School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness

History of education scholar Givens (Fugitive Pedagogy) delivers an intriguing if somewhat theoretical account of African American education in the 19th and 20th centuries. Expounding on the metaphor of “school clothes,” or clothing “purchased with the specific intent of being worn to school,” Givens contends that clothes were “forms of protection just as much as assertions of dignity and self-worth for young black people whose childhoods continued to be threatened, even after slavery was legally abolished.” He also suggests that Black students “dress[ed] themselves up for a new life, a new world, one in which all God’s children have shoes, and a robe, and wings, as the African American spiritual goes.” Though analysis of the “distinct subject position” of “the black student” and other scholarly discussions can grow abstract, Givens unearths and contextualizes many fascinating stories, including Zora Neale Hurston’s memory of contorting herself to meet the expectations of two white patrons who visited her fifth-grade classroom (“They asked me if I loved school, and I lied that I did,” she later wrote). Elsewhere, Utica Institute founder William Holtzclaw recalls how his mother, a sharecropper, would “outgeneral” the family’s white landlord by “slip[ping] me off to school through the back way” during cotton picking season. Patient readers will be rewarded with a tapestry of first-person voices capturing “the beautiful and the terrible realities” of Black education in America. Illus. (Feb.)