Dynamic Assertions of Agency: Black Students Resisting Anti-Blackness in 1970s Texas

• In Event: For Us, By Us: Black Education, Self-Determination, and Freedom

Abstract

School desegregation accounts often chronicle the mistreatment Black students endured at the hands of white school personnel, their white peers, and those peers’ white parents (e.g., Adams & Adams, 2018). Scholarship, however, is just beginning to emphasize how Black students responded to these encounters (e.g., Willis, 2021). Drawing on a larger, interdisciplinary study, this paper adds to that discourse, examining how Black students in the 1970s reacted to their treatment in formerly all-white schools in Waco, Texas. Viewing these circumstances as shaped primarily but not exclusively by Blackness, this paper analyzes how other social constructs like gender and class status influenced the racial foundation of school desegregation.

Both critical race theory (CRT) and Black geographies helped me underline the interlocking nature of social identity-based oppression to portray Black spatial agency, the consequential ways Black peoples have conceived of and produced space despite a logic deeming them insignificant and placeless. These theories emphasize the simultaneity of oppression and are complementary, as CRT frames racial oppression as normal and critiques it from the view of the oppressed (Bell, 1992) while Black geographies discerns how Black peoples produce and use space in ways that are often bound by—but not defined by—oppression (McKittrick & Woods, 2007).

I used historical and qualitative research approaches. Evidence consisted of thousands of pages of written documents and 20 oral history interviews with former Black students, who desegregated Waco schools. Written records included school board minutes, legal correspondence, newspaper articles, school brochures, court transcripts, judicial opinions, graduation records, yearbooks, and neighborhood petitions. Because written sources provided little representation of Black students’ thoughts or experiences (Trouillot, 1995), I drew heavily on these interviews, not to compete with the historical record, but to complement and complicate it (Portelli, 1991).

Two key insights emerged. In these contested spaces, Black students: (1) consciously united across class status and (2) strategically adapted their level of curricular and extracurricular engagement; these adaptations reflected class and gender differences among Black students. Informed by the Black Waco’s community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), Black students engaged these strategies to resist antiBlackness in the struggle for education justice and redefine for themselves the meaning of these schooling sites.

The story of school desegregation has long centered on race, and most school desegregation examinations have concentrated on the 1950s and 1960s alongside the policy’s legal dimensions, leaving questions unaddressed regarding the longer timeline associated with the implementation of this federal mandate and Black students’ experiential knowledge of it. Additionally, few studies have highlighted Texas, small cities like Waco, or its Black students’ pre-collegiate experiences with school desegregation. This paper addresses these gaps, nuancing scholarly understanding of a pivotal chapter in African American history and Black students’ willingness to practice self-determination amidst institutional antiBlackness.

Author

• ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, Texas A&M University