On a South Carolina August afternoon, around 1950ish, Auntie cuts figures and letters from construction paper, writes notes to herself in impeccable cursive, and sips sweet tea with lemon from an iced tea glass, stirred with an iced tea spoon. In spite of oppressive heat outside, Auntie’s rambling Victorian is cool, shades pulled. A floor fan oscillates on the mirror surface of the linoleum floor in the entryway, sending noisy warm breezes. A window is partially open on the shady side of the house. Scissors, glue, paper, notes are spread across the dining room table.
“Whatcha doing, Auntie?”
“Getting ready for school. It starts in a week.”
“Whatcha writing?”
“Names. Thinking about who will be in my class this year.”
“Why?”
“Because some children have a hard time. I need to remember who they are. So I can make sure they understand.”
Auntie continues jotting and cutting, and I go back to my dolls. Playing school. What else?
“Whatcha doing, Auntie?”
“Getting ready for school. It starts in a week.”
“Whatcha writing?”
“Names. Thinking about who will be in my class this year.”
“Why?”
“Because some children have a hard time. I need to remember who they are. So I can make sure they understand.”
Auntie continues jotting and cutting, and I go back to my dolls. Playing school. What else?
***
On the second Sunday in August, Auntie drives Mama and me to Springfield Baptist Church, in Levelland, South Carolina. Following winding two lane country roads bordered by the red soil of the south, we eventually pull into the churchyard where others gather for Homecoming Service. On this day, colored people (we are formally Negroes and will not be black for years to come) who ventured North during the Great Migration return to the church in which they were raised, reuniting with family and friends who remained down south. It is a joyous day.
Mama points to a brick tub-like structure. “That’s where we got baptized.”
And then proudly to another building, closed now, smaller than the church. “And that was our school.”
Auntie and Mama join their sisters, Myrtle and Lilla. With Aunt Lilla is her “adopted” son, a handsome and shy kid a few years older than I. He was one of Aunt Lilla’s students. She decided that his home life was not as she thought it should be, so she brought him home with her. And kept him.
Across the state in Columbia, my father’s sisters, Aunt Caroline and Aunt Francena, also perform these labors of love, teaching the children of the formerly enslaved as well as of the somewhat free, and sometimes even elder folks born before emancipation. They bring home, raise, and nurture the children of other mothers and believe that everyone can and will learn on their watch. These women, teachers in the segregated and often rural schools of the early to mid-20th century, practiced what bell hooks later called “teaching to transgress.”[1]
My aunties were neither alone nor pioneers in their fierce commitment to “the practice of freedom,” to better the lives of our people whose intelligence was vastly underestimated by the enslavers and their descendants. Forbidden literacy, especially following Nat Turner’s rebellion [Turner believed, through his own reading of the Bible, that God called him to rise up and lead his people out of bondage], Africans nevertheless learned to read and to write and to teach from their earliest arrival in the colonies, the Caribbean, and South America. Eavesdropping on lessons given to white children, listening to the “master” read his newspaper, hiding in field and forest to pass on knowledge, the enslaved outwitted their captors and embraced literacy. Frederick Douglas taught himself, in spite of being explicitly forbidden to pursue education.[2] Driven by a deeply seated zeal to improve the lives of her people, Charlotte Forten (Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, class of 1856), fought ill health and bigotry to become the first black teacher in the Salem Public Schools and ultimately ventured to South Carolina to teach newly freed people on the islands off the coast. [3] [4] The 1870 Census, the first in which blacks were counted as whole people and not property, repeatedly records that children are at school. A generation later, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, also a Salem alumna, founded Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, a private and competitive boarding school for the black middle and upper class whose economic well-being did not admit them to the elite schools of whites. [5] Mary McLeod Bethune would create and build Bethune-Cookman College, now University. These women and their peers conceived of and practiced the philosophy of race uplift, “lifting as we climb,” to become the best they could be in spite of racist limits to their opportunities, and to bring others of our race with them.
