Education Week - March 16, 2022 - 11

Dear principals,
assistant principals,
aspiring principals,
and all school leaders,
didn't have to be because it was pervasive. It played out
community by community, but it sure played out a lot.
The virulence and the consistency with which it played
out over decades tells us what we need to know about
how power relations and citizenship were being defined
in the postwar South.
Were school buildings burned down just
after they were constructed, or did some
last for years or decades before they were
burned down?
It varies. There are times when the school has just
been built and the next night it's burned down. There
are other times they do last a while. The Freedmen's
Bureau is supporting these communities and putting
up half the money. It makes the accounting part even
harder. [The Freedmen's Bureau] can't even count all
the buildings in operation.
How are the effects of these burnings,
and the students who lost their school
buildings in the process, playing out in the
generations that followed?
When you lose a school, kids end up not going
anywhere, at least during the 1800s. In a lot of places,
it didn't even come to school burning. Local whites
could basically intimidate anyone who would rent out
a building. Eventually, there's a deal brokered in most
Southern communities where there will be a Black
school, it'll just be underfunded and underresourced.
By the time you get to the 1950s and 1960s, at least
with K-12 schools, desegregation is on the menu, the
Supreme Court has ruled. You actually have a few
cases where civil rights activists are burning down
Black schools [to call attention to the persistence of
racial segregation in education]. It becomes somewhat
counterproductive for groups like the KKK to burn
down schools because they would just be encouraging
desegregation. In the 1950s and 1960s they started
targeting integrated schools.
It's never like there's a Golden Age where this
stops entirely. Once you get federal authorities who
are committed to integration, that at least raises
the specter that someone's going to get caught and
held accountable-even those investigations are not
conclusive.
How does the absence of this context from
the historical record, let alone the public
school curriculum today, distort our collective
understanding of our nation's past?
The media's full of all these stories of whitewashing
history. Various states are banning anything
controversial that might put America in a bad light. So
many historically Black schools have been expunged
from the record. The memorials are fewer, the buildings
have not been preserved. Because segregation was a
bad thing, many people don't want to dwell on it. For
particular families and communities, this is very much
part of their own history and memory.
In a lot of Southern communities, people certainly
remember these incidents. There's a high school
called Sterling in Greenville, S.C. [The political activist
and civil rights leader] Jesse Jackson [attended the
school in the 1950s]. It burns down in 1967. Officially,
the cause was faulty wiring. Is that possible? Sure,
it's possible, the school was old and not well kept up.
There were rumors that this was arson. The fact that
some communities might suspect arson or be sure
that it is arson, speaks to ongoing feelings of injustice.
It should be telling us something about how people
perceive their local institutions.
How has your investigation of Black schools
informed your understanding of the bomb
threats against HBCUs that have been in
the headlines recently?
We shouldn't be surprised. I remember, just after
President Donald Trump was elected, reading a story
on racist graffiti in schools in Virginia and Maryland
being up by 18 percent or 20 percent. I remember
thinking, yes, that's terrible-but what about the
baseline? It was pretty bad to begin with. I would say
something similar here. It's very much part and parcel
with a long history of intimidation and petty cruelty.
What is the value of deepening our
knowledge of the legacy of Black schools
that perished or were vandalized?
It is up to school boards what they decide to teach. ...
But schools were burned. There was rampant racism,
rampant violence. We need to think about that honestly
and with mutual recognition. My hope is that by
teaching kids how to wrestle with these things, it would
impart a great humility and questioning.
What would justice look like for the
descendants of the victims of school
burnings and for the broader swath of
people whose lives are materially affected
by America's legacy of racism?
If you're thinking about Reconstruction, at least half
of the cost of these buildings is put up by people who
are a year or two removed from slavery. They're pooling
very meager resources from people who have to get a
thousand dollars to build the buildings. They have no
insurance, the building burns down. That's a significant
hardship. There's lasting psychological and moral
hardships, where people have to deal with the indignity
and the inconvenience of having their kid denied an
education. Proportionally, it's a huge burden for Black
communities to bear. When you compound it with the
[continued] lack of funding, lack of textbooks, I think,
it should just really resonate with people that this is part
of an ongoing injustice. This is a big emotional weight to
carry even though it happened a long time ago.
I have a friend from graduate school who passed
away, Doria Johnson. A lot of her research involved
her family from South Carolina. Her great-greatgrandfather
had been lynched at the turn of the 20th
century and lost the family farm. Sometimes we talk
about reparations as this abstract nebulous issue
because no one today was directly affected. But her
family was directly affected. They can document
exactly what they lost.
It's not to say that you can look at some kid today
and exactly calculate what they're owed for something
that happened in the 1870s. But I also don't think that
this is just dealing with the 1870s. The discussion
of reparations needs to be focused on ongoing
misappropriations of resources. It needs to be seen in
much more of a continuous context. I do think we need
to be sure we're talking about it in the present tense.
-MARK LIEBERMAN
EDUCATION WEEK | March 16, 2022 | www.edweek.org | 11
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Education Week - March 16, 2022

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