Lessons From Below: Reshaping Southern and U.S. Educational History

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

As a tool for serving the public good, education has been implemented and enacted upon historically based on the structural forces shaping society. This symposium will raise new considerations of the varied ways in which African Americans between the 1950s and 1970s navigated both the public and private sector, relied on grassroots organizing, challenged the rhetoric of educational opportunity, and contested changing state and federal policies. The presenters will challenge the narrative that 1) suggests desegregation was a vehicle for improving educational equity and 2) exceptionalizes massive resistance in the South. Using a panel discussion format, the presenters and audience will engage an educational history that reshapes southern and U.S. desegregation history, while providing an opportunity to examine contemporary implications.

Sub Unit

• Division F - History and Historiography

Cosponsor

• SIG-Research Focus on Black Education

Chair

• Christopher M. Span, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Papers

• Was It for Their Good? Black Students and the Desegregation of a Southern Private School, 1967-1972 - Michelle A. Purdy, Washington University in St. Louis

• “Students as a Force for Social Change”: A History of the Freedom Schools and Head Start in Mississippi, 1963-1970 - Jon Hale

• “Don’t Be Fooled…The Fight Has Just Begun”: Black Youth Activism and White Opposition, 1954-1972 - Vincent DeWayne Willis, Emory University

• Educational Capital and the Circular Migration of Southern Black Educators, 1945-1970 - Donna Jordan-Taylor, University of Washington

Discussant

• James D. Anderson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign