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Posts Tagged ‘South’

Late to Integrate, Now a Model

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Photo:Todd Davis.
Friends of Cleveland School District, a nonprofit composed of local parents and community members are working to save the town’s school district.

Northern states are supposedly against segregation, but as soon as Boston desegregated its public schools, it resegregated. Interestingly, a city in the deep South, is embracing diversity.

Leonardo Bevilacqua reports from Cleveland, Mississippi, for the Guardian, “Fernando Green sits on a pile of plywood in a new barn on a humid Mississippi Delta afternoon. The barn will be a center for students like his daughter to get a feel for local jobs in agriculture. There’s school swag for the incoming middle schoolers. A petting zoo with a baby alligator is off in one corner while boys throw a pigskin around in the back.

“A Mississippi Delta native … looks out with a glint in his eyes on the grounds of a middle school that used to house his revered high school: East Side. … A recent effort by a parent group looking to heal divides and counteract disinvestment has locals like Mr. Green excited. … Using donated lumber and dollars, the parents are fighting not only for their children’s future but for their town’s as well. …

“Says Todd Davis, a professor at the town’s own Delta State University in an interview with the Monitor. ‘I’m not fighting for some grand mission … I just want my kids to go to a nice school. … Every kid should have that option.’ …

“Dr. Davis joined with Kierre Rimmer, a Cleveland native and coordinator at the Family Treatment court, to fight disinvestment in Cleveland public schools. The duo, along with community partners, LaKenya Evans, Clare Adams Moore, and Rori Eddie Herbison, helped found the group, Friends of Cleveland School District (FOCSD).

“In a 2016 high-profile court-ordered integration, Cleveland School District’s two middle schools and high schools were ordered to merge. Some 63 years after Brown v. the Board of Education, Cleveland became the last district in the United States to desegregate in 2017. The historically white high school became the consolidated high school, and the historically Black high school became the site of the consolidated middle school. The district’s football team was rechristened the Wolves in purple and white. 

“The following autumn, over 100 white parents pulled their children out of public school – as locals of all races had predicted. That, locals interviewed say, is why residents both Black and white sought to block integration, to the consternation of mainstream media outlets and policy watchdogs. Many in town feared that court-ordered desegregation would inspire a massive white flight in the last town in the Delta to have a sizable white population still enrolled in the public schools.

“And, those interviewed say, the reality on the ground was different than in the headlines. By the time of consolidation in 2017, enrollment at Cleveland High and Margaret Green Junior High, the historically white schools, were roughly 50-50 when it came to race. In 2013, parents were granted the freedom to choose which high school to send their children to.

“With students arriving for their first day Aug. 5, administrators are still waiting on a final head count for the 2024-2025 academic year. Last year, 243 more students joined Cleveland public schools, the first time the district wasn’t losing students since consolidation. …

“Friends of Cleveland School District has secured $30,000 worth of paint, timber, and appliances from the likes of Fleming Lumber Company and other regional and local businesses. They’ve raised roughly $250,000 for the school from grants and fundraising efforts.

“This is a little less than the roughly $300,000 that leaves the district each year with the 300 or so students that depart for private school or other towns, after the neighborhood-zoned and magnet elementary schools cut off at sixth grade.

It helps that Cleveland has a middle class. Quality Steel, Baxter Healthcare, a luxury hotel, a local university, and a downtown with boutiques and coffee shops offer families comforts unknown in the rest of the Delta. …

“Dr. Davis is building planters for a school garden on a warm April afternoon, putting the raised funds to use. Students will get a chance to grow okra, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes – a reflection of the local agricultural economy.

“It’s still the big industry in this area,” remarks Dr. Davis. … He lends his green thumb during breaks in between teaching classes at the local university.

“Students have joined the garden club by the dozen, learning the power of civic mindedness with hands deep in world famous Delta dirt. The garden ‘allowed us to make new friends that we otherwise probably would not have made,’ says seventh grader Michael Vardaman. …

“Parent volunteer Stephen Chudy is tall and burly with a firm handshake and a warm smile beaming beneath a trucker hat. He’s here for one reason.

