Towards a racial justice project: oral history methodology, critical race theory, and African American education

ABSTRACT

Oral historians have declared the methodology a social justice project. This essay advances that discussion, positing that oral history methodology may represent a more specific racial justice project when coupled with critical race theory. An examination of the history of African American education scholarship, we argue, supports this contention. Two central questions guide this essay: (1) What does scholarship on the history of African American education demonstrate about the compatibility between oral history methodology and critical race theory? and (2) How does this methodological-theoretical pairing advance a racial justice project? We aim to show how critical race theory and oral history methodology complement one another as research tools that can strengthen the history of education’s capacity to inform current educational issues. Our essay draws on the work of historians of African American education to exemplify possibilities for any historian of education who examines systematically underserved communities of Colour. Ultimately, we argue that critical race theory and oral history methodology are compatible because they share several propositions apt for helping researchers subvert the silencing, marginalisation, and objectification of systemically underserved communities of Colour, thereby furthering a racial justice project. This essay, therefore, contributes primarily to interdisciplinary education and historical research methods literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral history
• critical race theory
• history of African American education
• racial justice
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Toni Morrison, The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 323 – on Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1987).

² Morrison, The Source of Self Regard, 324.

³ Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 363–79.

⁴ Michael-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

⁵ Ibid. See also Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Macmillan, 2008) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: WW Norton, 2019).

⁶ Hartman, Lose Your Mother and Wayward Lives. See also Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991).

⁷ Bell, Faces at the Bottom.

⁸ Given the racial or ethnic specificity denoted by this term in reference to groups of people whom United States society does not racialise as white, we capitalise it. In contrast, any reference in this manuscript to peoples racialised as white maintains the lowercase capitalisation to counter the hegemonic status conferred to them by institutional systems of white supremacy. We recognise that the term people of Colour is fraught due to how it collapses groups of people without consideration for intergroup and intragroup differences or acknowledgement of complex histories within such groupings, but we use the term in this essay as it denotes those not racialised as white.

⁹ Representative articles dedicated to this topic include Jack Dougherty, “From Anecdote to Analysis: Oral Interviews and New Scholarship in Educational History,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (1999): 712–23 and Philip Gardner, “Oral History in Education: Teacher’s Memory and Teachers’ History,” History of Education 32, no. 2 (2003): 175–88.

¹⁰ The following scholars represent education historians who have explicitly used CRT in their historical research: James H. Adams and Natalie G. Adams, “Some of Us Got Heard More Than Others”: Studying Brown Through Oral History and Critical Race Theory,” Counterpoints 449 (2014); Caroline Eick, Race-Class Relations and Integration in Secondary Education: The Case of Miller High (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); Barbara J. Shircliffe, The Best of That World: Historically Black High Schools and the Crisis of Desegregation in a Southern Metropolis (Hampton: Hampton University Press, 2006); Eileen H. Tamura, “Education in a Multi-Ethnoracial Setting: Seattle’s Neighborhood House and The Cultivation of Urban Community Builders, 1960s–1970s,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2017): 39–67; and Adah Ward Randolph and Dwan V. Robinson, “De Facto Desegregation in the Urban North: Voices of African American Teachers and Principals on Employment, Students, and Community in Columbus, Ohio, 1940 To 1980,” Urban Education 54, no. 10 (2019): 1403–30; Maria Luce Sijpenhof, “A Transformation of Racist Discourse? Colour-Blind Racism and Biological Racism in Dutch Secondary Schooling (1968–2017),” Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 1–2 (2020): 51–69; David G. Garcia, Tara J. Yosso, and Frank P. Barajas, “‘A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest Mexican Children’: School Segregation as a Form of Mundane Racism in Oxnard, California, 1900–1940,” Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 1 (2012): 1–25; ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “What Got Them Through: Community Cultural Wealth, Black Students, and Texas School Desegregation,” Race Ethnicity and Education 25, no. 2 (2022): 173–91; ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “Tacit Curriculum of Black Intellectual Ineptitude: Black Girls and Texas School Desegregation Implementation in the 1970s,” History of Education Review 51, no. 1 (2022): 81–95; and ArCasia D. James-Gallaway and Adah Ward Randolph, “Critical Race Theory and Education History: Constructing a Race-Centered History of School Desegregation,” in Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, ed. Marvin Lynn and Adrienne D. Dixson, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 330–42.

¹¹ See the following for discussions of these debates: Cathryn Stout and Thomas Wilburn, “CRT Map: Efforts to Restrict Teaching Racism and Bias Have Multiplied across US,” Chalkbeat, February 1, 2022, https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism; Johnathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America,” The Heritage Foundation, December 7, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/civil-rights/report/critical-race-theory-the-new-intolerance-and-its-grip-america; Stephen Sawchuk, “What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why is it Under Attack?” Education Week, May 18, 2021, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05.

