Stepping Outside the Master Script: Re-Connecting the History of American Education

By Swartz, Ellen

Inaccurate and incomplete presentations of American education history in teacher education programs play a central role in the poor preparation of pre-service teachers. This article exemplifies how the praxis of late 19th and 20th century African descent educators-who viewed education as a vehicle for freedom and an affirmation of humanity-informed the democratic agenda claimed by their White counterparts. This informing praxis has been hidden in master scripted accounts of the history of American education through a White/normative belief structure of race, which has created a disconnection between emancipatory African descent educators and White reform-minded educators to this day. Inaccurate presentations of the history of education in teacher education programs play a central role in the poor preparation of pre-service teachers. These 90% to 95% White, pre-service teachers are invited to experience their racial dominance and its corollary White privilege tiirough curricular omission of varied forms of cultural excellence in education and all other disciplines demonstrated by people of African origin from ancient to modem times (Diop, 1987; Franklin, 1995; Karenga, 2004; Tedia, 1995; Van Sertima, 1986). Also absent is the long-term impact of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic racism on schools and schooling in the neo-colonized communities in which these pre-service teachers will soon be working (Duncan, 2004; Franklin & Moss, 1994; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 2004). This curricular hegemony produces racial silence, spurious claims of innocence, and shifts and refusals of responsibility for social, political, economic, and educational inequalities. In these ways, “whiteness” dysconsciously defines the terms of racial discourse in order to maintain its normative position of dominance (King, 1991).

Compounding White pre-service teachers’ lack of historical knowledge and systemic analysis is their limited or non-existent personal relatedness to communities and peoples of color. In to this knowledge or experience vacuum, falls fear-based assumptions, cultural misrepresentations, media stereotypes, and popular culture myths, which for many are fed by pools of missionary angst or warden- like zeal. These omissions, distortions, and misrepresentations are taught and learned with the resulting dyad of racial dominance and racial silence we currently see in White pre-service teachers who know almost nothing about people of color, past or present. What can teacher educators do for students whose 12 to 16 years of formal school silence and mis-education (Woodson, 1933/1990) have convinced them mat if it was not taught or they have not heard about it, it is not worth knowing? Exposure in teacher preparation programs to a more accurate account of the history of American education – a history mat still conforms to the Eurocentric socio-cultural archetype of omission, misrepresentation, and exogenous master scripting – is a place to begin.

“Re-Membering” American Education History

Re-membering history is a process of putting the members of history back together. This process produces a more accurate representation of those who were there, and is powerful enough to correct the omission and misrepresentation of African descent people in the United States – a people with a central historical presence that exists alongside a persistent absence in the teaching of it. Such a process requires high standards of scholarship based on criteria such as inclusion, representation, critical thinking, and indigenous voice, and can be used for every culture or group that the master script has removed and/or misrepresented (Swartz, 1996). Reconnecting the history of American education in this way can help education students step outside the master script that envelops them and, to a large extent, us. This script has been codified, managed, and maintained by earlier education historians (e.g., Bailyn, 1960; Cremin, 1970, 1980; Cubberly, 1920; Kaestle, 1983; Kliebard, 1986; Pulliam, 1982; Tyack, 1967) whose work consistently reflects the monocultural pattern of U.S. history in general. People of African origin appear only on occasion or in separate chapters or sections; they falsely appear to “start” in America, as if there is no prior educational history and culture; and their indigenous accounts are not present. They are only discussed briefly.

More recent publications on the history and social foundations of education (e.g., Cuban, 1993; Herbst, 1996; Ornstein & Levine, 1993; Tyack, 2003) reflect similar insufficiencies of earlier accounts so that even the increased presence of African descent people in these works fails to remove the master script. For example, the relationship between IQ testing, tracking, and racial stratification goes without critique; hegemonic practices in education and in the general society happens without perpetrators; terms like low- achieving, disadvantaged, violent, and school failure are rendered synonymous with African American students; and, if included, the accomplishments of Black educators and students are presented as examples of overcoming discrimination – not as examples of cultural excellence. The positions and practices of influential figures such as Horace Mann, Charles W. Eliot, and James B. Conant are written about (e.g., Tozer, Senese, & Violas, 2006), but these educators views are uncontested.

