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State University of New York Press - Tondra L. Loder-Jackson

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172 pages

English

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Schoolhouse Activists examines the role that African American educators played in the Birmingham, Alabama, civil rights movement from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing on multiple perspectives from education, history, and sociology, Tondra L. Loder-Jackson revisits longstanding debates about whether these educators were friends or foes of the civil rights movement. She also uses Black feminist thought and the life course perspective to illuminate the unique and often clandestine brand of activism that these teachers cultivated. The book will serve as a resource for current educators and their students grappling with contemporary struggles for educational justice.
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Activists or Accommodationists? Recasting the Role of African American Educators in the Civil Rights Movement

PART I. Breaking Ground and Laying the Foundation

1. Pioneering Black Schools Second to None

2. Organizing for Educational Equity

3. Supporting the Movement Inside and Outside of the Schoolhouse

PART II.Transitioning and Forging Ahead

4. Relative Activism

5. Intergenerational Bridge Building

6. Resurgent Activism?

Appendix. Notes on Methodology
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

USA

United States of America

Local history

History of education

Southern United States

20th century

History of the Americas

États-Unis

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	26 octobre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438458625
Langue	English

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SCHOOLHOUSE ACTIVISTS
SCHOOLHOUSE ACTIVISTS
African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
TONDRA L. LODER-JACKSON
Cover photograph of the Lincoln School faculty in Birmingham circa 1939 reprinted with permission from the Birmingham, Ala. Public Library Archives.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 Tondra L. Loder-Jackson
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loder-Jackson, Tondra L., 1967–
Schoolhouse activists : African American educators and the long Birmingham civil rights movement / Tondra L. Loder-Jackson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5861-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5862-5 (e-book)
1. African American educators. 2. African Americans—Education. 3. Civil rights movement—Alabama—Birmingham. I. Title.
LA2311.L63 2015
370.92—dc23 [B] 2014048843
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my grandparents, Mack and Martha Loder, and with desperate hope for my nieces, Kimya and Kamaya Loder
Tell your children about it in the years to come, and let your children tell their children. Pass the story down from generation to generation.
—Joel 1:3 (New Living Translation)
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Activists or Accommodationists? Recasting the Role of African American Educators in the Civil Rights Movement
PART I: BREAKING GROUND AND LAYING THE FOUNDATION
Chapter 1. Pioneering Black Schools Second to None
Chapter 2. Organizing for Educational Equity
Chapter 3. Supporting the Movement Inside and Outside of the Schoolhouse
PART II: TRANSITIONING AND FORGING AHEAD
Chapter 4. Relative Activism
Chapter 5. Intergenerational Bridge Building
Chapter 6. Resurgent Activism?
Appendix. Notes on Methodology
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
1.1. Arthur Harold Parker, principal of Birmingham’s first Black high school. Credit: Birmingham, Ala., Public Library Archives.
1.2. Carrie Tuggle, founder of Tuggle Institute. Credit: Birmingham, Ala., Public Library Archives.
1.3. Miles College teacher training class featuring President William A. Bell, 1938. Credit: Birmingham, Ala., Public Library Archives.
2.1. Arthur D. Shores, former educator and civil rights attorney. Credit: Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
2.2. Ruby Jackson Gainer and Emory O. Jackson at Gainer’s celebration, sibling teacher-activists. Credit: Birmingham, Ala., Public Library Archives.
3.1. Lucinda Robey, former Birmingham activist educator pictured with Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Credit: Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
3.2. Jesse Champion Sr., former Birmingham teacher fired for activism. Credit: Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
3.3. Lucius Pitts, Miles College president, 1961–1971. Credit: Birmingham, Ala. Public Library Archives.
TABLES
4.1. Pre–Civil Rights Movement and Civil Rights Movement Cohort Demographics
5.1. Post–Civil Rights Movement Cohort Demographics
PREFACE
In 2005, I was asked to interview for the Southern Oral History Project’s (SOHP) chronicling of the “The Long Civil Rights Movement” in the U.S. South. 1 The interviewer was interested in learning about my perspectives as a post–civil rights generation student who attended integrated Birmingham City Schools (BCS). 2 He knew I was engaged in my own research on Birmingham’s educational history, so we were able to converse both as academic researchers and interviewer and interviewee.
