Like most Black educators, Miss McGee was a public employee and vulnerable to the disciplinary practices of Jim Crow authorities.īut she was undeterred. She kept the book out of sight, understanding the likely repercussions were she to be caught. Woodson’s “book on the Negro,” which rested comfortably in her lap. Based on her own judgment, and perhaps at the recommendation of fellow Black teachers, she often read passages from Carter G. On many occasions, McGee made what she deemed to be necessary revisions to the mandatory curriculum. She was Black, 28-years-old, and taught history in 1933-1934 at the only Black secondary school in Webster Parish, Louisiana. Mellon Foundation to codevelop The Black Teacher Archives, a digital repository to preserve the more than 100-year history of Colored Teacher Associations.Tessie McGee read to her class in a steady measured tone, quietly engaging in a calculated act of subversion.

He recently received a $610,000 grant from the Andrew W. Givens earned his PhD in African American studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a two-time Ford Foundation fellow.

Givens pulls together these three bodies of literature-previously treated separately-with primary historical sources and theoretical insights from Native American studies and Black studies to render a new origin story of education in the United States. By analyzing literature on Native, white, and Black education, he reveals how experiences unique to Native communities, such as missionary and residential boarding schools, and experiences of Black people, such as the criminalization of literacy and then systematic underdevelopment of black segregated schools, were not anomalies but, in fact, structural features of a broader schooling apparatus of the state. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), traces the subversive and often covert educational practices black people employed to challenge racial domination during slavery through Jim Crow.Īs a Radcliffe fellow, Givens is writing “The American School in Red, White, and Black,” which revises the story of education in the United States during the 19th century. His first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Givens, the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at Radcliffe and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studies the relationship among race, power, and schooling in the United States. This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Fugitive Pedagogy by Jarvis R. Givens