Failing to judge or question past educational practices is typically couched in claims of objectivity or non-judgmental researcher neutrality (i.e., reporting “what is not what ought to be,” Cuban, 1993, p. 324). Notwithstanding Bernard Bailyn’s critique of education historians for viewing the past as “simply the present writ small,” (Bailyn, 1960, p. 9) what Milton Gaither described as the “inability to understand the past on its own terms” (Gaither, 2003, p. 3), understanding, for example, supremacy and its purveyors as normative for their time, reifies dominance, which is a way of silencing and objectifying the disenfranchised. By gate keeping the past, education historians have been a mouthpiece of historic systemic forces as well as economic, social, and political forces, which influenced and shaped schools and schooling in order to maintain racist and other hegemonic school practices (Duncan, 2004).

White mainstream historians’ omissions, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of people of African descent have resulted in an inaccurate and incomplete version of American education history that is typically taught to pre-service teachers. This version is relayed thusly: African people came to the Americas uneducated and received no education during slavery. Only through the beneficence of White teachers and missionaries was education brought to these once enslaved people. Since the late 19th century, reforms in education have come from White movements with White actors, but even with these efforts, poverty and discrimination have made it all but impossible for Black children to experience educational success. Absent from such tales are Black educators, Black families, communities, and the institutions, ideas, and practices that rose from them (Anderson, 1988; Franklin, 1979; Siddle Walker, 2000; Williams, 2005). Also absent is content on the systemic forces and practices that have sustained group-based inequalities in service to dominant groups. This content remains side-barred, but most often silenced. Also omitted in this master script is what Kantor and Lowe (2004) refer to as “a long alternative [African American] tradition of valuing and battling for quality education” (p. 9); a tradition that has carried U.S. democratic rhetoric closer to reality (Harding, 1990; King, 2004; Perry, 2003). Teacher educators can stand within this tradition by stepping outside the master script through learning and teaching more accurately and comprehensively about the history of education. Remembering history is a mending process – one that is needed to expand pre-service teachers’ knowledge in preparation for teaching all children in general, and children of African descent, in particular.

A Necessary Historical Context

The history of American education exists in the context of centuries of education history. While the focus of this article is the inaccurate and incomplete teaching of American education history, altering this requires a much longer view of African education, which begins well before the period of enslavement. What is little known by teacher educators is that people of African descent have a historical tradition of scholarship and educational excellence that extends through history for thousands of years (Asante, 2000; Davidson, 1991/2001; Diop, 1974). In addition to traditional forms of education, seen in an African context as “everywhere and for everyone” (Maiga, 2005), there were Nile Valley centers of higher education in Kernet, Kush, and Nubia; systems of higher education in Nigeria and Congo; and universities with noted scholars in the cities of Jenne, Timbuktu, and Gao in West Africa well before the Renaissance Era in Europe. As a result, African peoples came to the Americas educated; well before the arrival of Columbus, as explorers, traders, and visitors (Van Sertima, 1976); and they were educated when they were forced into a system of slavery shortly after the arrival of Europeans. African peoples brought with them knowledge in all disciplines. Many spoke several languages and were learned in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, and architecture. Still others had expertise in agriculture, cattle- raising, business and trade, government, artistry, and spirituality which were practiced in ways that acknowledged me oneness of all life (Asante, 2000; Holloway, 1990; Diop, 1987; Tedia, 1995). During the system of slavery, specific African peoples were sought for the knowledge and skills they possessed to enhance the profits of their enslavers. For example, the successful growing of rice on South Carolina and Georgia plantations was achieved by using the expertise of Songhay people (from Mali, West Africa), particularly the women, who had knowledge of rice cultivation techniques that could be exploited by their enslavers (Carney, 2001). Once enslaved, law and custom denied further education of African peoples. Yet, education which was understood as necessary for freedom and as an affirmation of humanity (Perry, 2003) was consistently pursued by Africans in colonial America, with its provision by families and community leaders in homes and churches, through tutoring, or in those few White schools that were open to free African children (Franklin, 1978, 1979; Franklin & Moss, 1994; Woodson, 1928). The history of the African Free Schools in New York City – the forerunner to free public education for White children in that city in the late 1 8th and 1 9th centuries – revealed the impact that educators of African descent had on education in New York (Franklin, 1995; Mayo, 1942; Rury, 1983, 1985). Another example of the influence of Black educators, who were elected to political offices in southern states, was their successful efforts as Reconstruction Period state representatives who rewrote state constitutions to create the first free public schools for all children in the South (Du Bois, 1935/ 1972; Franklin & Moss, 1994). These are only two examples of the ways in which the actions of educators of African descent were a bulwark against exclusionary practices that were severely compromising the country’s legislated democratic ideologies.

