The story of Black education is about more than desegregation and inclusion in mainstream schooling. Jarvis Givens returns to the classrooms of Jim Crow to highlight the forgotten work of Carter G. Woodson and his followers, who undertook the radical act of educating Black children. Their subversive methods continue to provide a model today.
"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"-- Provided by publisher