, co-opts Progressivist language by identifying the uses of progressive education for the Black school and community. Robinson also notes that Progressivism has the potential to “influence social thinking and, … social practice,” which could be advantageous to Blacks’ goal of resisting the status quo to free Black people from repression.
Other examples of resistance including leadership paradigms, teacher beliefs, and other organizational documents will be outlined in our presentation.


Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

This study contributes to contemporary discussions of Black intellectual responses in the “Post-Truth” era by: 1) challenging the idea that a singular period in Black education exists that can be considered “Post-Truth,” by 2) demonstrating how an Afrofuturist stance expands CRT’s counterstorytelling and challenges the limitations inherent within Western linear thought and research practice, and 3) centering Black educational history to inform how contemporary Black educators and scholars can shift their practices and employ historic methods to achieve contemporary educational success victories.

Authors

• Sheryl Jones Croft, Kennesaw

• Miyoshi Juergensen, Tuscaloosa City School

• Tiffany D. Pogue, Albany State University

• Michael Coleman, Camden City Schools