Movements Come and Go and Are Soon Forgotten: The Black Campus Movement at Fayetteville State 1966-1972

Broad surveys of college student activism are impossible without the study of individual campuses. Studies of activism on historically Black college and university (HBCU) campuses in the United States tend to focus on larger more well-known campuses or those in large urban areas. Studies of student activism within North Carolina repeatedly highlight only three of the eleven extant institutions. This study contributes to the historiography of Black campus activism by using nine oral history interviews conducted with university alumni paired with extensive archival research to excavate the ways Fayetteville State University students contributed to the Black Campus Movement. This essay is a narrative of student protests between 1966 and 1972. Ultimately, such protests were grounded in major breakdowns in meaningful communication between faculty, administrators, alumni, and students and in HBCU students’ shared desire to have a say in decisions that affected their lives. Fayetteville State’s student body fully invoked James Baldwin’s notion of critiquing America in that they loved their institution more than any other institution in the world, and, exactly for that reason, they insisted on the right to criticize Fayetteville State and demanded that she rise to the occasion for which she was formed

Towards a Racial Justice Project Oral History Methodology Critical Race Theory and African American Education

Oral historians have declared the methodology a social justice project. This essay advances that discussion, positing that oral history methodology may represent a more specific racial justice project when coupled with critical race theory. An examination of the history of African American education scholarship, we argue, supports this contention. Two central questions guide this essay: (1) What does scholarship on the history of African American education demonstrate about the compatibility between oral history methodology and critical race theory? and (2) How does this methodological-theoretical pairing advance a racial justice project? We aim to show how critical race theory and oral history methodology complement one another as research tools that can strengthen the history of education’s capacity to inform current educational issues. Our essay draws on the work of historians of African American education to exemplify possibilities for any historian of education who examines systematically underserved communities of Colour. Ultimately, we argue that critical race theory and oral history methodology are compatible because they share several propositions apt for helping researchers subvert the silencing, marginalisation, and objectification of systemically underserved communities of Colour, thereby furthering a racial justice project. This essay, therefore, contributes primarily to interdisciplinary education and historical research methods literature

Mobilizing Betrayal: Black Feminist Pedagogy and Black Women Graduate Student Educators

This article addresses Black women graduate students\u27 educational labor in higher education teacher training programs. We ground this reflective account of our respective teaching praxis in the educational betrayal we endured as younger students, connecting it to our engagement of Black feminist pedagogy. We illustrate how this praxis empowered us as undergraduate educators to implement pedagogies of equity and justice. Employing a structured vignette analysis framework, we draw on a Black feminist paradigm and Black feminist autoethnography to examine field notes of our teaching praxis. These two field notes, one from Francena and one from ArCasia, demonstrate challenges that emerged in our instruction of mostly white undergraduates. Despite the precarious nature of our political and professional positions, we discuss why working toward an anti‐oppression praxis remains our ultimate pedagogical aim

Black Baby Boomers, Gender, and Southern Education-Navigating Tensions in Oral History Methodology

Little to no extant scholarship examines procedural, epistemological aspects of conducting intergenerational oral history interviews with Black elders. Thus, in this multivocal piece, we, two Black women oral historians of education, discuss specific tensions we navigated in our respective projects that focused on Black baby boomers’ educational experiences in the US South. The baby boomer generation encompasses those born between 1946 and 1965, and our disparate studies, on which we draw here, sought to investigate how they remembered their raced, classed, and gendered educational experiences during the 1960s and 1970s. In our research processes, issues around identity arose, and this paper pursues two areas of inquiry related to those issues—trust and relationship building with narrators and race as an all-encompassing metalanguage; we contend this metalanguage superseded narrators’ perceptions of gender’s influence in their lives. It is our wish that our transparent reflexivity aids other scholars in wrestling with considerations similar to those we found ourselves navigating