¹² Sana Rizvi, “Racially-Just Epistemologies and Methodologies that Disrupt Whiteness,” International Journal of Research & Method in Education 45, no. 3 (2022): 225.

¹³ Daniel G Solórzano and Tara J. Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 25.

¹⁴ Michael J. Dumas, “Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse,” Theory Into Practice 55, no. 1 (2016): 11–19; Hartman, Lose Your Mother and Wayward Lives.

¹⁵ Ronald E. Butchart, “What’s Foucault Got to Do with It? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjected,” History of Education Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2011): 239–46; Isaac Gottesman, “Theory in the History of Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 65–82.

¹⁶ Gottesman, “Theory,” 65.

¹⁷ ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “More than Race: Differentiating Black Students’ Everyday Experiences in Texas School Desegregation, 1968–1978” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2020); Francena Turner, “Black Women and Student Activism at Fayetteville State, 1960–1972,” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2020).

¹⁸ Francena F.L. Turner and ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “Black Baby Boomers, Gender, and Southern Education: Navigating Tensions in Oral History Methodology,” The Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (2022): 77–96.

¹⁹ Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 4.

²⁰ See note 10 above.

²¹ Adams and Adams, “Some of Us Got Heard,” 201.

²² Adrienne Dixson and Celia Rousseau, “And We Are Still Not Saved: Critical Race Theory in Education Ten Years Later,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 8, no. 1 (2005): 201.

²³ Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995), xiii.

²⁴ Ibid., xiii, emphasis in original.

²⁵ Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” Teachers College Record 97 (1995): 47–68.

²⁶ For example, see Laurence Parker and Marvin Lynn, “What’s Race Got to Do with It? Critical Race Theory’s Conflicts with And Connections to Qualitative Research Methodology and Epistemology, Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 7–22; and Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology;” Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby, Thandeka K. Chapman, Paul A. Schultz, eds., Understanding Critical Race Methods and Methodologies: Lessons from the Field (New York: Routledge, 2019).

²⁷ Edward Taylor, David Gillborn, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, eds., Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education (New York: Routledge, 2009), 4; see also Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; Adrienne Dixson, Celia K. Rousseau Anderson, and Jamel K. Donnor, eds., CRT in Education: All God’s Children Got a Song, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016).

²⁸ Isaac Gottesman, The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race (New York: Routledge, 2016), 130.

²⁹ Dixson and Rousseau, “And We Are Still Not Saved,” 4.

³⁰ Mari Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparation,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Law Review 22 (1987): 323–99.

³¹ Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings, Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.

³² Gottesman, “Theory,” 73.

³³ Reiland Rabaka, “WEB DuBois’s ‘The Comet’ and Contributions to Critical Race Theory: An Essay on Black Radical Politics and Anti-Racist Social Ethics,” Ethnic Studies Review 29, no. 1 (2006): 23.

³⁴ Gottesman, “Theory,” 73.

³⁵ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998 [1935]); Deborah Gray White, Art’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985); Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Vincent P. Franklin, The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979); Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967) originally published in French in 1952; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1964), originally published in French in 1961.

³⁶ Theanne Liu, “Ethnic Studies as Antisubordination Education: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Employment Discrimination Remedies,” Washington University Jurisprudence Review 11 (2018): 182–3.

³⁷ Rabaka, “WEB DuBois’s ‘The Comet,’” 25.

³⁸ For a discussion of the significance of Anderson’s book, see Gottesman, “Theory,” 72–4; the monograph referenced is Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South.

³⁹ Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 25.

⁴⁰ Valerie R. Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

⁴¹ Rebecca Sharpless, “The History of Oral History,” in History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007), 9–10.

⁴² Ibid.; Abrams, Oral History Theory; Ronald J. Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” in History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007), 33–91.

⁴³ Mary Rizzo, “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater,” Oral History Review 48, no. 2 (2021): 154–79.

⁴⁴ We believe that this is evident in that some of the more foundational texts on oral history theory and methodology are written by scholars outside of the United States. See examples such as Abrams, Oral History Theory and Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli.

⁴⁵ Grele, “Oral History as Evidence;” Sharpless, “The History of Oral History.”

⁴⁶ Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli; Yow, Recording Oral History.

⁴⁷ Donna J. Spindel, “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 2 (1996): 247–61.

⁴⁸ White, Ar’n’t I A Woman.

⁴⁹ Valarie Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli.

⁵⁰ Hartman, Lose Your Mother and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

⁵¹ Institute of Historical Research, “History from Below,” Making History, May 3, 2022, https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/themes/history_from_below.html.

⁵² Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (New York: Routledge, 1993), 6.

⁵³ Vanessa Siddle Walker, Hello Professor, A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 241. Walker’s body of work refers to Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools (New York: New Press, 2018).