“ ‘I gave my daughter the choice, here or the independent school. She chose here. Fine by me. She’ll get to be around all different kinds of kids like there is out there in the world. It’s realistic,’ says Mr. Chudy, who is digging an irrigation path with ditches for the school’s many green stretches on a molasses thick morning. 

“ ‘There’s an understanding that the school is the only thing we all share as a town,’ he adds. ‘It’s a small place. We all go to the same McDonald’s and Walmart too.’ “

More at the Monitor, here. No paywall. Reasonable subscriptions. I really like the Monitor because it seeks out positive stories and international stories.

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Historic Homes Address Slavery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 27, 2019| 7 Comments »

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Photo: Hunter McRae for the New York Times
The slave quarters at the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, S.C. House tours in the South have stopped glossing over slavery.

Having just finished reading the painful Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, I found this article about southern house tours encouraging. At least people have stopped glossing over slavery and pretending people “owned” by other people had jolly lives.

Tariro Mzezewa writes at the New York Times, “A few years ago, people touring the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, Ga., would have heard a lot about George Owens, the lawyer, farmer and Congressional representative who lived in the massive neoclassical home in 1833. And about banker and slave trader Richard Richardson, for whom the house was built in 1816. They might have heard Emma Katin’s name, but not about how the enslaved black woman spent most of her nights sleeping on the wooden floors of the house, so that she could be available at all hours to the infants in the Owens family.

“They wouldn’t have heard about the 14 other enslaved people who lived there. And there’s a good chance that guests would not have heard about the 400 other slaves the Owenses had on their other nearby properties.

“ ‘Those pieces of the story would have been missing because she would have been treated as an accessory to the Owens’ lives,’ said Shannon Browning-Mullis, a curator of history and decorative arts for Telfair Museums, which owns the house and has been in charge of rethinking the way its history is told.

“In cities including Savannah and Charleston, S.C., where Confederate statues, elegant mansions and plantation weddings are common, tourism has often taken the form of nostalgia for the antebellum South, Southern charm and Southern hospitality. For years, tours of historic homes would focus on their architecture and fine furniture, but not on how the wealth so clearly displayed depended on enslaved labor.

“There is a growing consensus among the interpreters who guide people through historic properties that by excluding stories of the enslaved, institutions like historical societies, museums and tour companies have sent the message that power and wealth were not directly connected to slavery, and racism, and erased the stories of the black people who built these cities.

“Now that’s changing.

“ ‘When we come to see historic houses, often we are coming to see what it looked like to live in the past and a lot of us are sometimes just coming to see a pretty house,’ said Lacey Wilson, a historic interpreter for Telfair Museums, to a group of tourists on a recent tour. ‘What we’re looking at is the political power of the people who lived here. All the beautiful decorative objects throughout the house — the money coming for all these things came primarily from the enslaving of other human beings.’ …

“When Lauren Northup, director of museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation, leads a tour or when visitors listen to the self-guided audio tour of the house, they hear how the enslaved people in the house and the white family would have interacted in almost every room. The differences between the spaces where the white family lived and socialized compared to where the enslaved toiled are stark. Tourists also hear, again and again, about how every aspect of the house, which was built by a wealthy merchant, was designed to let the owners see and control the enslaved.

“Most guests at the Nathaniel Russel House remark on the beauty of the mansion and its décor, Ms. Northup said, adding that she reminds them that the house was built with the purpose of ‘keeping people in, keeping people from seeing each other, from socializing, from talking,’ she said. ‘It was a prison. That is what I’m trying to make people understand — you are in a beautiful prison.’

“Ms. Northup said that her organization has been actively working to change its storytelling since the mid-1990s. But in 2017, when she, with the help of art conservator Susan Buck, discovered that much of the original fabric of the slave quarters were intact, with artifacts, there was an urgency to study, preserve and open the space to the public.

“They were also galvanized by the 2015 killing of eight black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel AME church, by Dylann Roof, a man who professed white supremacy. …

“After the Emanuel shooting, ‘things changed in Charleston,’ Ms. Northup said. ‘That was such a watershed time for Charleston because of Emanuel. The community fundamentally and irrevocably changed.’

“Increasingly, the people going on house tours are looking for more history and are trying to satisfy ‘a hunger’ for history and truth, Ms. Browning-Mullis in Savannah and Ms. Northup in Charleston said.”

More here.

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