What got them through: community cultural wealth, Black students, and Texas school desegregation

ABSTRACT

Despite the robust body of scholarship on southern school desegregation, little has concentrated on the ways Black students’ home communities helped them persist in desegregated schools. Using oral history interviews, historical methods, and community cultural wealth, this paper examines key forms of knowledge, or capital, that the Black Waco community implanted in their children, knowledge on which students drew to navigate their new, contemptuous school climates. Rather than celebrate school desegregation as an outright victory, I place emphasis on a community that reared Black desegregating students and empowered them to meet such a challenge. Ultimately, I argue that community cultural wealth from Black Waco students’ home community afforded them vital knowledge they used to navigate and persist in newly desegregated schools, and this epistemic insight reflected the simultaneity of oppression for differently classed and gendered Black students.

KEYWORDS:

• Community cultural wealth
• critical race theory
• school desegregation
• African American education
• history of education
• Texas history
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I use the terms Black and African American interchangeably here.

2. Although oral history guidelines recommend augmenting the historical (i.e., written) record using narrators’ given names with their written and oral consent, I use pseudonyms here to protect them and their testimonies.