Methodological Rememory of Home: Reflexivity, Oral History of Black Education, and Black Geographies

• In Event: Reflexivity in History of Education Research: Complicating Oral History, Archive, and Black and Indigenous Voices

Abstract

In this project, I analyze how I, a historian of African American education, research— undertake rememory of—the education history of my hometown. Simply put, rememory represents one’s recollection of something, often traumatic, they have suppressed. As a scholar, I have worked to relearn and reimagine my hometown’s school desegregation process from a Black perspective. This process has shown me that doing so necessitates examining how “black geographies, and black geographic subjects, can help us to better understand the racialization that has long formed the underpinning for the production of space.” These spaces, my research demonstrates, include those shuttered and forced upon Black Texans in the school desegregation process.

My study illustrates how school desegregation was punctuated by many Black students’ rememory of its implementation. These considerations animate my relationship to home and underscore the complicated sacrifices that accompanied school desegregation for Black stakeholders writ large. My project illuminates Black spatial agency, the consequential ways Black peoples have conceived of and produced space despite a logic deeming them spatially insignificant. I propose that Black geographies offers oral history and the history of education a powerful tool to foreground Black spatial agency in examinations of ordinary Black resistance against institutional white supremacy.

Crucial to the history of African American education, Black oral histories address the “need to critically assess historically present black geographies.” From this view, I elevate the perspectives of Black former students who desegregated via original oral history interviews, which challenge written, often through a white lens, accounts of school desegregation. Thus, I posit that oral history is a powerful methodology that serves the objectives of Black geographies in amplifying the voices of subordinated, marginalized Black Texans, who resisted antiBlack oppression.

Black feminist perspectives of home render it significant to racially marginalized communities, invite authenticity, and emphasize subjectivity. Using this frame, I analyze cases from my research that demonstrate the dynamic considerations researchers studying their home must weigh and write against. Calls to uphold objectivity via the standard Eurocentric knowledge validation process rub against my use of rememory as too personal, traditionally speaking, to generate “valuable” academic insights. Ultimately, I contend that school desegregation was primarily about the contestation of space. In the narratives I share, I discuss what it meant for me to learn of this hometown history as a Black girl student who decades later attended many of the same schools I now study.

Author

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