Pedagogies of Care and Justice: African American High School Art Teachers During the Civil Rights Era in the Segregated South

Abstract

This study examines the art pedagogies at Southern African American high schools during the civil rights era (1955–1969). I examine three segregated high schools located in South Carolina as a lens to highlight art pedagogies that were practiced; I expose counterstories by three former students, a student teacher, and the wife of an art teacher; I support my findings by reviewing archival data; and I illustrate how several caring African American Art Educators contributed to the agency of African American Students to achieve racial equality and justice. By locating these counterstories alongside an African American care-and-justice framework developed by Siddle Walker and Snarey, I discuss how exemplary art teachers’ pedagogical practices actualize and expand care and racial equality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Endnotes

Notes

1 I use the term African American to denote the people and “descendants of persons brought as slaves” (Agyemang et al., 2005, p. 1017), as they comprised most of the Black population in the American South until 1965 (Berlin, 2010). Since 1965, the influx of immigrants from the Caribbean (Afro-Caribbean or African Caribbean), Africa (Black African or African), and Europe and the Pacific Rim (Black) diversified the term, while Black includes the heterogeneity within these populations (Agyemang et al., 2005). Thus, I use the term Black to include all types of Black populations while differentiating them from African Americans as the descendants of persons brought as slaves.

The terms African American education or African American art education denote the segregated education for African Americans (people and descendants of persons brought as slaves) in the American South until the education system was desegregated in the mid-1970s.

The U.S. Census Bureau (2020) defined White as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” (para. 2). Yet the social definition of “white” is debated regarding racial and sociocultural (Hispanic and Latino Americans) and religious associations (Islam, Judaism, etc.).

In this study, white indicates Protestant Americans of European ancestry residing in the American South who benefited from and were complicit in white supremacy, which is the belief in the superiority of white people over other races by defending their power and privilege as manifested in African American slavery, the antebellum status quo, and the legal and sociocultural segregation of the races during the Jim Crow era.

Additionally, I acknowledge that “white is a construct of power, rather than an authentic human ethnicity” (Rolling, 2018, p. 248). Following Rolling (2018), I use the lowercase “white” as an antiracism effort when identifying an individual or structure (e.g., white scholar, white supremacy). In this regard, I also intentionally capitalize when identifying a minority individual or group (i.e., African American Students, African American Art Teachers/Educators, Black Scholar, Students of Color, Communities of Color, etc.).

2 In this study, pedagogies include formal courses, methods, hidden curricula, and extracurricular activities.

3 Human agency is “a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities)” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 963). Through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, human agency reproduces and transforms the responses to “problems posed by… historical situations” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 970).

4 Justice encompasses the behavioral, ethical, and legal practice toward creating equal respect, equal rights, and formal equality (Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004). The “impartial fairness or respect for all persons” (Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004, p. 5) as a universal claim is the primary principle and the ultimate goal of justice. In this study, the educational efforts to dismantle not only formal inequality but also the “cultural, institutional, and tacit forms of subordination and exclusion” (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2018, p. 6) devised by whites employed principally against African Americans are considered as pursuing justice.

I acknowledge that my small case study is not representative of African American art education taught at the secondary level during the civil rights era.

5 Brown v. Board of Education is the landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional.

6 In the cultural realm, the arts encompass practice, materials, and contexts as well as “ideas and structures” that shape what is “classified as the arts” (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2018, p. 13). Because what is deemed to be the arts is implicated by and belongs to whiteness, the arts are therefore “white property” (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2018, p. 15). Thus, cultural resistance movements to promote Black aesthetics in opposition to the arts as white property is an act of care for justice, liberating Black people from the needs and injustice in which Black artistic creations are not equally valued and are considered inferior in the art world.

These cultural resistance movements include the Black Chicago Renaissance and Black Arts Movement, which were aligned with the civil rights movement from its inception. Both movements explored the history, heritage, and strength of Black visual arts, highlighting distinctive Black aesthetics. Whereas the Black Chicago Renaissance emerged in Chicago in the 1930s and had its defining period until the 1960s (Hine & McCluskey, 2012), the Black Arts Movement began in New York City and became national in the 1960s and 1970s.

7 Considering that race is a social construct and aesthetics is a set of principles and practices with an appreciation of beauty, Black aesthetics cannot be easily defined. Following Black philosopher Paul C. Taylor (2016), “to do ‘Black aesthetics’ is to use art, criticism, or analysis to explore the role that expressive objects and practices play in the creation and maintenance of Black life-worlds” (p. 12).

8 The deficit model is the application of epistemological racism in education research, which only considers the sociocultural traits of Students of Color that differ from their white counterparts as the reason for educational failure and not the educational system or prevalent socioeconomic disparities in society (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

9 During the Jim Crow era, to preserve segregation in higher education, 12 Southern states provided out-of-state scholarships for teachers to finance more advanced study (Baker, 2011), which enabled African American Teachers to obtain higher education degrees at prestigious universities. McAfee obtained his master’s degree in art education from New York University in 1963 (McAfee, personal communication, April 15, 2020).

