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Reconstructing the Southern Landscape: The History of Education and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Charleston, South Carolina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jon N. Hale
Jon N. Hale*
Affiliation:
College of Charleston in South Carolina
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The city of Charleston, South Carolina, illustrates how educators can use people- and place-based case studies as pedagogical tools to reconstruct a Southern public and historic landscape. Teaching the Foundations of Education course in the city of Charleston makes the history that frames contemporary educational issues such as (re)segregation more visible. In the wake of the recent tragedy at the historic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston that claimed nine lives at the hands of Dylann Roof, place and local history help make a silent history more pronounced. A history of resistance and an ongoing struggle for freedom is inscribed into Charleston's landscape as much as the colonial and antebellum grandeur that captures the imagination, and dollars, of a thriving tourism industry. The public and historic landscape, in short, is in and of itself an educative space that allows educators and students to disrupt popular narratives by making the invisible more visible.

Type
Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 163 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

1 The topic of place and the historic landscape of Charleston is discussed in more length in a recent op-ed piece by Hale, Jon and Chase, Robert, “Where are America's memorials to pain of slavery, black resistance?” July 9, 2015, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/03/opinions/hale-and-chase-breaking-the-cycle/.Google Scholar

2 The College of Charleston, established in 1770 and segregated until 1970, has an enrollment of 12,000, which is approximately 90 percent white, 8 percent African American, and 2 percent Latino/a or Asian American.Google Scholar

3 Wood, Peter, “The Stono Rebellion and Its Consequences,” in Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974), 308–30. For a complete history, see Shuler, Jack, Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); and Smith, Mark E., ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), xiii–xiv. For a good classroom primary resource, see http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/peoples/text4/stonorebellion.pdf.Google Scholar

4 Wood, , Black Majority, 277–82; Schuler, , Calling Out Liberty. The Teaching American History website often provides excellent primary sources aligned with state standards, in this case South Carolina, http://www.teachingushistory.org/ttrove/1740slavecode.htm.Google Scholar

5 Powers, Bernard, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 52–56. For a full history on the phenomenon of literacy acquisition during slavery, see Williams, Heather A., Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Powers, , Black Charlestonians, 93–94. For a complete history on Smalls, Robert, see Miller, Edward A., Jr., Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). For the history of formerly enslaved communities establishing a system of education, see Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Span, Christopher M., From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 96–99; and Bullock, Henry, A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

7 For a complete history of the Avery Normal Institute, see Drago, Edmund L., Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston's Avery Normal Institute (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Powers, , Black Charlestonians, 139–57; and W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Printing, 1969[1903]).Google Scholar

8 Pyatt, Sherman E., Burke High School, 1894–2006 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007); Who Is Burke High?: The History of the Burke High School Family (Charleston, SC: South Carolina Humanities Society, 2010); Baker, R. Scott, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926–1972 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Washington, Booker T., “Atlanta Exposition Speech,” in The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 3, ed. Harlan, Louis R. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 583–87; and Hale, Jon, “A History of Burke High School in Charleston, South Carolina since 1894,” http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/history_burke_high_school.Google Scholar

9 Resistance was still a part of the history of this vocational school. Teachers and students at Burke regularly contested institutional discrimination and worked diligently to provide a quality education, which propagated notions of active citizenship and participatory democracy. Baker, R. Scott, “Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963,” Teachers College Record 113 (2011): 2777–803; and Hale, Jon N., “‘The Fight Was Instilled in Us': High School Student Activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Charleston, South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 114, no. 1 (January 2013): 4–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Siddle-Walker, Vanessa, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Baker, , Paradoxes of Desegregation. CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 The Avery Normal Institute Collection, the Dart Family papers, the Simms, Lois A. papers, and the collection of Eugene Hunt are housed at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston. Lessane, Dr. Patricia, Mayo, Georgette, Wright, Debra, Battle, Dr. Mary, Spelbring, Aaron, and Calhoun, Daron have been instrumentally helpful in locating records.Google Scholar

12 For a fuller history of Septima Clark's work at the Avery Institute and her work as an educator in Charleston and the Country, Low, see Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: the Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Septima Poinsette Clark with Blythe, Legette, Echo in My Soul (New York: Dutton, 1962); and Clark, Septima Poinsette and Brown, Cynthia Stokes, eds., Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1996). On a larger discussion of women and education in South Carolina, see Valinda Littlefield, “Teaching Survival and Combat Strategies during the Jim Crow Era: Ruby Middleton Forsythe and Fannie Phelps Adams,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, eds. Spruill, Marjorie J., Littlefield, Valinda W., and Johnson, Joan Marie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).Google Scholar

13 On the history and significance of the Brawn decision, see Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Tushnet, Mark, The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Patterson, James T., Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Balkin, Jack M., “Brown v. Board of Education: A Critical Introduction” in What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Landmark Civil Rights Decision, ed. Balkin, Jack M. (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Irons, Peter, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); and Klarman, Michael J., Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement: Abridged Edition of from Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).Google Scholar

14 Waring as quoted in Yarbrough, Tinsley E., A Passion for Justice: J. Waties Waring and Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 196 (emphasis is original). See also Burton, Orville Vernon, Burton, Beatrice, and Appleford, Simon, “Seeds in Unlikely Soil: The Briggs v. Elliott School Segregation Case,” in Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century, ed. Moore, Winfred B., Jr. and Burton, Orville Vernon (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 176–200; and Baker, , Paradoxes of Desegregation, 87–107. Though the NAACP lost the case and South Carolina continued to equalize its public school system to avoid desegregation, local activism supported a swelling grassroots movement that sustained the push for a quality education and established legal precedent behind the monumental Brown decision. On the experiences of desegregation, see Millicent Brown, interview with the author, November 29, 2011.Google Scholar

15 Evaluations from fourteen sections of this course taught since the fall of 2011, which include an 84.9 percent (n = 342/403) response rate, were exemplary. The mean rating for the statement, “I found this course intellectually challenging and stimulating” was 4.71/5, for the question “This course increased my interest in the subject,” the mean rating was 4.51/5. Both scores are higher than the institutional average.Google Scholar