School Clothes
A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A chorus of Black student voices that renders a new story of US education—one where racial barriers and violence are confronted by freedom dreaming and resistance
Black students were forced to live and learn on the Black side of the color line for centuries, through the time of slavery, Emancipation, and the Jim Crow era. And for just as long—even through to today—Black students have been seen as a problem and a seemingly troubled population in America’s public imagination.
Through over one hundred firsthand accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Professor Jarvis Givens offers a powerful counter-narrative in School Clothes to challenge such dated and prejudiced storylines. He details the educational lives of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison; political leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis; and Black students whose names are largely unknown but who left their marks nonetheless. Givens blends this multitude of individual voices into a single narrative, a collective memoir, to reveal a through line shared across time and circumstance: a story of African American youth learning to battle the violent condemnation of Black life and imposed miseducation meant to quell their resistance.
School Clothes elevates a legacy in which Black students are more than the sum of their suffering. By peeling back the layers of history, Givens unveils in high relief a distinct student body: Black learners shaped not only by their shared vulnerability but also their triumphs, fortitude, and collective strivings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
History of education scholar Givens (Fugitive Pedagogy) delivers an intriguing if somewhat theoretical account of African American education in the 19th and 20th centuries. Expounding on the metaphor of "school clothes," or clothing "purchased with the specific intent of being worn to school," Givens contends that clothes were "forms of protection just as much as assertions of dignity and self-worth for young black people whose childhoods continued to be threatened, even after slavery was legally abolished." He also suggests that Black students "dress themselves up for a new life, a new world, one in which all God's children have shoes, and a robe, and wings, as the African American spiritual goes." Though analysis of the "distinct subject position" of "the black student" and other scholarly discussions can grow abstract, Givens unearths and contextualizes many fascinating stories, including Zora Neale Hurston's memory of contorting herself to meet the expectations of two white patrons who visited her fifth-grade classroom ("They asked me if I loved school, and I lied that I did," she later wrote). Elsewhere, Utica Institute founder William Holtzclaw recalls how his mother, a sharecropper, would "outgeneral" the family's white landlord by "slip me off to school through the back way" during cotton picking season. Patient readers will be rewarded with a tapestry of first-person voices capturing "the beautiful and the terrible realities" of Black education in America. Illus.
