Abstract:

While Black working class mothers’ combination of care-work and political strategizing in sectors of politics, health, and education has gained attention in the media, there is limited understanding of their response to controlling images in their school involvement. This paper extends discussions of Black working class mother’s experiences with discrimination in the school settings (Lareau 1999) with insight into their choice to incorporate or reject respectability in interactions with school personnel. Prior research has distinguished Black middle and working class women’s involvement in respectability politics (Barnes:2015; Dow:2019), but interviews with working class Black mothers reveal their awareness of controlling images that compels members of the school system to marginalize Black families. Additionally, participants’ description of their own mothers’ respectability strategies in schools is consistent with the history of Black working and middle class women’s variations in respectable performances. This paper argues that class should not be the framework by which researchers distinguish which Black women incorporate respectability politics in their school involvement and other forms of advocacy. Instead, it extends historic findings of Detroit working class women’s socio-political involvement (Wolcott:2015) to illustrate the benefits of using a class framework to account for different motivations for, and performances of respectability politics among Black working class mothers.

Overview: My investigation of local oral histories, and archives revealed some of the foundations of educational advocacy and organizing in the area that can be connected to a legacy of organizing from the reconstruction era to the strategies Black women incorporate as they navigate schooling presently. Some of this material has been published in Race & Identity in Society.

While scholars have analyzed the establishment, persistence, and effects of segregation, the process and the mechanisms involved in undoing that racialized structural inequality receives less attention. I draw from comparative historical and qualitative methods in order to chronicle the transition from segregated Jones [Elementary] School to the integrated Community High School. After The Jones School closed its doors under implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in June 1965, parents, city officials, and activists not only deliberated over what to do with the facility, but also with the larger school system, which was still reeling from segregation. These conversations lasted seven years until Community High School was opened in August 1972. Due to the nature of my data collection in local archives and through interviews with members of formerly segregated Ann Arbor neighborhoods, my presentation will also address how this research, and the larger changes it seeks to chronicle, emerges from and complements Black Ann Arbor natives’ efforts to preserve their local history.

Black Women’s Words: Using Oral History to Understand the Foundations of Black Women’s Educational Advocacy

In this paper I combine oral history with an archival case study of the desegregation of a school in a Detroit suburb as an example of a Black Feminist method in order to describe Black women’s educational advocacy during the process of school desegregation. I argue that Black Feminisms adds to the Sociological subfield of Education and theories of parent involvement historical context and tools for appreciating Black women’s educational advocacy in schools, local government, and universities as a form of reproductive labor they have been committed to since reconstruction. In this paper, I draw from the claim that Black Feminisms is an analytical strategy that acknowledges the structural and representational forces that silence black women, and responds with investigations and action that more adequately conveys Black womanhood and Black Women’s dedication to their communities. Adding to McCall’s (2005) discussion of intersectionality as a complex methodology, and Nash’s (2008) critiques of the theorization of Black Womanhood in intersectional research, I add that Black Feminism is a form of analysis that privileges the understanding of Black Women due to their multiple, marginalized identities, but it can also inform investigative techniques that respond to the distortion of Black Women’s thoughts and experiences in data. I construct my argument around the idea that a Black Feminist Sociology critically responds to the lineage of theories in Urban Studies and Education that suggest Black children, and their families develop ‘oppositional cultures’ to schooling. Instead, it considers the legacy of Black women who have historically understood and responded to the structural and interpersonal forces that restricted their access to equal education in the

development of methodology. This paper adds uses narrative and historical methods in order to emphasize the significance of class privilege in the experiences and social networks that Black women draw from to advocate for educational equality.

Presentation delivered as a recipient for the U of M: Mini Libraries Grant.