There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969)
Creators: name: Ransom, Kimberly
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: History of African American Education
subject: History of Childhood
subject: Ethonohistory
subject: Critical Childhood Studies
subject: Oral History
subject: Education
subject: Social Sciences

description: Research examining Black education during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow have either emphasized whites’ and Blacks’ interpretations of the warrant and function of Black education or documented empirically the inequitable conditions of Black schools and the role and contributions of Black educators and community members. In this scholarship, Black children have been implicitly present through whites' and Blacks' opposing versions of whether and for what purpose Blacks should be educated. Alternatively, Black children have been empirically present inasmuch as their presence enabled the documentation of inequitable educational conditions (e.g., low per-pupil-expenditure; high student-teacher ratios) or evidenced the care they received from Black teachers and community members. Yet, how Black children experienced childhood or articulated agency in relation to schools is not apparent. Given this extant gap in the literature, and drawing upon critical childhood studies and the concomitant assertion that Black childhood has been unimagined and devalued within the social conception of childhood, my dissertation project provided a one-year ethnohistorical inquiry of former schoolchildren who attended Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County (PCRS), Alabama between 1940 and 1969. Drawing upon the oral histories (n=49) of these former school children (referred herein as “once-children”) and material objects (n=2,576) from archives and personal collections, I examined: (a) the experience of Black children in and around PCRS; (b) what these childhood experiences revealed about how Black children may have influenced the culture, organization, or dynamics of these schools; and (c) how in foregrounding Black children’s perspectives and materials, we might develop distinct or nuanced understandings of Black children's experiences and agency in and around pre-Brown segregated schools; and by implication, expand our understanding of Black childhood in this space and time. Findings reveal conditions that grounded Black children’s PCRS related experiences (including physical and spatial burdens associated with the journey to school) -- conditions more suited for adults. However, study participants defied these conditions in ways that animated or reinforced their status as children. While these conditions required Black children to be agentic, their innocence was not eclipsed as adults provided supports and protections that affirmed their status as children. The once-children recalled that in school they animated their childhood status via their power and agency to play and indulge childish shenanigans; namely, by demonstrating preoccupations, motivations, and behaviors that defined their status of children as opposed to student or adult. As Black children took up liberties to play in (relation to) school, they fulfilled their natural and developmentally appropriate desire to be playful, navigate peer conflicts, negotiate status differences, and engage in social dramas, all in decidedly childish ways. In doing so, they expanded the dynamics and culture of school to include Black childhood. Importantly, children engaged in these developmentally appropriate expressions of agency in clear opposition to adult expectations and boundaries and the norms, expectations, and organization of schools. In demonstrating how Black once-children in PCRS articulated their childhood status in the aforementioned ways and via robust articulations of human agency, we not only complicate our understanding of Black children’s educational experience in de jure segregated schools but expand considerations regarding the purpose of schooling beyond its more instrumental purposes – namely how schooling provides a stage for a wide range of developmental expressions and human agency that have been especially under-analyzed in histories of (Black) education.