Prior to the Civil War, White planters and politicians were intent on maintaining their positions of power and illusion of superiority. To continue to do so, they denied education to those they were exploiting by passing laws in Southern states making it a crime to teach free or enslaved African people to read or write (West, 1972; Williams, 2005). In both the North and Soutii, the denial of schooling and second-class citizenship was inscribed through “legal” and illegal means; therefore, the relationship between literacy and freedom was understood (Kluger, 1976; Walker, 1829/1965), There was the destruction of White schools that opened their doors to Black students, inequitable funding schemes, intimidation, terrorism, and school curricula that focused only on the languages and cultural productions of European civilization – completely omitting, denigrating, or misrepresenting African peoples’ civilizations, languages, and cultural productions (Crummell, 1891/1969; Darling-Hammond, 2004; Franklin & Moss, 1994; Woodson, 1933/1990). It became clear that there was no intention to educate Black people to be full participants in this country’s social and economic life (Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 2004). Against this backdrop, because of their steadfast insistence on education, Black people were positioned as unacknowledged leaders in me democratization of American education – in “education for everyone.” Acknowledging this “unspoken” presence of Black people is key to re- membering what Eurocentric accounts have distorted and torn apart (Morrison, 1992).

White Reform-Minded Educators Carve a Democratic Agenda

In the late 1 9th and first half of the 20th centuries, a re- membering process uncovered how worldview and the resulting body of knowledge, concepts, and assertions produced by Black educators informed the democratic agenda claimed by their White counterparts. This unspoken presence of Black educators represents a refusal to identify their pivotal role in the education reform of this period and beyond. The actual relationships between Black educators and meir reform-minded White counterparts revealed, however, that the work of the latter depended significantly on the unacknowledged work and realities of me former. Sylvia Wynter’s (1992a) White/normative belief structure of race was used to explain how such a major source of this democratic agenda has been hidden.

Toward the turn of the 20th century, reform-minded White educators carved a democratic agenda for themselves designed to move away from the rigid practices of traditional education. For example, John Dewey (1903) criticized the practice of only acquiring prescribed knowledge in schools, advocating instead the inquiring into knowledge, and claiming that the reduction of teaching and learning to a rote and controlled activity caused schools to lag behind the emerging democratic efforts of other social institutions. Like Dewey, other White reform-minded educators taught and wrote about schools and the role of teachers in the context of a society needing reform – a society where capitalism, special privilege, and the value of the wealthy for property rights over human rights produced great economic disparities (Coe, 1935; Counts, 1939). Their work envisioned a collectivist economy and society that could reduce the privileges of the ruling class and promote the general welfare in which teachers were loyal, not to the accepted truths of the past, but to the critical examination of proposals able to accelerate change for the future interests of all (Counts, 1932a, 1932b, 1939; Dewey, 1916, 1937-1938; Kilpatrick, 1935; Rugg, 1932).