Another factor directed these women into education: other careers were essentially closed to them because of their race, and because schools were segregated, the culture of the time ensured their employment. Integration, however, brought about a staggering loss of black teachers regardless of their experience and, one might argue, because of their dedication. [Of my five aunts who were teachers, only Aunt Carolyn maintained her teaching position under integration until she retired, teaching black and white children together, the pride, and perhaps bane, of her school system.]
In her now classic work, hooks describes her dismay when, under integration, her school went from black teachers whose raison d’etre was the survival and progress of their charges to white teachers:
Mama points to a brick tub-like structure. “That’s where we got baptized.”
And then proudly to another building, closed now, smaller than the church. “And that was our school.”
Auntie and Mama join their sisters, Myrtle and Lilla. With Aunt Lilla is her “adopted” son, a handsome and shy kid a few years older than I. He was one of Aunt Lilla’s students. She decided that his home life was not as she thought it should be, so she brought him home with her. And kept him.
Across the state in Columbia, my father’s sisters, Aunt Caroline and Aunt Francena, also perform these labors of love, teaching the children of the formerly enslaved as well as of the somewhat free, and sometimes even elder folks born before emancipation. They bring home, raise, and nurture the children of other mothers and believe that everyone can and will learn on their watch. These women, teachers in the segregated and often rural schools of the early to mid-20th century, practiced what bell hooks later called “teaching to transgress.”[1]
My aunties were neither alone nor pioneers in their fierce commitment to “the practice of freedom,” to better the lives of our people whose intelligence was vastly underestimated by the enslavers and their descendants. Forbidden literacy, especially following Nat Turner’s rebellion [Turner believed, through his own reading of the Bible, that God called him to rise up and lead his people out of bondage], Africans nevertheless learned to read and to write and to teach from their earliest arrival in the colonies, the Caribbean, and South America. Eavesdropping on lessons given to white children, listening to the “master” read his newspaper, hiding in field and forest to pass on knowledge, the enslaved outwitted their captors and embraced literacy. Frederick Douglas taught himself, in spite of being explicitly forbidden to pursue education.[2] Driven by a deeply seated zeal to improve the lives of her people, Charlotte Forten (Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, class of 1856), fought ill health and bigotry to become the first black teacher in the Salem Public Schools and ultimately ventured to South Carolina to teach newly freed people on the islands off the coast. [3] [4] The 1870 Census, the first in which blacks were counted as whole people and not property, repeatedly records that children are at school. A generation later, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, also a Salem alumna, founded Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, a private and competitive boarding school for the black middle and upper class whose economic well-being did not admit them to the elite schools of whites. [5] Mary McLeod Bethune would create and build Bethune-Cookman College, now University. These women and their peers conceived of and practiced the philosophy of race uplift, “lifting as we climb,” to become the best they could be in spite of racist limits to their opportunities, and to bring others of our race with them.
Another factor directed these women into education: other careers were essentially closed to them because of their race, and because schools were segregated, the culture of the time ensured their employment. Integration, however, brought about a staggering loss of black teachers regardless of their experience and, one might argue, because of their dedication. [Of my five aunts who were teachers, only Aunt Carolyn maintained her teaching position under integration until she retired, teaching black and white children together, the pride, and perhaps bane, of her school system.]
In her now classic work, hooks describes her dismay when, under integration, her school went from black teachers whose raison d’etre was the survival and progress of their charges to white teachers:
School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority. When we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment. Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom. [6]
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***
Of the dozen or so black women in my 1964 graduating class, all but three or four went into the classroom, mostly as elementary school teachers. I chose secondary education and English. One became a lawyer, another somehow pursued her love of chemistry. A third, her Bachelor's degree in education in hand, went directly to New York to eventually succeed in her dream to become an actor. Possibly my generation of black women was the last to believe that they were not only destined to the teaching profession, but also obligated to their race to enter it. It was what we knew and what our parents wanted for us: security. As predominantly white schools in cities became increasingly black, and white teachers transferred out or retired from them, school districts seemed eager to bring us in, sometimes hiring at the first interview. Ten years later, after the seeming success of the Civil Rights movement and emboldened by Black Power, black women began to pry open doors unavailable to our mothers and undreamed of by our grandmothers. They began to leave the classroom, and the rubrics of empowerment, pride, identity, uplift, the underpinnings of generations of Aunties and Aunt Carolyns, left with them.
