Reading side-by-side two similarly spirited but very different histories of Black educational strategies in the 20th century raises fascinating questions about strategies for today.
Vanessa Siddle Walker’s The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools (The New Press, 2018) centers on the century-long practice of misdirection executed by leaders of the all-Black Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GT&EA). Through a succession of GT&EA leaders in the midst of JIm Crow, a strategy was pursued to improve education for Black children while concealing the motivating role of Black teachers and school administrators in the organizing and tactical maneuvering for justice. The story of how Prof. Siddle Walker got access to the materials for her book is itself a part of her subject and both introduces and complicates the trickster theme that she is exploring in her “historical ethnography,” as she calls it. Spending three days a week for two years with Dr. Tate, the last president of the GT&EA, Siddle Walker explains that it was only after she “had passed [Prof. and Mrs. Virginia Tate’s] ‘test’ for inquisitive researchers” that she was allowed to see volumes of materials stored in the Tates’ basement. Siddle Walker tell this part of the story in the introduction to her book, but only the patient reader hears the rest of the story in her epilogue. After Dr. Tate passed away in 2002, Siddle Walker finally follows up on his hint to go back to the old headquarters of the GT&EA in Atlanta, where she discovers eleven steel filing cabinets filled with additional records in a hidden attic.
We are meant to understand Dr. Tate’s wiliness, caution and indirection as part and parcel of the broader strategy to control not one but at least two narratives. In particular, there is the narrative “blandly accepted…that most historical accounts wrote and most readers affirmed”: “the NAACP protested injustice and crafted the successful Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that was supposed to deliver black children from poor schools to new opportunities. Grassroots movements of citizens tired of injustice erupted after Brown and demanded that America deliver on its promises of equality. The memory—of brilliant attorneys, courageous ministers, and a handful of private citizens who protested injustice as plaintiffs or through civil disobedience—remains seared in America’s collective consciousness.”
Siddle Walker notes that “the black educators about whom I write are also implicated in the dominance of [this] popular story. For most of their years of professional activities, black educators intentionally told the part of the story they wanted the public to know. It was intentional because it allowed them to gain the legal decisions and federal funding desired. The truth is, black educators did such a good job teaching the public the official script that most people never questioned those accounts. Historians cannot fully be blamed for that craftiness” (275).
The second narrative, concealed by these educators, has two parts. The first part tells the story of the “hidden world of courageous black educational leaders” who “created networks of advocacy that mirrored the networks created by the white educational associations in which they were denied membership…Necessarily invisible to prying eyes, black educators provided the plaintiffs, money, and data for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to generate the education cases…The bottom-to-top functioning of these networks allowed local parents to access nationally known attorneys to litigate their school-related grievances. Local NAACP chapters often provided the shield by lending their names, since they were already highly visible advocates who had enough distance from schools to lessen the concerns about retaliation by those who were determined to maintain the status quo.”
The second part of the hidden narrative tells how black educators “stimulated a vision to demand equal rights in an unequal America…they crafted forms of purposeful education that infused black schools with a civic and literary curriculum” through which “[g]enerations of students were quietly taught how to recognize they were being denied their rights and [were] armed with the resilience to believe they did not have to be diminished by America’s perverse form of ‘justice for all’ [laying] the groundwork for subsequent generations to demand equality” (11).
Siddle Walker’s underlying point is that “black educators could not always publicly discuss what they were actually working toward…Instead, [they] used their organizations to mask their activities.” She refers to Brer Rabbit as the “West African trickster figure who’d survived the MIddle Passage” and was now deployed strategically by these wily educators. “Much of Negro behavior,” she cites Robert Moton [/efnnote} Second president of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute [/efnnote] as saying, “was ‘nothing more’ than the Negro’s ‘artful and adroit accommodation of his manners and methods to what he knows to be the weaknesses and foibles of his white neighbor.’” “Had I not had access to Dr. Tate,” Siddle Walker emphasizes, “I would not have thought to look for these educators who employed a visible network to operate secret strategies utilized by every generation from Reconstruction to desegregation” (11-12).
Siddle Walker’s extremely detailed account of the complications involved in these strategies emerges from her methodology of “historical ethnography” which she has described in earlier books and outlines again here in an Author’s Note. She tries to describe from the inside out the experience of furtive car trips at night designed to shield parents from retribution for organizing against unequal schools, or the advice that Dr. Tate received as an undergraduate when he served as driver for his college’s president, Horace Mann Bond, father of Julian Bond (who would later become famous in SNCC). She recreates the intense, high-stakes debates about how much to ask for, when to demand rather than ask, how to get into the rooms where White people exercise power, how to desseminate information to different constituencies without endangering livlihoods or lives.
But the climax of The Lost Education of Horace Tate is the painful explication of the process by which the segregated but powerful Georgia Teachers and Education Association became merged in the 1970s with the previously all-White National Education Association’s (NEA) Georgia branch. The story is painful because Tate and others were aware of the loss that integration would represent. Already, hundreds of Georgia schools and thousands of schools across the country had experienced “outergration,” the process by which expert Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs to less qualified Whites and by which at least hundreds of Black communities lost their schools altogether, seeing the students in them bussed away and the schools shuttered forever. Siddle Walker reports extensively on Tate’s appeal to the GT&EA arguing against “second-class integration,” urging his colleagues to vote against merger. The speech is immensely powerful and moving. For example:
“Second class integration . . . is more evil than was segregation...because second class integration has a way of striking at the psych[e] and penetrating the fibers of the brain and depths of the soul to say to a person who has been deprived for over 400 years, 'I will make you think you are equal by passing laws to protect you and your rights, and after I have enacted those laws I will creep in on you. I will creep in on you and make you think you are somebody and make it legal for you to eat at the forbidden lunch counters and then I will creep a little further and take away your jobs so you wouldn't have money in which to buy the food.'...Second class integration has a way of saying 'I will creep in on you and surprise you and make you say "Yes sir" and "Yes ma'am" when you are buying items from my store, but I will creep a little further and charge you 25 cents more than the item is worth. I will let you listen to me tell you that you are equal but I will take away your control; I will take away your power; I will take away your influence; and I will take away your job. But I will tell you that you are equal and integrated.' There can be no first class citizenship with second class integration” (p. 261).
