Role Models for the Race

With the days of Jim Crow almost a half-century behind us, the history of the South’s segregated schools has been reduced, at least in white minds, to the history of desegregation, with all its bitterness and violence. Black schools figure in this drama only as neglected institutions that children sought to escape. In Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville (University of Illinois Press, 208 pp., $35), Sonya Ramsey examines th Nashville’s white-controlled Board of Education complied—primarily because black teachers could be paid less than whites.

Ramsey portrays these pioneers as visionary drudges, committed to “uplifting the race” even as they coped with decrepit facilities and inadequate teaching materials. In addition to rigorous academic instruction—many of the early teachers were Fisk graduates—the women sought to “present themselves as visual representations of achievement,” modeling self-respect to children who faced severe discrimination in the white world. The teachers tried to be a living rebuke to the notion that blacks were inferior.

Reading, Writing, and Segregation is most interesting when it explores the role of schools in the wider culture. Through the lens of education, Ramsey looks at class divisions within the black community, at African American participation in Nashville politics, and at employment practices in the city, especially during World War II. She examines the dilemma for black teachers during the Cold War, when they were compelled “to teach students to appreciate democracy although they did not live in a racially democratic society.” Their response was to emphasize that “racial equality is the true American ideal,” a notion that motivated many of the young adults who joined the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

The last third of the book is devoted to the process of desegregation in Nashville, especially to its consequences for the women who had devoted themselves to making the best of the old system. Black schools were closed or restaffed with whites, and black teachers were transferred to majority white schools where they faced disrespect from students and colleagues. Their importance as role models evaporated in this less constrained environment.

White flight and consequent re-segregation have so far thwarted many of the hopes black teachers had for the changes that cost them so much. As Ramsey makes clear, their story is still waiting for its happy ending.