“Slum Life Is Squalid”: Challenging Urban Renewal Through Critical Race Place-Based Research in Historic Schools/Communities

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

For centuries, specific groups have been viewed as disposable—Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and other minoritized communities. Relatedly, the places where these communities reside have been viewed as deficient. Such theories propel closure of public schools, razing of public housing, and gentrification. In this symposium, critical race scholars challenge these policies through case studies involving Black schools and neighborhoods, revealing that communities of color portrayed as bereft of value have always been sites of repair and renewal in a racially hostile world. They confront white-washed conceptions of Black geographies by drawing on racial-spatial data in Birmingham, New Orleans, Camden, and Atlanta, mapping a complex landscape of connection and culture and the injustice of top-down policies focused only on reconstituting space.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 1: Education and Place, Space, Time

Chair

• Kristen L. Buras, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective

Papers

• Black-and-Proud: The Soul of Residents in a Birmingham Housing Project and Federal Housing Policy - Jerome E. Morris, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Black Teachers, the Culture They Created in New Orleans, and the Threat of School Closures - Kristen L. Buras, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective

• The Heart of the City: Black Teachers as Othermothers in Atlanta's Gentrifying Schools - Thais Council, Temple University

• Mapping the Takeover of Camden Public Schools: From Community Resistance to Corporate Consolidation of Power? - Keith E. Benson, Camden City School District

Discussant

• DeMarcus A Jenkins, University of Pennsylvania