Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
(Nelson Mandela)
Education was a core value cherished and transmitted by my colored family, community, and school. Education was the key to colored children reaching their full potential—a tool for racial uplift, citizenship, and leadership. Acquiring an education was the primary toll of empowerment, a means to gaining equality in American society.
As an African American parent, I came to understand the meaning of another quote about education as a weapon by Joseph Stalin:
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and to whom it is aimed.
It was and is the use of education to disempower African American children that led me to an unintended career choice. In 1992, I established Diversity Training Associates, with the intention of changing the conditioned consciousness of many educators regarding African American students.
The stereotypical belief in the cultural, intellectual, and moral inferiority of African Americans was pervasive in the schools in which I consulted and trained. The culture of African American parents was believed to be one that did not value education; low expectations were held for the academic achievement of African American students, and African American males in particular were victims of racial disparity in disciplinary actions.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated schooling based upon race was unequal and unconstitutional. The decision failed, however, in not mandating that stereotypical beliefs about African Americans be refuted, and all educators were required to demonstrate freedom from these beliefs. Unfortunately for African American students, this was not the case. African American students were placed and bussed in school environments in which they were denied access to equal educational opportunities. They were tracked into lower-level classes, overwhelmingly placed in special education classes, and denied access to gifted classes, as was the experience of my own son initially.
By the 1990s, schools across the nation had resegregation. This post-Brown segregation was similar but drastically different in ways that negatively impacted the academic motivation and achievement of African American students. Like my colored segregated school, schools with a majority of “minority” and poor students receive less funding and access to educational resources. Unlike my colored segregated school, today’s African American students attend schools in which they are denied educational equality by being taught primarily by white teachers, many of whom are the most inexperienced and who have difficulty releasing the conditions and beliefs about African American students.
Despite unequal funding, poor facilities, and few resources, the environment of my colored schools provided the affective environment, institutional policies, and teacher excellence that enabled myself and others to achieve academically and experience success in the larger society.
The culture, climate, and curriculum of our colored segregated schools were informed by an empowerment pedagogy. Our teachers resisted and circumvented the caste education designed for us. While the larger society sent deprecating messages about colored people, our colored teachers and school provided a counter message. Unlike the experiences of many African American students today, our humanity was affirmed, our heritage celebrated, and our dignity restored.
The culture of colored segregated schools was grounded on beliefs about student and teacher roles and responsibilities. I have no idea what low expectations could feel like in a school environment; we were believed to have unlimited potential, that all children could learn and succeed, and that one could always rise above one’s current life condition.
Teaching was a mission rather than a job for my teachers; it was a means to uplift the race and demonstrate the community value of “giving back.” Teachers were responsible for student achievement by motivating and keeping students engaged. Teachers were obliged to hold the highest expectations for students and never giving up on them.
The school climate in the segregated, colored school was an outward expression and demonstration of the belief system espoused by teachers and administrators. Providing personal attention to students, to help them discover individual gifts and talents was key. Teachers probed to determine the cause of academic and other problems, and one of the most referred to interventions by colored teachers to raise the bar and set higher standards for student achievement was “pushing.” Pushing was a teacher’s demand that a student perform at a higher level than they thought they were capable of. This colored girl became an essayist and won essays contests in high school because my English teacher, Mrs. Esther Dailey, “pushed me relentlessly.”
The curriculum in my segregated-colored school was expansive rather than contractive. Our teachers circumvented the prescribed caste education that would have prepared us for menial jobs and instead provided a liberal and college-preparatory education.
I am not naïve enough to believe that all segregated colored schools were as excellent as the ones I attended; however, if one takes a good look at the successes of the many leaders, especially of the Civil Rights movement, who attended these schools, then the empowering pedagogy described was the key to their success.
Over six decades after the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” schools to be unconstitutional, schools today remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity. African American students today are disempowered by the educational system, just as I, a colored girl, was empowered. Equal educational opportunity remains an ideal rather than a reality for African American students.