As for race, reform-minded White educators occasionally spoke and were critical of racial discrimination and the country’s history of slavery, making increasingly stronger denouncements of educational inequalities, segregation, and “sentiments of superiority” by the mid-20tii century (Counts, 1932a, 1952; Dewey, 1934-1935, 1938/ 1968). White educators tendency to exemplify their ideology by criticizing what John Dewey referred to in 1922 as “race prejudice” (Boydston, 1977) or in 1938 as “racial intolerance” highlighted the democratic ideals they professed by contrasting them with such flagrant examples of non-democratic practices. After all, they intoned, democracy practiced to its fullest potential would not countenance such discriminatory practices. However, what remained unexplained was the virtual disconnection – even when tiiey worked together – between these White educators and their contemporary Black counterparts who simultaneously lived with racism and were dedicated to its eradication.

While the work of one or two Black educators from this period are included in master-scripted versions of the history of education, their inclusion only serves to solidify educators’ disconnection across race. Booker T. Washington is one such “lone” figure who encouraged Black people to become skilled only in agriculture and trades, a clear accommodation to White supremacist ideology that fit well with the social efficiency agenda of the early 20th century (Franklin, 1992; Gardner, 1975; Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 2004; Scott, 1936; Washington, 1905). If another Black educator was permitted in the standard script, his purpose was often to disagree with the first Black educator, which was seen in the case of W. E. B. Du Bois (Alilunas, 1973). While many Black educators, journalists, and religious and political leaders agreed in their public opposition to Washington’s agenda, such as, Alexander Crummell, T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and William Monroe Trotter, it was Du Bois who was consistently positioned as Washington’s detractor (Franklin, 1992, 1995; Moss, 1981). The way in which these two educators were pitted against each otiier as individuals further exemplified racial disconnection and disregard by obscuring the collective and determinist responses and practices of Black educators and by diverting attention from the racist socioeconomic and political context in which they lived.

Racial disconnect could also be seen in Social Frontier, A Journal of Educational Criticism and Reconstruction that was edited and featured essays and editorials by well-known White reform- minded educators between 1934 and 1939. This journal provided extensive treatment of democracy, freedom, class inequalities, critiques of capitalism, and the role of schools in changing the social order. There were some minor insertions about the inequalities experienced by Black students and teachers and the reprisals and lack of freedom that White teachers faced in taking a position against slavery and discrimination (Curti, 1936). In five years, there was only one strong call for “full economic, social, and political equality for the Negro people, for promptest enactment of vigorous anti-lynching legislation, for the abolition of the color lines in the unions and all racial segregation and discrimination” (Lovestone, 1938, p. 58).

In 46 issues of Social Frontier over a five-year period, there was also only one essay by a Black autiior – a doctoral student, L. D. Reddick. In response to an article seeking recognition and support for White intellectuals who experienced research barriers in the South, Reddick (1937) critiqued the omission of more severe obstacles experienced by Black research scholars in the same region. The near complete exclusion of Black voice in one of the most progressive journals of White reform-minded educators in the second half of the 1930s was representative of educators’ widespread disconnection across race. What is troubling and disingenuous in this finding is that White reform-minded educators laid sole claim to a reform agenda whose actual praxis was not their own. As exemplified later in this article, there was little congruency between these educators’ stated positions of social and educational reform and meir actual lived relations and scholarly practices. The Informing Praxis of Emancipatory Black Educators

The elements of an African worldview – and their retentions in the Americas – have survived and been replicated in me context of centuries of racism/White supremacy (Boykin, 1994; Myers, 1993; Nobles, 1980). It was this combination of context and a people’s ontological and epistemological orientations, values, social organizing principles, and past and present cultural practices that created the collective praxis of late 19th and 20th century emancipatory Black educators who worked within theoretical frameworks of racial justice, cultural representation, reciprocity and mutuality, self-determination, and liberation (Bond, 1934; Du Bois, 1903, 1945; Franklin, 1992; Lane, 1945-1953; Woodson, 1933/ 1990). In developing this collective praxis, these educators produced trenchant critiques and reconfigurations of the inadequacies and inequities of school and society; they demonstrated the retention of African ontological orientations such as collective responsibility and interdependence; and they exemplified how using me organizing principles of reciprocity, group well-being, and the value for a collective humanity in education works in the best interest of all, not just some. An examination of their worldview, positions, and practices revealed the ways in which their praxis sought to liberate historically subordinated groups from the forced fit of dominant ideologies and practices, with every culture viewed as normative and possessing cultural capital (Boykin, 1994; Goodwin, 1998; Scheurich & Young, 1997). This value for cultural autonomy was congruent with emancipatory praxis, and together created a space within which a full or inclusive democratic agenda could exist. Dissimilarly, the democratic agenda claimed by White reform-minded educators was constrained by its solipsistic connection to whiteness as seen in the failure of its proponents to acknowledge and learn from their Black counterparts’ socio-cultural orientations, organizing principles, and values.

