ABSTRACT
Despite a growing educational literature about the quality and character of legally segregated schools for blacks, the dominant and wide-spread view assumes that before school integration blacks were intellectually unequal to whites due to inferior education. I encountered this in a class I taught at a state university when I showed segments from the award-winning civil rights documentary series, Eyes on the Prize (Hampton, 1986). When I asked for verbal reactions to footage from the 1960s, one white student remarked: “I was shocked that the black people were so articulate, more than some of the whites!” Other students (black and white) said that they too had been surprised. This chapter has been inspired by these students and seeks to reclaim the legacy of Jim Crow’s teachers.