Tate’s speech was prophetic, and as we look around at the landscape of second class integration that surrounds our schools, neighborhoods, economic arrangements, and politics today, we can only wonder what would be different if the magnificently organized teachers’ associations that existed across the South had retained their segregated independence. The GT&EA ignored Dr. Tate’s warnings, and merged with the Georgia Educaiton Association, hoping that by allying with the more powerful and much wealthier White dominated teachers’ union that they could preserve some authority and some employment—a compromise, and, as things turned out, not a good one, at least not from the point of view of creating a true, egalitarian democracy.
Jarvis Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching tells a very different story, though its themes are in many ways similar to Siddle Walker’s. Givens describes Woodson keynoting a GT&EA convention in 1942, inspiring the 2500 members to crowd out the Spellman College chapel “standing on chairs outside and leaning into the windows.” But with this one exception there is no cross reference between Woodson’s orbit and Tate’s in either book. Neither Woodson nor his organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) is mentioned at all by Siddle Walker.
The principle contrast between Tate’s story as told by Siddle Walker and Woodson’s story as told by Givens is that Tate attempted to collaborate with White power structures and Woodson operated as independently of them as he could. Givens’s account focuses on the second hidden narrative of Siddle Walker’s” “[g]enerations of students were quietly taught how to recognize they were being denied their rights and [were] armed with the resilience to believe they did not have to be diminished.” This teaching and arming was the purpose of Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Woodson did not seek integration or patronage from White institutions. He was never invited to speak at any predominantly White college or university. As Givens puts it, Woodson “engaged teachers through pathways beyond educational spheres controlled by white officials and philanthropists. They offered guidance that infused teachers’ pedagogy with politics and ideas emanating from the black counterpublic sphere” (p. 161).
This is a very different approach from the publicly accommodating but privately subversive role Siddle Walker describes as underlying Horace Tate’s career. The point is not that Tate was always accommodating. Far from it. His house is set on fire, he loses his job when he speaks out aginst the racist school board policies, he attempts to demand what his students need. But his work is constrained by the power dyanmics of the economic, political and cultural structures that he and his colleagues work within: what Givens refers to as the American School. For Siddle Walker, what Horace Tate teaches us is how much secret resistance was possible while still surviving economically within the dominant educational structures.
Givens emphasizes, in contrast, not so much hidden or secret resistance as what he calls “fugitive” pedagogy. Woodson “adovcated for black schools to ‘abandon a large portion of the traditional courses which have been retained throughout the years because they are supposedly cultural’” (p. 115). “Any educational program in service to black freedom dreams,” he writes, “needed to have, at its core, a social analysis of the world and new language that demystified how ideas in the American Curriculum—or colonial curricula—worked to sustain one’s subjection” (119).
Although Woodson and others emphatically taught the history of African Americans’ learning in secrecy when White supremacy made Black learning dangerous to do in the open, Woodson himself was bold and public about his own teaching. He published enormous amounts of explicitly pro-Black materials over many decades. His conception of Negro History Week was only one of the avenues he pursued to bring the political content of freedom work out of the shadows. He also wrote and disseminated textbooks that taught about Black rebellion and resistance. He mass produced and distributed posters and art for schools, classrooms, and churches that promoted images of Black power and strength. Through the vehicle of the Negro History Bulletin, Woodson stimulated research and publication on historical and cultural topics that openly contested the dominant narrative.
I think Givens could have been a little more explicit about the contrast between Woodson’s boldness and the kind of courageous but more deliberately disguised strategy of Horace Tate and others. Givens clearly explicates the “function of antiblackness in the American School” (always capitalized) and describes the resistance to antiblackness in education as, in fact, resistance to American School. Integration was in no way a goal of Woodson’s, at least not in any short run. The project of the ASNLH was to establish an independent Black consciousness through the knowledge and celebration of Black history.
In case we miss the point, Givens includes a wonderful chapter that connects anti-colonialist writings outside of the U.S. to Woodson’s project. Sylvia Wynter of Jamaica, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, and Aimé Césaire of Martinique are invoked as related practioners of anti-colonial educational strategies. Césaire, for example writes that “wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see…in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business” (Givens, p. 118)
In schools where there is no critique of capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and violence, doesn’t Givens’s perspective imply that School necessarily produces this parody of education? The pathos of Horace Tate’s story is that despite his heroic persistence and cunning, schools for Black children are still thoroughly segregated by caste, and the power of Black teachers and communities—once concentrated through efforts like those of the GT&EA—are now dissipated, diffused, and compromised. The standard, consensus policy of virtually every education agency at the local, state, and federal levels is indeed to hastily manufacture the subordinate functionaaries, clerks, and interpreters neccessary for the smooth operation of business. What a different education system it would be if the goal was freedom, relationship, and democratic power.
I don’t know by what measures we could or should compare the efforts of Woodson and Césaire, for example, to Tate’s efforts, but Givens’s and Siddle Walker’s books together make me think that we should be aware that choices have to be made. We can choose to be more or less open in our resistence to the smooth operation of business. Different choices may need to be made in different circumstances. But we do no one any good if we pretend that we can play both sides. And we should teach the generations who must take over this struggle that they must choose, too, both whose side they are on, and whether they will fight openly or in camouflage.