Looking back to this period, it was the community embedded, day- to-day, life-long experiences and practices of Black educators such as Carter G. Woodson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, Layle Lane, and many others that demonstrated the elements of an emancipatory democratic agenda – one that was formed and supported by the retentions of an African worldview (Boykin, 1994; Myers, 1993; Nobles, 1980). While this article focused on these four educators’ works as reflective of these retentions, they and their works existed in the broader context of determined educators of African descent at the local, state, and national levels in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. These determined educators represented a range of ideological positions and practices, from the industrial and rural community improvement focus of the Jeanes teachers/supervisors to the accommodationist, manual labor focus of Booker T. Washington and the “Hampton-Tuskegee Idea” (Anderson, 1988, p. 33) to the socio-political, equity-seeking focus of a Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, and other teacher leaders in the American Teachers Association (Anderson, 1978; Bethune, 1939; Cooper, 1892/1969; Dillard, 1923; Franklin, 1992; Giles, 2006; Jones, 1937; National Education Association, 2002; Pincham, 2005; Washington, 1905). Whether through industrial schooling, higher education in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), private schools, state teachers associations, litigation and the judicial system, politics, the press, or national organizations and community organizing -Black educators collectively forged conditions for change (Bell, 2004; Dougherty, 2004; Franklin, 1978, 1979; Kluger, 1976; Roebuck & Murty, 1993; Williams, 2005). Even with their opposing positions, their struggles to advance, demonstrated through diverse forms of cultural excellence under hostile and oppressive social, economic, and political conditions, created the platform for emancipatory Black educators to craft and promote a democratic agenda in education.

In his classic work titled The Mis-education of the Negro (1933/ 1990), Carter G. Woodson demonstrated the role that school knowledge played in the denigration of Africa and the disregard of African and Diasporic achievements in each subject area. Woodson’s analysis of school curriculum in the early 1930s revealed how systemic cognitive distortions resulted from omissions and misrepresentations of African descent people (Wynter, 1992b). He used his analysis of these dominant and distorted historical narratives to explain how they taught White students to view their ancestors as having done everything worthwhile, while Black students – if they were only exposed to such master scripted representations of their ancestors – were viewing them as having done nothing worthwhile. Woodson’s ontological or cultural orientation of collective responsibility was seen in the breadth of his practice. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), a quarterly Journal of Negro History (1916), the Associated Publishers (1921), Negro History Week (1926) which was renamed African American History Month, and the Negro History Bulletin (1937) to present, publish, and preserve the historiography that White institutions refused to consider (Thompson, 1935; Woodson, 1919/1968). Woodson’s cultural inclination to foster unity and mutuality by coalescing collective efforts, represent African retentions and elements of the informing praxis of emancipatory Black educators.

The scholarly work of W. E. B. Du Bois began in the late 19th century and extended throughout most of the 20th century. Du Bois (1903, 1935/1972, 1945) was a philosopher, author, political organizer, professor, and researcher who consistently affirmed the intellectual traditions of people of African descent and established a scholarly grounding in opposition to the race- and class- privileged exclusionary ideologies and racist positions of decades of White scholars and demagogues (Green, 1977; Stewart, 1984). In 1910, he founded and was editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, in which he relentlessly advocated for democratic rights and the liberation of Black people in the U.S., all in the context of the liberation of oppressed peoples throughout the world. Referred to by historian Milton Gaither (2003) as “one of the few truly great men of letters our country has produced” (p. 1 1 3), Du Bois wrote in numerous genres and produced classic sociological studies (e.g., Black Reconstruction, The Philadelphia Negro, The Negro Common School). While viewing “education as part of the process of the liberation of his people,” his writing “was meant to serve all humanity” (Aptheker, 1973, p. xi). His insightful and prolific publications and social advocacy demonstrate value for a collective humanity – another African retention and element of the informing praxis of emancipatory Black educators. His clear position on education as a subversive force, needed to undo socioeconomic and educational privileging, laid a foundation on which more recent emancipatory scholars have built (Aptheker, 1973; Lee & Slaughter- Defoe, 2004).