⁵⁴ Walker, Hello Professor, x.

⁵⁵ Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential, 3.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 5

⁵⁷ James-Gallaway, “What Got Them Through.”

⁵⁸ Derrick Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 363–79.

⁵⁹ Butchart, “What’s Foucault Got to Do with It?” and Abrams, Oral History Theory, 7.

⁶⁰ Abrams, Oral History Theory; Garnet, “Affinity and Interpretation,” Alessandro Portelli, “Oral History as Genre,” in Narrative & Genre: Contests and Types of Communication (New York: Routledge, 1998), 23–45; and Valerie R. Yow, “Do I Like Them Too Much?” Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice Versa, Oral History Review 24, no. 1 (1997): 55–79.

⁶¹ Abrams, Oral History Theory, 7.

⁶² Ibid.; Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” and Valerie Janesick, Oral History for the Qualitative Researcher: Choreographing the Story (New York: Guildford Press, 2010).

⁶³ Matsuda et al., Words that Wound.

⁶⁴ Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

⁶⁵ Valerie J. Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project,” Qualitative Report 12, no. 1 (2007): 111-121 and

Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory.

⁶⁶ Derrick Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 374.

⁶⁷ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Anti-Discrimination Law,” Harvard Law Review 101 (1988): 1331–87.

⁶⁸ Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory.

⁶⁹ The following works note how certain fields or disciplines have worked to minimise African Americans: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Towards a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1935); Craig S. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

⁷⁰ Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project,” 111. Recently, other scholars have joined her: see e.g. Thalia M. Mulvihill and Raji Swaminathan, eds., Oral History and Qualitative Methodologies: Educational Research for Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2022).

⁷¹ Matsuda et al., Words That Wound, 6. See also Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory.

⁷² Valerie J. Janesick, “Oral History Interviewing with Purpose and Critical Awareness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 464.

⁷³ Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project.”

⁷⁴ Ibid., 118.

⁷⁵ Bell, “Racial Realism.”

⁷⁶ Clive Glaser, “‘Beyond the Syllabus’: Morris Isaacson High School’s Struggle for Human Equality Under the Apartheid Education System, 1958–1990,” Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 5 (2021) 475–93.

⁷⁷ Ibid.; Bell, Faces at the Bottom.

⁷⁸ Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings, Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education; Matsuda et al., Words That Wound; and Dixson, Rousseau Anderson, and Donnor, CRT in Education.

⁷⁹ Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project,” 119.

⁸⁰ Derrick A. Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory,” University of Illinois Law Review (1995): 893–910; and ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, ”Tacit Curriculum of Black Intellectual Ineptitude: Black Girls and Texas School Desegregation Implementation in the 1970s, “History of Education Review 51, no. 1 (2021): 81-95.

⁸¹ Michelle Purdy,Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

⁸² Paulette M. Caldwell, “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender,” Duke Law Journal 2 (1991): 365–96.

⁸³ Purdy, Transforming the Elite, 114.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 118.

⁸⁵ For a discussion of the interest convergence principle, see Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518–33.

⁸⁶ Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

⁸⁷ Ladson-Billings and Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education;” Dixson, Rousseau Anderson, and Donnor, CRT in Education.

⁸⁸ Purdy, Transforming the Elite, 3.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 177.

⁹⁰ Bell, ”“Racial Realism.”

⁹¹ Purdy, Transforming the Elite, 20.

⁹² Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” and Janesick, “Oral History Interviewing with Purpose.”

⁹³ Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” 39.

⁹⁴ Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom.”

⁹⁵ Derrick Bell, And We are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Reform (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Bell, Faces at the Bottom; Richard Delgado, “Storytelling For Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” Michigan Law Review 87, no. 8 (1989): 2411–41; Daniella A. Cook and Adrienne D. Dixson, “Writing Critical Race Theory and Method: A Composite Counterstory on the Experiences of Black Teachers in New Orleans Post-Katrina,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no. 10 (2013): 1238–58; Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom;” Solórzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology.”

⁹⁶ Bell, And We are Not Saved; Bell, Faces at the Bottom; Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists;” and Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?”

⁹⁷ Bell, And We are Not Saved; Bell, Faces at the Bottom; Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists”; Grele, “Oral History as Evidence;” Janesick, “Oral History Interviewing with Purpose.”

⁹⁸ Dionne Danns, Crossing Segregated Boundaries: Remembering Chicago School Desegregation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020).

⁹⁹ Ibid., 5–6; for definition of social boundaries, see Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28, no. 1 (2002): 167–95.

¹⁰⁰ Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; and Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings, Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.

¹⁰¹ For more on enduring stereotypes, see ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, “Alive and Well: Enduring Stereotypes in Southern School Desegregation,” American Educational History Journal 46, nos 1/2 (2019): 37–54. See also Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalisation of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

¹⁰² Agyepong, The Criminalisation of Black Children.