The teaching profession is not, of course, limited to the contributions of black women, although one can argue that they have been at the forefront of black education for almost 300 years, as teachers, leaders, and founders of educational institutions. Interestingly, data on both gender and race demographics in the 21st century seems difficult to pinpoint, with the emphasis of research being on the paucity of black or other minority teachers, male and female, in United States schools. While school systems have re-segregated students, arguably more so than before Brown vs. Board of Education, teachers of color in those schools are woefully not in evidence.
USA Today writes:
The teaching profession is not, of course, limited to the contributions of black women, although one can argue that they have been at the forefront of black education for almost 300 years, as teachers, leaders, and founders of educational institutions. Interestingly, data on both gender and race demographics in the 21st century seems difficult to pinpoint, with the emphasis of research being on the paucity of black or other minority teachers, male and female, in United States schools. While school systems have re-segregated students, arguably more so than before Brown vs. Board of Education, teachers of color in those schools are woefully not in evidence.
USA Today writes:
Nearly 63 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case kick-started racial integration in schools — and six decades after a group of African-American students had to be escorted by federal troops as they desegregated Little Rock’s Central High School — students nationwide are taught by an overwhelmingly white workforce. Even as the proportion of black, Latino, Asian, Indian, African and other “non-white” students grows inexorably, the teachers these children encounter are nearly all white. And the racial mismatch, in many places, is getting worse. [7]
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Reputable research consistently supports the premise that “With Just One Black Teacher, Black Students [Are] More Likely to Graduate.” [8] Yet black teachers, male and female, carriers of the race uplift tradition, practitioners of lifting as we climb pedagogy, are absent from classrooms in the United States. In their place rule the school to prison pipeline, corporate charter schools, “failing” schools (usually in impoverished, i.e., black, neighborhoods), “teaching to the test” and white-centric curricula, young, inexperienced white teachers who have not read Teaching to Transgress, and Betsy DeVos.
A new school year begins and I want to channel my aunts and their peers. I want to bring to all my students the fervor, determination, empathy, and philosophy of these women on whose shoulders I stand. I want those who come into the room already privileged to understand those who arrive without it, and how that came to be. I want my black students to become citizens of the world, while lifting their communities as they climb. In my classroom, we will practice freedom; we will teach to transgress.
A new school year begins and I want to channel my aunts and their peers. I want to bring to all my students the fervor, determination, empathy, and philosophy of these women on whose shoulders I stand. I want those who come into the room already privileged to understand those who arrive without it, and how that came to be. I want my black students to become citizens of the world, while lifting their communities as they climb. In my classroom, we will practice freedom; we will teach to transgress.
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- bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress as well as Tell Them We Are Rising: A Memoir of Faith in Education by Ruth Wright Hayre and Alexis Moore should be mandatory reading for every person involved in education, regardless of level or capacity, including Betsy DeVos.
- Douglas, Frederick. (1845, Boston) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself. Retrieved from http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html.
- Forten, Charlotte. (1864, May). Life on the Sea Islands. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1864/05/life-on-the-sea-islands/308758/
- Rosemond, Gwendolyn Luella, Maloney, Joan M., To Educate the Heart: The life of Charlotte Forten, Sextant, 1988, Vol. III, No.1, pp. 2-7.
- Rosemond, Gwendolyn. Charlotte Hawkins Brown: What One Salem Alumna Could Do. Sextant, Fall 2004, Vol. XIII, No. 1, pp. 20-25/
- hooks, bell. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge.
- Toppo, Greg, Nichols, Mark. Decades after civil rights gains, black teachers a rarity in public schools, USA Today, February 4, 2017.
- Press release. Johns Hopkins University, April 5, 2017. Retrieved from http://releases.jhu.edu/2017/04/05/with-just-one-black-teacher-black-students-more-likely-to-graduate/
Header art by T. Guzzio.
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Levelland Snow lives, writes, and teaches in a community north of Boston.
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