Horace Mann Bond was a teacher, historian, scholar, author, and university administrator who supported progressive educational ideals and equitable educational opportunities for Black children. He held prominent positions in schools of education and was a scholar committed to the use of social science to carefully document findings of inequality and inhumanity – all in the interest of racial justice and uplift (Bond, 1934; Norton, 1984; Urban, 1989). In 1924, Bond published his analysis and refutation of current racial interpretations of the Alpha Army Test scores, and along with other Black social scientists, who included Charles H. Thompson (founder of The Journal of Negro Education in 1932) and Doxey Wilkerson (union and civil rights advocate and federal advisor), claimed that such test scores were based more on environmental conditions than innate mental ability (Bond, 1924; Franklin, 1979; Thompson, 1934; Wilkerson, 1934). Written during me Depression, his seminal text, Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934) addressed the funding inequalities between Black and White schools and advocated for social, economic, and educational change. Bond used historiography to advance education for Black institutions by arguing that their inequitable treatment was inconsistent with the goals of public education (Gaither, 2003). Along with other Black educators and reformers, Bond practiced the organizing principles of reciprocity and group well-being inherent in me democratic idea of what it means to be public; more African retentions and elements of the informing praxis of emancipatory Black educators.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, Black educators throughout the country organized themselves to develop special programs at their educational institutions and in their communities; they wrote about and advocated against bias in textbooks and for African American and multicultural curriculum; they created child-centered experiential learning programs as democratic learning environments; and they engaged witii a wide range of social reforms such as racial justice, civil rights, union organizing, economic and political organizing, antimilitarism, and community advocacy and uplift (Daniel, 1938; Eaton, 1975; Johnson, 2004). These reformers’ approaches were communal, collaborative, and focused on group well-being, which are all African retentions and elements of the informing practice of Black educators. Layle Lane exemplifies these reformers. She was a New York City high school teacher who ran for the New York State Senate and New York City Comptroller. As a local and national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), she advocated for a more inclusive curriculum, an end to discrimination and segregation in unions and the armed forces, and enforcement of the 14th amendment (Baratz-Snowden, 1999; Dewey, 1973; Lane, 1941a, 1944, 1945; Schierenbeck, 2000-2001). Lane was a key figure in organizing the March on Washington with A. Philip Randolph in 1941, and was one of four organizers to meet with President Roosevelt to successfully press for the desegregation of federal defense factories during me same year. She chaired the AFT Committee on Cultural Minorities, which later became the Committee on Democratic Human Relations and wrote an informative monthly column called, “The Human Relations Front” for The American Teacher (1945-1953). This column provided teachers with examples of the intense and incremental struggle waged to end segregation and remove practices of racism and xenophobia in government, housing, education, sports, real estate, business, religion, media, labor, health care, armed forces, immigration, land claims, income, and employment. Pulling these data together from multiple sources and presenting them in a national teacher journal reflected Lane’s critical analysis of the information teachers needed in order to see themselves and their teaching as part of maintaining the ongoing struggle to affirm humanity. Lane and this Committee were also largely responsible for an AFT Amendment in 1953 that banned segregated locals, and for submitting an amicus curiae brief in support of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). She also helped to organize a network that opposed me Japanese internment of World War II (Schierenbeck, 2000-2001). Layle Lane’s consistent and wide-ranging efforts for equity in education and other fields, and her relational and group-based ways of knowing exhibited collective responsibility, interdependence, and value for a collective humanity.

