Obligated to Educate All
In American schools throughout the 20th century most young people of color were never given the opportunity to open a book and meet themselves
The halls didn’t feel as large as they had when I walked through them carrying books from class to class, navigating the capital E-shaped, one story, south Jersey high school where I led the flag squad in marching band and played the flute in the orchestra. I danced and sang and acted in every Lower Cape May Regional High School musical and I directed the fall play my senior year. We performed Our Town and it was glorious.
One year after graduation, I walked through the halls again; towering over young people who seemed surprisingly short to me now. Perhaps I had grown in the year between 17 and 18 years old. Perhaps they had shrunk. Or maybe I was standing up straight for the first time; not trying to fit in—not trying to diminish myself. I was feelin’ my height, for the very first time.
I walked with a group of alumni from the class of 1986. We crossed the threshold into one of the inner-sanctums of Lower Cape May Regional High School; the school library.
Dewey decimals, carts and books lined walls and stacks. Students sat at round tables reading and we, recent alumni, joined administrators to offer feedback on our educations. Alumni and administrators sat together at school library tables—for the first time, peers. Our school wanted to know: did they prepare us for what we found, when we left their hallowed halls?
I was grateful for many things and many people at Lower Cape May Regional (LCMR) High School, but in this moment we were asked to help strengthen the school by sharing what we missed.
Here is what I missed: books written by people who looked like me. And I told them so.
You see? It seems hard to believe now with the proliferation of African American literature and history courses and whole departments at universities, but in the 1980s, when I was in high school none of that existed. In American schools throughout the 20th century most young people of color were never given the opportunity to open a book and meet themselves.
Granted, people who looked like me were a vast minority at LCMR. I was one of the very few people of color who graced college-bound or AP courses throughout my four years as a Caper Tiger. So, I understood why most of our books represented the majority of students filling our classes. We read Shane and 1984 and Shakespeare and The Sun Also Rises.
“But,” I asked Principal Stanley Kotzen, “Where were the Black women authors?”
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Mr. Kotzen shifted his weight at the podium and leaned in.
“Why did I, a student at this school, have to go to college to hear a voice that sounded like my own?”
“Why did I have to go to college to learn that Gloria Naylor and Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and Zora Neal Hurston exist?”
When I met Black women authors, I met myself. When Gloria Naylor’s women of Brewster Place dared to dream beyond the wall that contained their red-lined community, who had found each other on the northern side of the Great Migration, I understood my grandmother’s struggles to flourish in ghettoized South Philadelphia. When I met Alice Walker’s Celie and Nettie in The Color Purple, I understood the agony of family separation that my ancestors endured in slavery and the Great Migration. And when I witnessed Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie rising into the fullness of her soul in Their Eyes Were Watching God I heard the first cries of my own Black feminine soul’s cry for freedom.
“Why did I have to go to college to encounter myself in books?”
I’ve thought often of that conversation in my high school library. I was one year into college and had already had my world pried open by authors of color. In the years since, I have become clear that school curricula is obliged to prepare every student to flourish and help cultivate the world.
Literature courses serve both the reading skills and the souls of every student. Books are like portals into a fourth dimension where young human beings slow down and see that they are not alone. There are others who dream, others who hurt, others who yearn, are shy, are brave, are smart, are isolated and striving to connect. And when young people finish a book, they are more connected with our world, with our history, with their family’s stories and with themselves. They are more whole human beings.
But My grandparents, my parents and I attended public schools and none of us were ever assigned a writer of color in any of our classrooms.
What’s more, we attended public schools that never really taught American history. Not really. We were taught that there were wars. We were taught that there were presidents. We were taught that there was a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution and Bill of Rights. We were not taught that the vast majority of those who declared independence from Britain, themselves owned slaves and fought to maintain slaveocracy. We were not taught that the first race laws on the soil we would come to call America were established to determine who could be a citizen and who could not; therefore who could be enslaved and who could not. Citizens could not be enslaved. We were not taught that for a brief period between the Revolutionary War and the turn of the 19th century, Women could vote. But, then women’s right to vote was handed to states, to be decided on and one by one—one state at a time revoked the right to suffrage – for fear that women would vote down slavocracy. We learned that there was a Great Awakening, but were never taught that the Second Great Awakening was sparked by free Black people’s protest of white supremacy in the church in 1787. We learned that there was a civil war and an Emancipation Proclamation, but we did not learn that free and formerly enslaved African-American soldiers joined the fight for their freedom by the thousands and turned the tide of the war. We were told there was no battle at Appomattox. So we never learned about the last battle of the Civil War. We never learned that the battle of Appomattox was won by nearly every Black regiment in the Union after they hunted down, surrounded and forced the surrender of General Lee. We never ever learned the name, Hannah Reynolds, who was ordered by her master to watch after the house while he fled to safety. When the drumbeats of war overtook the town, Hannah was caught in the crossfire of Confederate soldiers. Hannah was injured and died three days later; becoming the last casualty of the Civil War. We did not learn that.
These acts of omission were acts of violence. They bludgeon the souls of Black folx by perpetuating the myths of White normativity, White virtue, and White omnipotence—a.k.a. White power. Moreover, these violent omissions erase from public memory the agency that Black, Indigenous and other people of color have exercised, that has impacted the world. Erasure subjects the image of God – in bodies of color – to ignorance of their own divine capacity and to White agency, in perpetuity.
Strands of America’s separate and unequal education system lingered in public schools across the U.S. throughout the 20th century. But this is the year 2023. Much progress has been made. The 21st century has brought proliferate African-American literature and history courses as well as whole departments of study dedicated to previously marginalized people groups in universities. As our nation marches toward demographic shifts whereby people of color will constitute a new majority within 20 years, more accurate understandings of American history are rising, as previously muffled narratives gain voice.
But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is legislating slavocracy back into being in the sunshine state. The Stop Woke Act has eviscerated books by BIPOC authors and women from school shelves, canceled AP African American History courses and outlawed mentions of race in the classroom. Pundits are clear that he is creating a blueprint for other states to follow. Governor Greg Abbott is currently shopping a school-choice initiative that would shift tax-payer dollars away from Texan public schools, funneling the funds into affluent private Christian schools instead. And there are others.
It is time to speak out. It is time to rise up. We cannot let this slow walk backward go unanswered. Say “No!” at your school board meetings. Say “No!” in city counsel meetings. Say “No!” by raising your voice in your sphere of influence. "And say “No!” by casting your vote in 2024 for candidates that say "Yes!" to an education system that educates all."
President and founder of FreedomRoad.us, Lisa Sharon Harper is a writer, podcaster and public theologian. Lisa is author of critically acclaimed book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World—And How To Repair It All.
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