SCHOOL CLOTHES

A sharp examination of how Black students have consistently overcome institutionalized racism.

As Givens, a Harvard professor of African and African American studies, notes, Black students, forever "picked at and prodded as specimens for study,” have never been treated as subjects of their own discourse. This book ends centuries of silence by piecing together more than 150 years of student eyewitness accounts found in everything from autobiographies to yearbook inscriptions. Givens begins with accounts from Alexander Crummell and Henry Garnet, two 19th-century New York teens who experienced “witnessing,” which “involves coming into awareness of how the violence and mistreatment of other individual black people could potentially be visited on oneself.” Though living in the “free” North, both boys saw—and recorded—their experiences with the hate crimes perpetrated against Blacks Americans seeking education. Like countless others after them, they survived a White supremacist system through ingenious means. When tight finances prohibited the purchase of new clothes, parents—e.g., those of late-19th-century student William Holtzclaw, whose mother cut up an old petticoat to sew him a white suit needed for a school performance—found ways to help their offspring “bear new marks” that repudiated myriad humiliations of slavery and enforced poverty. The young Richard Wright—who sought assistance from a sympathetic White man to help him check out library books in the Jim Crow South—routinely engaged in acts of “fugitive learning.” As Givens writes, eloquently, “beneath the veneer of compliance and deference to white authoritative power, the black school was always a singing school of protest and fugitive planning, where black students could dream up a world more beautiful and more just than the one around them.” Collectively, these young people helped create “a tradition that transmitted a sense of self-worth and respect” to the generations of Black youth that followed them. This book, which will appeal especially to educators and historians, triumphantly rewrites Black students into a history that has ignored them.

An eloquently necessary study.