The lives of these four Black educators demonstrated the “unspoken” foundation of an emancipatory democratic agenda in American education. Fostering unity and mutuality by coalescing communal and collaborative efforts, demonstrating value for a collective humanity, defining “public” through the organizing principles of reciprocity and group well-being, and exhibiting collective responsibility and interdependence represent the ontologically driven and lived legacy of their praxis – a praxis that informed White reform-minded educators, although White educators failed to acknowledge or learn from it.

Hiding Knowledge Through a White/Normative Belief Structure of Race

The informing praxis of emancipatory Black educators has been necessarily hidden in master scripted accounts of the history of American education tiirough a White/normative belief structure of race (Wynter, 1992a). Sylvia Wynter explained that people of African origin have been constructed in the national White consciousness as the “alter ego Other” of whiteness – invested with all the characteristics opposite those that are constructed as ideal in the official “body” of dominance. Accordingly, White reform-minded educators were able to denounce discrimination toward their “alter ego Other” because it conflicted with their democratic ideology, but they were unable to identify the praxis of emancipatory Black educators as an essential knowledge and experience base of their reform efforts. Whiteness as a reified organizing principle of national identity based on White supremacist ideology resulted in a hegemonic and hierarchal “logic” mat harnessed White consciousness, even when both White and Black educators were advocating a democratic agenda. Thus, Counts’ disconnection from those most committed to and experienced with reaching the democratic vision he claimed – from people he knew and worked with – can be understood through Wynter’s analysis of the White belief structure of race (Counts, 1932a, 1932b, 1939, 1952; Wynter, 1992a, 1992b). While President of AFT between 1939 and 1942, Counts worked with Lane and other Black educators such as Doxey Wilkerson, Robert C. Weaver, and Ralph Bunche on the AFT Executive Council, on commissions, or at conventions (Eaton, 1975; Berleman, 1944; Schierenbeck, 2000-2001). During this time, Lane, who was one of the union’s vice presidents, used an AFT platform to advance the social justice agenda Counts professed. She wrote articles for 77/e American Teacher, the AFT organ, during and after Counts’ tenure as President. She was the only representative from the New York local who was elected to the AFT Executive Council in the hotly contested 1940 AFT convention because she was a Counts’ supporter (I versen, 1959). Yet, she and her work, obviously known by him, had only an “unspoken” presence in his.

In another example, Counts put his signature on a letter sent to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1936 asking him to become a sponsor of the Progressive Intercollegiate Alumni Association of America (Aptheker, 1976). This organization was established to respond to

the savage attacks directed against university administrators, faculty members, and students by the Hearst press, the American Liberty League, vigilante societies and other reactionary elements of American Society. . . [and] to protect the civil liberties and democratic rights wherever they may be endangered on the university front, (p. 129)

The letter further stated, “The success of this organization will depend on the endorsement of persons like yourself who occupy positions of leadership in American cultural and political life” (Aptheker, 1976, p. 129). Du Bois responded in a letter that he would become one of the sponsors of the organization. This rare example of White acknowledgment of Black educational leadership serves to underscore the profound denial of a Black presence in the White reform-minded agenda. The stature of Du Bois was large enough to request the support of his name, yet Counts did not openly engage with, cite, support, or build on Du Bois’s prolific intellectual and activist productions – or those of other Black scholars – whose work grounded the agenda he assumed. As chief editor of Social Frontier from 1934-1937, Counts did not include or review the writing of Du Bois and other Black educators whose work was closely aligned with that journal’s stated ideology and purpose.

