The 50th year anniversary of Brown v. Board of
Education,
Topeka
,
KS
is quickly approaching. It has given scholars/educators time to
reflect on the educational experiences of African Americans in the
post-
Brown era.
A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a
Southern Community by Winfred E. Pitts assists in this process
of reflection with a contribution to the “local history
genre” (p. xiii). Embracing critical race theory, the author
engages in what he calls ‘historical research
methodology’ (p. xii). Pitts accomplishes this task primarily
through archival research. However, to augment what he learns from
archival documents like school board minutes, correspondence files
with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, microfilm copies of the local
newspapers, school documents such as office records from city
schools, yearbooks, and student newspapers, Pitts interviews
individuals active at the school and community levels preceding,
during, and following the
Brown decision. This approach
results in a vivid picture of the impact of
Brown v. Board of
Education, Topeka, KS on a local community that attempted to
protect ‘separate but equal’ at all costs.
Pitts’s book includes the history of education in the
South and
Gainesville-Hall County
,
Georgia
. This part of his discussion is accessible to students studying
the history of education at the undergraduate and graduate levels
and is also a good reminder for those with some knowledge of
educational history. It covers educational opportunities for
African and European Americans during the era of slavery and
follows the development of education in the Southern region. He
captures the tension between providing African Americans with
education while maintaining the “Southern way of life”
(p. 33). Of the early education of African Americans, Pitts writes,
“[it] emphasized industrial training and sanitation . . .
courses in hygiene, manual arts, domestic science, and agriculture
. . . simple methods of teaching in reading, writing, arithmetic,
and geography” (p. 34).
Moreover, the inferiority of African American education was
maintained by the allocation of unequal resources. In Georgia, the
average salary for white teachers exceeded that for African
American teachers; colleges and universities serving the African
American community received 2.2% of the state educational
appropriations in 1921 despite the fact that they made up 40% of
the population in the state; and during the 1939-1940 school year,
Georgia spent an average $142 to educate each white student and
only $35 per African American student (p. 35). In fact, every
educational resource provided to African Americans in
Gainesville-Hall
County
was inferior to that received by white students. Consequently, the
Brown decision left racially segregated school districts
with one of three choices: 1) business as usual in hopes that local
courts would not enforce the
Brown decision; 2) equalize the
educational opportunities for all students in hopes of avoiding
racial integration; or 3) racially integrate the schools. The
Gainesville School Board initially opted for the former strategy.
Therein lays one of the strengths of the author’s research.
Pitts continually ties the local decisions in
Gainesville-Hall
County
to a state and national context enabling readers to develop an
understanding of the extent to which citizens were willing to go to
preserve racial segregation and white supremacy.
Pitts cites the litigation preceding and including Brown
as responsible for widespread improvements in the educational
resources allocated for African American education. While Pitts
credits the Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown case
with closing the gap between African and European American
educational resources, he argues that White Southerners met the
decision with “determined resistance” (p. 86). Leaving
the enforcement of the Brown decision to Southern
politicians enabled school districts to fend off change for more
than a decade. In the case of the Gainesville school district,
efforts to desegregate the schools were avoided until the 1969-1970
school year. The discussion surrounding the process of
desegregation highlights the challenges of sending African American
students into formerly all white schools predicated on notions of
black inferiority and white supremacy. According to Pitts, upon
integration the ‘black schools’ in Gainesville, Georgia
were closed even when the physical facilities were superior to
those of the ‘white schools’; African American students
were placed in “‘average’ and ‘below
average’ classes” (p. 173) even when they had taken
above average classes in the year preceding racial integration;
those African American students placed in advanced placement
courses were asked by teachers “‘Are you sure you need
to be in this class?’” or found that they
couldn’t remain in these courses because they didn’t
have a prerequisite course despite their performance; “Black
students were not expected to perform [academically]” (p.
175); and, the number of African American teachers and
administrators declined substantially. These experiences highlight
the tension between the goal of the plaintiffs in the Brown
decision–to provide African American children with a quality
education–and the goals adopted by school boards–to
racially integrate the schools.
In the beginning, Pitts says that his primary goal is to unveil
universal lessons about the process of desegregation by studying
the experiences of one community. Through this research, the author
hoped to ‘discover both the gains and the costs of
desegregation for the Gainesville-Hall County African American
community” (p. xv). While a laudable goal, this proves to be
difficult for the author given the circumstances surrounding
African American education in the South and, more specifically, in
Gainesville, Georgia. In fact, the challenges that African American
students faced when integrated into Gainesville High School are
similar to the challenges that African American students experience
if and when they attend racially integrated schools today. And,
contemporary shortages of African American teachers and
administrators are a direct result of this period of desegregation.
Furthermore, contemporary disparities in per-pupil expenditures
appear to be the result of differences between the wealthy and the
poor while masking the degree to which they disproportionately
burden African Americans who are disproportionately poor. These
‘costs’ make it difficult to see the
‘gains’ resulting from the Brown
decision.