Bringing Desegregation Home pp 73-98 | Cite as
The Ghost of Whittier Crockett Witherspoon
Abstract
The funeral of Whittier Crockett Witherspoon, the renowned black principal of Marian Anderson segregated school from 1954 to 1968, occurred days before my first visit to Camden County. When Witherspoon passed away, Fannie Mae Lewis, a former black cafeteria worker, noted, “that was the first time a black person was on the cover [of the newspaper] for something good.” Half of the front page of the January 23, 2003, paper was dedicated to an article and photograph of his funeral. I realized at that moment that I had missed meeting one of the most important players in Camden’s struggle toward school integration. But I soon found out that his ghost—what psychologist Mary Gergen calls a “social ghost”—entered my conversations in Camden everywhere.1 He was, and still is, a mythic figure for both whites and blacks.
Keywords
Black Community Black Child Student Affair White Community Black SchoolPreview
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Notes
- 1.In many of this book’s narratives, Witherspoon appears as someone that substantially influenced the lives and memories of people, supporting Gergen’s insight about social ghosts that “In all our present relationships, we carry the essences of the past.” Mary Gergen, Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology: Narrative, Gender, and Performance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001): 12.Google Scholar
- 5.Diana Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 16.Out-of-state tuition grant programs covered tuition but not travel or living expenses. See Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 149.Google Scholar
- 20.Sherick Hughes, “Theorizing Oppressed Family Pedagogy: Critical Lessons from a Rural Black Family in the Post-Brown South,” Educational Foundations (Jersey City, NJ: New Jersey City University, American Education Studies Association,2005): 65.Google Scholar