In this historical examination, Amato Nocera, Kyle P. Steele, and John Hensley argue that the development of Black rural high schools in the decades leading up to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision represented the dynamic between standardization, white supremacy, and Black self-definition that has shaped US education reform.…

Typically, when a community's historical materials encounter a large academic library's archives, the engagement is transactional: they sign forms, they hand over their archives, and we assure them that their materials will be valued by researchers. These procedures make assumptions about comfort with gift agreements (what if communities seek…

This article documents collective memories of the founding, curriculum, and attendees of one of the first (1866) Reconstruction Era Quaker-Freedmen School sites in the Southeastern United States. It applies critical oral history methodology including the collection of primary documents, previous investigations into the school, and interviews of…

This paper explores trends in summer and intermittent teaching practices among African American students in the post-Civil War South, focusing on student activities in the field, the institutions they attended, and the communities they served. Transitioning out of the restrictions and impoverishment of slavery while simultaneously seeking to…

Drawing on such academic topics as the white racial frame, critical race theory, Black critical theory, and Black male studies, the authors offer Black PlayCrit, a tool focusing on the specificity of Blackness and anti-Black violence in play. Calling for the adoption of Black PlayCrit in future studies, they suggest researchers should consider…

This study explores the common barriers and shared visions for creating access to archival collections held by libraries at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). One of few reports that document the needs of HBCU libraries as they relate to archives and special collections. It is based on a series of online focus groups that author…

In this essay, filmmaker and educator Caroline Stephenson tells how Hurricane Irene started her on a journey to make a documentary about Rosenwald Schools in her native Hertford County, North Carolina. After many years working as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films and television shows, Stephenson moved back to the family farm to raise…

This book explores a profoundly negative narrative about legally segregated schools in the United States being "inherently inferior" compared to their white counterparts. However, there are overwhelmingly positive counter-memories of these schools as "good and valued" among former students, teachers, and community members.…

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have…

Given the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. Franklin Frazier's award-winning "Black Bourgeoisie", this article reconsiders the political nature of a respectability discourse among black teachers in the Jim Crow South. Writing against Frazier's image of a materialistic and status-addicted black middle class, I argue that the…

This study seeks to understand the ways nine states represent African Americans within their standards for U.S. History. Previous research on the effects of high-stakes assessment on social studies educators suggests teachers align their instruction with information found in state standards. Therefore, an understanding of the way African Americans…

In the spring of 2003, the author worked with a team of eighth grade teachers at Asheville Middle School in North Carolina on a project that combined fine art, music, the history of the railroads, and the African American experience in the state and nation. In her classroom, students interviewed a retired train conductor, who was African American,…