ABSTRACT
In 1907 Edgar Gardner Murphy, the head of the Southern Education Board, wrote to Wallace Buttrick, executive offi cer of the General Education Board: “There is not only no chance to help the situation of the Negro educationally, but it is steadily growing worse, and their schools, upon every sort of pretext, are being hampered and impoverished where they are not actually abandoned” (White, 2002, p. 89). 1 While education for Black people in the north was not faring much better then (or now), and has certainly advanced beyond the post-Reconstruction nadir Murphy reported, 150 years after our “emancipation,” African Americans’ aspirations for social, political, and economic justice by means of liberating education remain largely unfulfi lled. In 1997 nearly a century after Murphy’s dismal admission, Murrell observed that “African-American children as a group” were still being “horribly served” in major underresourced urban school systems. Today, after more than 60 years of integration, the conditions of Black education that Murrell described have further deteriorated:
. . . African American children, particularly males, fare dramatically less well than their European-American counterparts. They are disproportionately expelled, suspended, and relegated to special programs for the emotionally disturbed, learning disabled, and mentally retarded. They have dramatically higher drop-out rates, yet dramatically lower grade point averages and rates of matriculation. Half as many young African-American men go to college than a decade ago. (Murrell, 1997, p. 23)
Moreover, women are now the fastest-growing prison population including a disproportionate number of Black women and girls (Meares, 2011; Ravoira & Patino, 2011; Winn, 2011). In fact, Black education, particularly in urban schools, remains a question of our survival as a people. Whether urban education should actually enable Black students to develop not only academically but also to be conscious and committed to this sense of “peoplehood” continues to be contested (Ravitch, 1990, 2010).
