Liza Cobey is a Junior double majoring in American studies and Media Studies . She was awarded a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on the history associated with the desegregation of schools in the U.S. under Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker.
For generations, the women in my family have taught. My grandmother taught at the high school I attended decades before I was born, and my aunts, a cousin, and my mother all call their schools their second home. I grew up in a perpetual extended family tied together by bus routes and classrooms. I had no intention of following their path when I came to Emory. Despite this, by the second semester of my freshman year, I had connected with one of the few remaining professors from Emory’s Department of Education, and by the fall I was enamored with her work.
For generations, the women in my family have taught. My grandmother taught at the high school I attended decades before I was born, and my aunts, a cousin, and my mother all call their schools their second home. I grew up in a perpetual extended family tied together by bus routes and classrooms. I had no intention of following their path when I came to Emory. Despite this, by the second semester of my freshman year, I had connected with one of the few remaining professors from Emory’s Department of Education, and by the fall I was enamored with her work.
It has been Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker who inspired my work and who continues to support my research. Her work presented to me a counternarrative, one of many which I sought to oppose the Eurocentric, patriarchal lessons of my K-12 education. Dr. Siddle Walker’s work defies the common narrative of segregated Black schools as being institutions of lower quality than their white counterparts. While it is true that Black schools were underfunded, relegated to second class buildings and denied critical public support, the idea that Black teachers were less qualified is simply racist fiction. Black teachers often held more advanced degrees then white ones, and Black schools were bolstered by communities and administrators that cared deeply about their students, supporting the whole child, both in and outside school (Siddle Walker 1996). After desegregation, much of this community was lost, as Black teachers and administrators were fired, and Black students put under the tutelage of teachers who neither understood them nor cared about their success. It was beginning to understand these complexities that led me to the research I undertook this summer.
My hometown, Fredericksburg, Virginia, has a small school system with which I am intimately familiar. The city is small enough that all its residents attend the same schools – one elementary, one upper elementary, one middle, and one high. I went from kindergarten to twelfth grade there, as did my father, who was a part of the first desegregated first grade class, and my grandmother taught biology in the ‘70s at the high school where my mother currently works. Because of these connections, I knew bits and pieces of the schools systems history – the story of the segregated Black school, supported by the community before the city would fund it; Virginia’s history of Massive Resistance and the fact that Fredericksburg’s schools were still segregated for almost 15 years after Brown v. Board, until 1968. The remnants of segregation are also clear throughout our community – the buildings which used to be all-white elementary schools, one now the public library and one an apartment complex, and the former all-Black middle school, quite literally on the other side of the train tracks from the others, which now houses our Head Start and alternative school programs. Recalling these memories and intrigued by how my school’s history would hold up in light of new perspectives, I went online to find a more comprehensive story of Fredericksburg’s segregation. Online, there was nothing more than bits and pieces, the same facts that had been passed down to me. Searches of libraries and books turned up more of the same.
This is where my journey to independent research started – a search for the documentation of a history that seemed troublingly absent. I knew the stories existed – held in newspapers, in court records, and most importantly by community elders, but they didn’t seem to have been collected in one place. Especially concerning was the fact that many of the teachers and administrators who are fundamental to this history are entering their 80s and 90s, and the loss of these figures might mean the loss of their stories forever. With this sense of urgency in mind, I returned home.
Fredericksburg is known as a historic city and its involvement in the Civil War is well documented, however, its African American history, particularly in regard to education, has often been overlooked. There is no comprehensive written history of Black education or desegregation in the city, so I looked to the newspaper archives. Both the city paper, the Free Lance Star, and Norfolk and Baltimore’s African-American papers covered the city’s desegregation in depth. While collecting these articles created a valuable timeline of events and revealed methods of organization and policy, the reporting failed to answer questions surrounding racism, memory, and community. For these, I turned to those who came before me; the men and women who were present for the days of “separate but equal” and who lived through the upheaval that was desegregation.
From these educators, I learned more than anywhere else. Teachers spoke of the innovative methods they used to help students learn despite lack of funding and physical resources, the ways that parents and teachers came together to petition the city for change, and the ways that they subtly carried their practices and activism on after desegregation had occurred. They spoke without question of the enormous value of Black schools and Black teachers, and outright rejected the traditional narratives of desegregation. I use the word “desegregation” and not “integration” because of a lesson taught to me by a woman who worked through the closure of her Black school and remained a renowned teacher through her over 50 year career. “I refuse to call it integration,” she said, “because it has never been equal.”
This research is only the beginning of this project. I hope to make my findings accessible to my community, and share a piece of history that has remained a side-note for too long.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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