10 All students and the majority of faculty were African American. Johnson and Wilkinson were similar in size in terms of students, and Booker was smaller (952, 910, and 642, respectively); while the student–teacher ratios were diverse (16:1, 21:1, 10:1). Racial identification may not be accurate because there are no surviving documents recording the race of teachers and students, and I only identified their race by viewing surviving yearbooks. It seems that there have been very few white educators at Johnson since the mid-1950s. At Booker, there seemed to be several white staff from the early 1960s and white faculty from the late 1960s. Wilkinson had only African American Educators in 1964.

I selected the yearbooks to count the number of students and faculty, but also to provide the context to the stories told by my narrators: The Johnson yearbook was from 1961 (the year when Wilson was a student teacher), the Booker yearbook was from 1962 (when Furgess graduated), and the Wilkinson yearbook was from 1964 (the only version archived online, while 1964 is a similar period to other yearbooks I selected).

It is unclear why Booker had a smaller student–teacher ratio than the other two segregated schools. This may be due to the gap in salary between the counties (as detailed in the “Local Context of African American Education and Art Education” section). Additionally, well-studied and well-known principals of Booker, such as Andrew Simmons (principal from 1932 to 1945), who were “instrumental in advocating for equal teachers’ pay for the African-American [T]eachers in… South Carolina” (Edwards, 1999, p. 14), might have had an impact on the recruitment and retention of faculty at Booker.

11 Primary resources for “first-person accounts of events” (Lundy, 2008, p. 396) that were created during the time period under study that I used include the Central County Board of Education Minutes (1950–69); State Department of Education Annual Reports (State Report, 1951–71); original documents and letters from the Palmetto Education Association (African American Teacher’s Association, 1951–70; Palmetto); local newspapers (1951–70); surviving yearbooks from Johnson (Johnsonian), Booker (Washingtonian), and Wilkinson (Wilkinsonian) ranging from 1951 to 1970; and Comet, the student newspaper at Booker (1933–66). Secondary resources include art textbooks used in Richland County where Johnson and Booker were located (Craven, 1958; Goldstein & Goldstein, 1958; Nicholas et al., 1962) and relatable historical research (Baker, 2011; Edwards, 1998, 1999).

12 During the interviews, although I did not search for the values emphasized in the care-and-justice framework developed by Siddle Walker and Snarey (2004), the recurring themes resonate with their framework.

13 Resistance in this study indicates the collective efforts and movement to refuse to accept or comply with formal inequality. On the other hand, accommodation in this study means an act to partially conform to racially unequal and oppressive standards, regulations, and laws.

14 The only example of African art is in the book Art in Everyday Life (Goldstein & Goldstein, 1958). Out of 350 figures, one African wood sculpture is included, with the statement “primitive Negro art is decorative and full of imagination” (p. 422).

15 For example, Kehinde Wiley subversively inserts contemporary African American Men and Women with hip-hop culture items into traditional European portraits. Rolling (2018) provided an in-depth analysis on whiteness in visual culture through the case of Wiley and other African American Artists by using visual culture archaeology.

16 African American Christianity is the result of enslavement, with the large-scale conversions of slaves in the mid-18th century. These conversions were possible because biblical themes resonated with Black oppression, such as the captivity of Israel and the Hebrew exodus from Egypt with plantation slavery and escape to the North (Pluralism Project, n.d.). Yet, during the antebellum period, most white church leaders in the South reinforced a religious system as “a rationale for slaveholding” (Pluralism Project, n.d., para. 3).

17 Following the Reconstruction era (1865–1877), Jim Crow law was officially enacted in 1896 in the Southern United States through the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. As the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned separate but equal legal practice, the facilities, including housing, education, employment, medical care, and transportation, were racially segregated until Jim Crow law was overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Packard, 2002). Jim Crow was “codified in a statute and lived, every minute of every day.… [The discrimination] was rigidly enforced by both the law enforcement agencies and… by ordinary white citizens who… often took the law into their own hands” (Packard, 2002, pp. vii–viii).

18 Despite the increase in research on the contribution of African American Teachers to the civil rights movement, mainstream studies have focused on principals (Edwards, 1999; Siddle Walker, 2009), social studies teachers (Hale, 2018), English teachers (Hale, 2018; Henry, 2000; Robinson, 1978), math teachers (Baker, 2011), and music teachers (Siddle Walker, 1996).

19 Wilson, a former art teacher, mentioned how David R. Clark (an art teacher at Johnson) was a good role model for her, while Williams, the renowned civil rights movement photographer, remarked how Robert E. Howard (a principal at Wilkinson) guided him to believe that artist is a professional job and also inspired students to become teachers.