Discussions of Black history and school desegregation in many US K-12 schools have been narrowed to a few heroic figures and moments. Historic representations are currently challenged by a nationwide movement to uphold White supremacy and deny the violent history of racism in the US. The revisionist claims are challenged in this qualitative narrative research project that presents stories gathered from 10 Black educators in Augusta, Georgia, who recount their stories of desegregating schools and institutions as students or educators. This oral history narrative project imagines these stories as the basis for engaging K-12 teachers and students in creating new curricula.

            Although African American history is part of the K-12 curriculum, the complexity and diversity in the experiences of African-descended people in the United States is rarely represented (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). Recognizing all of African Americans’ experiences in the US challenges the popular understanding of America, its place in the world, and its moral standing, and thus this full description is generally not welcomed (Hannah-Jones, 2019). Teachers need to be equipped with a rich understanding of the circumstances that African Americans have endured, the economic and political as well as individual, and deliberate forces that created those circumstances, and the triumphs and achievements of African American communities despite the challenges (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). One way to disrupt popular discourses that claim the moral authority of the US and uphold white supremacy is to teach local stories that enhance national examples of resistance, struggle, and achievement in Black communities. We use the words African American and Black interchangeably in this paper to describe people and community in Augusta, Georgia, where people self-identify as African American and Black, and are multigeneration residents of the US. We also follow the authors when referencing research literature as they have used these terms. The experiences of those in the community who personally advocated for change in order to create access and greater justice remind teachers and their students that we are all responsible for creating the communities we want to live in.

             The stories told in this oral history research project highlight the brave acts of educators and students in many settings: teachers who took the first steps to create meaningful educational experiences for their newly desegregated classrooms of students, community educational efforts in which media distortions and omissions were countered through forms of public pedagogy, and student responses to experiences of new and hostile school environments. They remind us of the costs of these efforts, as well as the gains achieved. They also remind us of the slippery forms of backlash that have sprung up since the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), and the insidious ways that discrimination continues to assert itself (Mattia, 2021). These stories are relevant as we struggle to engage students in conversations that counter discourses that uphold white supremacy, or the “majoritarian stories” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). These discourses can be found in the language of our students and in the local media presentations on questions regarding school curricula and student activism. “Everyday schooling in America rests deeply on this history [of white coloniality], which positions Eurocentric values and the impetus to control and erase BIPOC at the center of what we view as standard, decent, and desirable for intellectual acuity” (Lyiscott et al., 2020, p. 368). Because of the global resurgence and political support of the erasure of Blackness and colonial harms in national discourses on race and education, it is imperative to highlight history that complicates a simple narrative about the Black experience in the US.

The Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) Education Oral History Project asked a broad question of a wide variety of participants to understand the experiences of education in the CSRA through a historical lens. We asked participants to describe their identities and roles in education for us and then asked an open-ended question, such as, “What are some of the things that have happened or are happening in the area that are of historical and educational importance? And how have your efforts contributed to the education of people?” Beginning in spring 2016, 23 people were interviewed. They were identified using snowball sampling, and participant self-identification. Starting with colleagues teaching at the university, we asked to hear more detailed recollections of short, interesting anecdotes that we had heard about our local schools and educational leaders. Twelve men and 11 women, 10 of whom identified as African American and 10 of whom identified as White, as well as three people who are immigrant adult arrivals to this country participated. All worked in some capacity in education, including art museums, as working artists, and in religious settings. Each of the three researchers conducted face-to-face interviews, each roughly one hour or more in duration. Stories narrated by these 23 participants were video- and audio-recorded and have been transcribed and archived. As we began discussing the interviews we realized that the stories of desegregation were “hidden histories,” (Graham, 2022), those stories that are known within families or among friends, but not officially recorded as the history of the place or taught within schools. The stories selected for this analysis represent those that to the researchers demonstrated a robust rebuttal to the taken-for-granted narratives of educational deficits and failures attributed to Black neighborhoods and families (Au, et al. 2016) in Augusta. While we have analyzed the corpus of stories that we collected in other publications (Christodoulou et al., 2022; Quinn et al., 2020), as we read and wrote about the complexity of the stories told about education of African Americans in the CSRA prior to and during desegregation, we decided we needed to use a Critical Race Theory-informed analytic lens that would allow us to develop an analysis around the counterstories participants were telling (Bhattacharya, 2017). As we engaged with CRT and counterstories we made the analytic decision to let the stories of the African American participants stand alone in this paper.

Teachers in schools need access to curricula that guides them to age-appropriate ways to teach history discussing the violence and challenges faced by Black students and families in Augusta, not that long ago, as well as Black history that is not about violence or slavery (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). We argue that knowing this history makes us better citizens and critics of threats to our institutions in the present moment. It is therefore imperative that students understand this history. Students can learn to be critical thinkers about current events and history only if we provide them the tools of our disciplines that demonstrate how events get interpreted and how people experienced those events in real time (Muhammad, 2020). Students are not immune from hearing about violence and have been compelled to listen to stories of very recent terror and violence, such as White supremacist attacks or shooting deaths of Black people in their communities. Not teaching about these events and similar events in history leaves intact a story of completion about integration and the overcoming of racism. It fails to link the racism of the (recent and distant) past with the effects of racism today in the understanding of many in the US. What do we learn from these omissions or inclusions about intractable, enduring violence and conflict cases related to, but also extending beyond race, such as religion and ethnic differences in Europe and the world, including, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, India, Ireland, and the like? How can oral history be used in education to teach these conflicts, learn from the past and create better futures? What kind of curriculum would embrace such and what teaching and learning methodologies could be employed? And how can we access memory as curriculum in all these different contexts and conflicts?

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