Participating in the SOHP helped crystallize my previous thinking and assumptions about the salience of multigenerational participation in the mid-twentieth century, or what has been called the “classical phase” of the civil rights movement. 3 Similar to the SOHP, this book acknowledges that this movement is more aptly titled “the long civil rights movement,” one that has been described as “a living, breathing animal that grows and morphs in different directions” over time, and by some accounts, spans from as early as the nineteenth century through the integration eras of the 1970s and 1980s. 4
As a third-generation citizen of Birmingham and a BCS alumna, I have an affinity for the city, which is undergirded by my intellectual understanding and appreciation of its pivotal role as a battleground for the civil rights movement. I am dismayed yet motivated by scholarly and anecdotal contentions that younger generations of African American educators, being too far removed from the activist traditions and experiences of older generations of African Americans, are ill-equipped to address modern-day problems in schools and communities. 5
After devoting fourteen years to public education in the Midwest and Northeast, I was beckoned by a “call to home” in 2003 to fulfill a lifelong yearning to give back to Birmingham and the BCS. 6 One of the initial teacher education courses I taught at UAB was “The Birmingham Civil Rights Movement,” which was spearheaded by my School of Education colleague, Lois Christensen, along with two local educators. 7 Other courses on this subject had been taught on campus, but none at that time or since then has focused squarely on the struggle for educational equity in Birmingham. Our guest speakers not only included icons of the Birmingham civil rights movement, such as Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and widely acknowledged leader of the Birmingham movement, and Reverend James Bevel, a leading strategist of children’s and youths’ activism, but also relatively unknown educators, who were instrumental in desegregating schools and instituting Black History programs and curriculum in Birmingham when it was still risky and dangerous to do so. As the course’s youngest collaborator, it was not lost on me that, over time, I would become increasingly responsible for teaching about the Birmingham civil rights movement. The unexpected death in 2009 of one of our collaborators, Lillie Fincher, was a somber reminder of my obligation. 8
My role as a local professor, who was only seven months old when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and has longstanding family ties to Birmingham, undoubtedly afforded me the privilege to pursue a relatively large life story project featuring a multigenerational sample of educators, most of whom consented to having their transcripts eventually housed in local public archives. In addition to collaborating with local public school educators through my employment as a university educator of teachers and school administrators, I also work closely with parents, community members, and civic organizations to mobilize grassroots support for urban education reform. My social, professional, generational, and geographic locations uniquely shape my perspectives, insights, and biases concerning this book’s content.
In the wake of Birmingham’s commemoration of fifty years of civil rights history in 2013, and the sixtieth anniversary of the landmark Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court case in 2014, I believe now is the time to examine more closely the role and involvement of African American educators during the long civil rights movement. I am struck by how little we know about how African American educators figured into the local, regional, and national civil rights movements. In Birmingham, very few connections have been made to link the struggles between educators and students in the 1950s and 1960s and those still living today, and then to situate these generations within the historical quest for quality public schooling, which began shortly after the first African Americans arrived in post–Civil War Birmingham. Another neglected and related matter concerns a longstanding and controversial historical debate about whether African American educators in the U.S. South helped or hindered the civil rights movement. To state the matter plainly (and, admittedly, too simplistically), were they activists or accommodationists? The ambitious aim of this book is to interrogate these issues utilizing alternative methods, some unearthed data, and new historical interpretations.
This is the first book of its kind devoted primarily to the multigenerational perspectives of African American educators in the U.S. South and their perceived roles and contributions to the civil rights movement. 9 Several notable works by historians of education examine African American educators in the U.S. South between the periods of enslavement and the classical phase of the civil rights movement. 10 However, disciplinary boundaries and scope preclude these works from addressing, in elaborate depth, contemporary African American education. Schoolhouse Activists is a continuation of this hi