Association for the Study of African American History and Culture (ASALH)
PRESS RELEASE
NOW AVAILABLE
The Journal of African American History
Special Issue:
"African American Education, Civil Rights, and Black Power"
Guest Editors: Dionne Danns and Michelle A. Purdy
ASALH announces the publication of the final issue of Vol. 100 of The Journal of African American History, Fall 2015.
The Fall 2015 issue of The Journal of African American History's
(JAAH) centennial volume presents significant new studies of the
history of African American education. In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, the
Father of Black History, published his important book, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861,
and laid the foundation for the field of African American educational
history. In their introduction to the JAAH Special Issue, Dionne Danns
and Michelle Purdy examine the major contributions to this area of
African American history over the last century, including the Special
Issues and articles on African American educational history published in
the JAAH.
Crystal R.
Sanders' "More Than Cookies and Crayons: Head Start and African American
Empowerment in Mississippi, 1965-1968" describes the activities of the
Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) and its numerous Head
Start programs opened for pre-schoolers. Veterans of the civil rights
campaigns were hired to run these programs and they were empowered by
their control over substantial amounts of federal funds flowing into the
state. Sanders makes it clear that CDGM teachers and administrators
viewed the implementation of Head Start programs in the late 1960s as
the next phase of the black freedom struggle in Mississippi.
While there
have been many books, articles, and memoirs recounting the experiences
of the first African American children to desegregate public elementary
and secondary schools, there is little or no documentation of the
circumstances for those who were the first to enroll in elite private
schools. Michelle A. Purdy's "Courageous Navigation: African American
Students at an Elite Private School, 1967-1972" fills this gap in the
scholarship by focusing on the first African American students who
attended the Westminster Schools, a private boarding school in Atlanta,
Georgia. Using school records, newspaper accounts, curricular materials,
and oral interviews, Purdy provides detailed insights into the positive
and negative aspects of the African American students' experiences, and
she explains why most were successful in making the transition for an
all-black to a predominantly white educational environment.
Barbara
Sizemore was the first African American women appointed as
Superintendent of a large urban school district. In "Barbara Sizemore
and the Politics of Black Educational Achievement and Community Control,
1963-1975," Elizabeth Todd-Breland presents insightful information on
Sizemore's upbringing and training, as well as her leadership of public
elementary and secondary schools in Chicago and an experimental
community control program before she was appointed Superintendent of the
Washington, DC, Public Schools in 1973. In her well-documented analysis
of Sizemore's attempt to use "community control" to improve black
academic achievement in Chicago and the District of Columbia,
Todd-Breland exposes the racial and gender discrimination that prevented
Sizemore from implementing the changes needed to advance African
American education in the era of Black Power.
In the
Special Report, "Documenting the Contributions of Children and Teenagers
to the Civil Rights Movement," V. P. Franklin describes the research
carried out and the exhibit mounted by students at the University of
California, Riverside, that documented the activities of children and
teenagers in support of civil rights campaigns organized by adults, as
well as the protests and demonstrations organized by the teenagers
themselves. The report describes the beginning of efforts to document
the many ways children and teenagers' social activism impacted civil
rights campaigns throughout the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Fall
2015 issue also includes an Essay Review by Dionne Danns of two recent
books on the "Separate and Superior" black secondary schools operating
during the Jim Crow era; one by M. Christopher Brown on two books that
examine the limited possibility for African American students to achieve
equal educational outcomes in U. S. public schools; and a third by
Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua on the history of black cooperative economics.
This fourth issue of the JNH/JAAH's 100th
volume also includes three "Centennial Perspectives." Brenda E.
Stevenson's "'Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves': Carter G. Woodson's Journal of Negro History
'Invents' the Study of Slavery" documents the JNH's pioneering work in
the field of slavery studies. "'Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow':
African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement" by
Linda M. Perkins describes the women's long struggle for college and
university education, and shows how college-bred black women used their
advanced training to benefit oppressed African Americans in American
society; and Olga Dugan's "In the Catbird Seat: The African American
Contribution to 20th Century American Poetry" details how
poets Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Natasha Tretheway
used their positions as U. S. Poet Laureates to expand the audiences for
poetry in the United States.
In addition, there are also reviews of 15 recently published scholarly works on African American history and culture.
The JAAH
Fall 2015 issue is available for purchase from ASALH in hard copy, and
for use in courses through Publications Director, Karen May, at kmay@asalh.net. Orders may be placed online here.
The digital version will soon be available through "JSTOR Current
Journals"; please check and make sure your university library subscribes
to the program.
For more information, go to the JAAH website: www.jaah.org; or contact Sylvia Cyrus, JAAH Managing Editor, executive.director@asalh.org; or the JAAH:
V. P. Franklin, Editor
The Journal of African American History
Department of History
The University of New Orleans
2000 Lake Shore Drive
New Orleans, LA 70148
E-mail: jaah@jaah.org.
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