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School Clothes

School Clothes

A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness

A chorus of Black student voices that renders a new story of US education—one where racial barriers and violence are confronted by freedom dreaming and resistance

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Product Code: 9348
ISBN: 9780807093320
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Beacon Press
Pages: 240
Published Date: 06/25/2024
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Price: $17.95
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Black students were forced to live and learn on the Black side of the color line for centuries, through the time of slavery, Emancipation, and the Jim Crow era. And for just as long—even through to today—Black students have been seen as a problem and a seemingly troubled population in America’s public imagination.

Through over one hundred firsthand accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Professor Jarvis Givens offers a powerful counter-narrative in School Clothes to challenge such dated and prejudiced storylines. He details the educational lives of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison; political leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis; and Black students whose names are largely unknown but who left their marks nonetheless. Givens blends this multitude of individual voices into a single narrative, a collective memoir, to reveal a through line shared across time and circumstance: a story of African American youth learning to battle the violent condemnation of Black life and imposed miseducation meant to quell their resistance.

School Clothes elevates a legacy in which Black students are more than the sum of their suffering. By peeling back the layers of history, Givens unveils in high relief a distinct student body: Black learners shaped not only by their shared vulnerability but also their triumphs, fortitude, and collective strivings.


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PREFACE
“School Clothes” and the Black Vernacular

INTRODUCTION
Living and Learning Behind the Veil
CHAPTER 1
Going to School North of Slavery
CHAPTER 2
Becoming Fugitive Learners
CHAPTER 3
Learning and Striving in the Afterlife of Slavery
CHAPTER 4
Reading in the Dark: Becoming Black Literate Subjects
CHAPTER 5
A Singing School for Justice
CHAPTER 6
Some of Them Became Schoolteachers
CONCLUSION
Hieroglyphics of the Black Student Body

Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
Index

“A treasure of Black student voices about their separate and distinctive experiences with American schooling. With School Clothes, Jarvis Givens has brought to magnificent view the special meaning of schooling in Black America across time and space. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand and educate Black children.” —James D. Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935

“School Clothes deftly captures the dialogic character of education—a feature too often missed in our singular focus on teachers. Drawing on a range of personal memoirs and a wealth of historical and theoretical knowledge, Jarvis R. Givens reveals that black students experience the classroom as a terrain of battle, a stage, an observatory and a microscope, and a space of nurture, imagination, and freedom-making. And as such, they must dress for the occasion.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“In School Clothes, Jarvis Givens offers a penetrating historical excavation of the ancient tropes and distortions that have for centuries dominated the discourse about black students…revealing their wounds and their witness, listening to their voices and insights, laying bare their armor, celebrating their gifts, and composing a liberating cultural narrative that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful…and true.” —Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer

“School Clothes is an ode to black adornment: veils both literal and symbolic, the masks we wear that grin and lie, the outfits and encouraging words we choose for our children—from Sunday morning to the first day of class—to help them shine. Jarvis Givens’s careful attention to the interior lives of black students is astonishing to witness. And this book is a mighty weapon against a world that calls those young people problems, disruptions, unworthiness enfleshed. At every turn, Givens speaks back to such misrecognition with fire, rigor, and a measure of tenderness that clarifies the true stakes of this groundbreaking new work: the preservation of all that we love.” —Joshua Bennett, author of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

“School Clothes takes readers ‘behind the veil’ to gain insights from several generations of Black students. This is a brilliant, well-researched, and cogent study that centers the voices and experiences of Black students in the American educational system. It is a beautiful tribute—and testament—to the power of Black knowledge and resistance.” —Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls and author of Until I Am Free
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Black students were forced to live and learn on the Black side of the color line for centuries, through the time of slavery, Emancipation, and the Jim Crow era. And for just as long—even through to today—Black students have been seen as a problem and a seemingly troubled population in America’s public imagination.

Through over one hundred firsthand accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Professor Jarvis Givens offers a powerful counter-narrative in School Clothes to challenge such dated and prejudiced storylines. He details the educational lives of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison; political leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis; and Black students whose names are largely unknown but who left their marks nonetheless. Givens blends this multitude of individual voices into a single narrative, a collective memoir, to reveal a through line shared across time and circumstance: a story of African American youth learning to battle the violent condemnation of Black life and imposed miseducation meant to quell their resistance.

School Clothes elevates a legacy in which Black students are more than the sum of their suffering. By peeling back the layers of history, Givens unveils in high relief a distinct student body: Black learners shaped not only by their shared vulnerability but also their triumphs, fortitude, and collective strivings.


Bookmark and Share
PREFACE
“School Clothes” and the Black Vernacular

INTRODUCTION
Living and Learning Behind the Veil
CHAPTER 1
Going to School North of Slavery
CHAPTER 2
Becoming Fugitive Learners
CHAPTER 3
Learning and Striving in the Afterlife of Slavery
CHAPTER 4
Reading in the Dark: Becoming Black Literate Subjects
CHAPTER 5
A Singing School for Justice
CHAPTER 6
Some of Them Became Schoolteachers
CONCLUSION
Hieroglyphics of the Black Student Body

Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
Index

“A treasure of Black student voices about their separate and distinctive experiences with American schooling. With School Clothes, Jarvis Givens has brought to magnificent view the special meaning of schooling in Black America across time and space. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand and educate Black children.” —James D. Anderson, author of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935

“School Clothes deftly captures the dialogic character of education—a feature too often missed in our singular focus on teachers. Drawing on a range of personal memoirs and a wealth of historical and theoretical knowledge, Jarvis R. Givens reveals that black students experience the classroom as a terrain of battle, a stage, an observatory and a microscope, and a space of nurture, imagination, and freedom-making. And as such, they must dress for the occasion.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“In School Clothes, Jarvis Givens offers a penetrating historical excavation of the ancient tropes and distortions that have for centuries dominated the discourse about black students…revealing their wounds and their witness, listening to their voices and insights, laying bare their armor, celebrating their gifts, and composing a liberating cultural narrative that is at once heartbreaking and hopeful…and true.” —Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer

“School Clothes is an ode to black adornment: veils both literal and symbolic, the masks we wear that grin and lie, the outfits and encouraging words we choose for our children—from Sunday morning to the first day of class—to help them shine. Jarvis Givens’s careful attention to the interior lives of black students is astonishing to witness. And this book is a mighty weapon against a world that calls those young people problems, disruptions, unworthiness enfleshed. At every turn, Givens speaks back to such misrecognition with fire, rigor, and a measure of tenderness that clarifies the true stakes of this groundbreaking new work: the preservation of all that we love.” —Joshua Bennett, author of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man

“School Clothes takes readers ‘behind the veil’ to gain insights from several generations of Black students. This is a brilliant, well-researched, and cogent study that centers the voices and experiences of Black students in the American educational system. It is a beautiful tribute—and testament—to the power of Black knowledge and resistance.” —Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls and author of Until I Am Free
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Review and Rate this Item