“They will liberate themselves”: Education, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in the Appalachian Coalfields

The Black Appalachian educational experience during the civil rights era has largely been obscured by mythologies of invisibility and regional racial innocence. The narrative in this article counters these myths through the stories of Black Appalachians who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s in Jenkins, a southeastern Kentucky coal town. It explores the nuances and complexities of Jim Crow in this Appalachian community and demonstrates the various ways in which the Black community navigated segregation and inequality through its commitment to education as freedom. The belief in the liberatory potential of education fostered different forms of activism, from direct-action protest to more subtle acts of resistance. This article uses oral histories to reconstruct the educational experiences of Black Appalachians during a particular transformative moment in history. Prioritizing the voices of those who lived this history not only highlights the agency of Black Appalachians, but also assigns subjectivity and agency in constructing the narrative itself.

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

We analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

“WOKE” in Historically Black Colleges and Universities

This research paper aims to examine and critique the impact and contribution of HBCUs in advancing societal issues and education while fostering a heightened understanding of social justice for today’s HBCU students. The purpose of this research is to discuss, expose, and share the impact HBCUs have had on the “WOKE” movement and social justice in the United States of America. The discourse centers on the development of scholars and activities who have been nurtured by and at HBCUs. The primary sources and events have been summarizing, focusing on the cause and effect of the injustice minorities face from the modern Civil Rights Era to the present day. The information/data demonstrates core components that have shaped American HBCUs from their establishments/foundation. Those ideals still evoke the same emotion of individuals who effort toward higher education decades ago up to today’s HBCU student bodies that embrace societal images upon their school. It also demonstrates how HBCUs have shown their ways of waking to societal limits in multiple forms of action to be heard through their oppression. Some sources broadly state approaches to reinstating these essential values, while some indicate the efforts to prove the name of HBCUs compared to PWIs. Some sources even show how our institutions solidify our government. This paper expresses how HBCUs in our nation keep students aware of the delinquent acts around them from social injustice and racial inequality.

Disrupting the Big Lie: Higher Education and Whitelash in a Post/Colorblind Era

James Baldwin (1998) described whiteness as “the big lie” of American society where the belief in the inherent superiority of white people allowed for, emboldened, and facilitated violence against People of Color. In the post-Civil Rights era, scholars reframed whiteness as an invisible, hegemonic social norm, and a great deal of education scholarship continues to be rooted in this metaphor of invisibility. However, Leonardo (2020) theorized that in a post-45 era of “whitelash” (Embrick et al., 2020), “post-colorblindness” is more accurate to describe contemporary racial stratification whereby whiteness is both (a) more visible and (b) increasingly appealing to perceived injuries of “reverse racism.” From this perspective, we offer three theoretical concepts to guide the future of whiteness in education scholarship. Specifically, we argue that scholars critically studying whiteness in education must explicitly: (1) address the historicity of whiteness, (2) analyze the public embrace of whiteness, and (3) emphasize the material consequences of whiteness on the lives of People of Color. By doing this, we argue that critical scholars of race in higher education will more clearly understand the changing nature of whiteness while avoiding the analytical trap of invisibility that is decreasingly relevant.