John Dewey (1942) wrote a letter to the New York Times in protest of the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper convicted of murdering a White farmer who refused to give Waller his fair share of the wheat crop. To introduce his letter Dewey stated, “Once more our colored citizens, already deeply aroused over discrimination against them in the armed forces and defense industries, have been presented with a grievance” (p. 18). Dewey failed to acknowledge that almost a year earlier, Lane, Randolph, and other Black leaders had led a successful campaign to convince Roosevelt to issue his June 25, 1941 executive order banning discrimination in federal defense factories. On the same day Dewey wrote this letter to the Times, the Workers Defense League, with Lane listed as one of its vice presidents and Counts as its treasurer, issued an emergency appeal in the form of a letter seeking funds to continue the fight to convince the Supreme Court to review Waller’s case (Schierenbeck, 2000-2001; Sherman, 1992). Dewey’s signature is affixed to this letter along with 15 other men and women, including A. Philip Randolph. Thus, Black and White leaders were involved in seeking a fair trial for Odell Waller who was convicted by an all- White jury selected from among poll tax payers, with ten of the jurors being farmers employing sharecroppers. Dewey, the beneficent White reform-minded educator, critiques two examples of government injustice toward “Others,” but fails to acknowledge what “Others” have already accomplished and are presently doing with him to reduce those injustices. Their liminal status positions people of African descent out of his reach and out of sight as explained by a White/normative belief structure of race and its effect on cross-cultural relations (Wynter, 1992a).

The language of White reform-minded educators also indicated their embeddedness in the official “body” of whiteness. For example, in referring to a Black witness who testified against Odell Waller in his 1942 letter to the Times, Dewey wrote, “Moreover, reliable [emphasis added] Negroes who know the South insist that it is incredible that any colored man in that region would give testimony against a White employer’s interest, in a White man’s court, after a conference with a White prosecutor” (p. 18). Even when making his case for the unjust use of testimony gathered under intimidation, Dewey revealed how he was influenced by the White/normative belief structure of race that had historically separated Black people into “reliable” and “unreliable” categories, with the “reliable” informants being the ones deemed acceptable by White people. While the language used to express the liminal status of Black people may differ today compared to 1942, the “socially determined power of language practices” does not (King, 2004; Wynter, 1992b). Dewey’s use of socially determined language is emblematic of the disconnection between White reform-minded educators and Black emancipatory educators, with the former also having determined the non-reliability of the later as informants on the democratization of educational practices.

Implications

As teacher educators, we stand in a short line of those responsible for the knowledge imparted to children through schooling. Thus, we must create models of education that reconnect and more accurately account for the origins of the reform practices we value. We can begin by not misrepresenting the past because the present is the past. The present is “writ” large enough for us to see how it emulates the past. The past as it is told or not told in the master script is a disservice to us and to our students. We can however, avoid complicity with the insufficiencies of the past that still exist in the present by reconnecting historical knowledge. As teacher educators, we can avoid replicating the mis-education of the past in the present by emancipating ourselves and our students from “agreed-upon versions of knowledge” (Swartz & Goodwin, 1992, p. 58) that continue to position systems of schooling as primary gatekeepers of an inequitable social order. Our task is to outthink the White/normative belief structure of race that intends to preserve the master script with its race-based hierarchy and hegemony. A first step is to acknowledge and study past and present emancipatory Black educators, and by so doing, to disrupt the legacy of disconnection left to us by White reform-minded educators. Today, Black educators continue to provide theoretical frameworks and practices designed to produce equity and excellence and to preserve and strengthen those cultures and groups that have been silenced and demeaned by unjust and exclusionary school practices. Learning from these educators and from their forebears will familiarize pre- service teachers with the cultural orientations and productions of an African worldview that grounds current pedagogical reforms, such as, cooperative learning, inclusion, co-created curriculum, student- centered pedagogy, heterarchal leadership, student voice, and cultural responsiveness. To effectively enact such practices, teacher educators and teachers must engage in “re-membering” history. This process produces knowledge that identifies the historical source and central features of these pedagogical practices. Collective humanity, mutuality and reciprocity, relational and group-based knowing, collective and communal responsibility, and interdependence are values, organizing principles, and ways of knowing that represent the “unspoken” African foundation of the 20th century emancipatory democratic agenda in American education. This is an agenda we must speak in the 21st century.

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Ellen Swartz Nazareth College of Rochester

AUTHOR

ELLEN SWARTZ is Associate Professor and Frontier Chair in Urban Education, School of Education, Nazareth College, in Rochester, New York.

All comments and queries regarding this article should be addressed to eswartz7@naz.edu

Copyright Howard University Spring 2007

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