¹⁰³ James-Gallaway, “Tacit Curriculum of Black Intellectual Ineptitude.”

¹⁰⁴ Danns, Crossing Segregated Boundaries, 96.

¹⁰⁵ Barbara J. Love, “Brown Plus 50 Counter-Storytelling: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of the ‘Majoritarian Achievement Gap’ Story,” Equity & Excellence in Education 37, no. 3 (2004), 227.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 243.

¹⁰⁷ Dumas, “Against the Dark” and Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

¹⁰⁸ Danns, Crossing Segregated Boundaries..

¹⁰⁹ Examples include Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Dionne Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Richard Rothstein, The Colour of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017); and Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billings, Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.

¹¹⁰ Danns, Crossing Segregated Boundaries, 68.

¹¹¹ Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom;” Bell, And We are Not Saved; Bell, Faces at the Bottom; and Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists.”

¹¹² Delgado, “Storytelling for Oppositionists.”

¹¹³ Yoon Pak, Latasha L. Nesbitt, and Suzanne M. Reilly, eds., Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives: Oral Histories of (Mis)Educational Opportunities in Challenging Notions of Academic Achievement (Urbana: Common Ground Research Networks, 2017); Yoon Pak, Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle’s Japanese Americans During World War II (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Eileen H. Tamura, Americanisation, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

¹¹⁴ Isaac Gottesman, The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race (New York: Routledge, 2016), 124.

¹¹⁵ Bell, ”Racial Realism.”.

¹¹⁶ See Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; and Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Critical Race Theory – What it is Not,” in Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, eds. Marvin Lynn and Adrienne Dixson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56–67.

¹¹⁷ For CRT’s boundaries, see Adrienne D. Dixson and Celia Rousseau Anderson. “Where Are We? Critical Race Theory in Education 20 Years Later,” Peabody Journal of Education 93, no. 1 (2018): 121–31; for reference to historians of education using CRT, see Gottesman, “Theory,” 73.

¹¹⁸ James-Gallaway and Ward Randolph, “Critical Race Theory and Education History,” 338.

¹¹⁹ University of Virginia, “Teachers in the Movement,” UVA School of Education and Human Development,” July 11, 2022, https://teachersinthemovement.com.

¹²⁰ University of Virginia, “Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA,” Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia, May 10, 2022, https://www.descendantsuva.org/.

¹²¹ Amherst College, “Oral Histories,” Amherst Uprising, May 10, 2022, https://amherstuprising.org/oralhistory.

¹²² University of Maryland, “Black Experience at UMD Oral History Project,” Reparative Oral History Project, May 10, 2022, roh-umd.info.

¹²³ Karen Hulstaert, “‘French and the School are One’: The Role of French in Postcolonial Congolese Education: Memories of Pupils,” Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 6 (2018): 822–36; Sijpenhof, “A Transformation of Racist Discourse?” and Glaser, “Beyond the Syllabus.”

¹²⁴ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

¹²⁵ Hulstaert, “French and the School are One,” 835.

¹²⁶ See Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom;” Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-167 and Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Identity Politics, Intersectionality, and Violence Against Women,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–299.

¹²⁷ Crenshaw et al., Critical Race Theory; Bell, Faces at the Bottom.

¹²⁸ Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment.”

Additional information

Funding

In part, this article was supported by the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant programme is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Notes on contributors

ArCasia D. James-Gallaway

ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, is an interdisciplinary historian of education at Texas A&M University, where she works as an Assistant Professor and ACES Fellow. Her scholarly aim is to bridge past and present perspectives on African American struggles for educational justice. Engaging critical perspectives and approaches such as critical race theory, Black feminist theory, and oral history methodology, her research agenda follows three overlapping strands of inquiry: the history of African American education, Black history education, and gendered (anti)Blackness in education. Her current book project won a Ford Dissertation Fellowship, the John H. Jenkins Research Fellowship from the Texas State Historical Association, and the Honorable Mention designation for the History of Education Society’s Claude A. Eggertsen Dissertation Prize. For her scholarship, James-Gallaway also won the Kipchoge Neftali Kirkland Social Justice Award from the National Council for Social Studies’ College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) and the Emerging Gender Researcher Award from the academic journal Gender, Work, and Organization.

Francena F.L. Turner

Francena F.L. Turner, is a CLIR Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate for Data Curation in African American History and Culture for the University of Maryland Restorative Justice Project where her archival and oral history work sits at the intersection of African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum), oral history, and the University of Maryland Libraries faculty. Francena uses oral history methodology as excavation work in an effort to bridge the past and present. That is, her research has a decidedly social justice centred purpose and end goal. Her research interests include histories of Black education, Black women’s higher education, activist scholars, Black Feminisms. She is most interested in historical and contemporary issues of equity, agency, and thriving in education.