Abstract
Charlie Hughes was one of the few black farmers in Camden County who still owned their family land.1 Until Hughes’ death in his late eighties, he continued to farm five acres. With a cell phone on his belt, he drove his tractor through the fields of watermelon, potatoes, onions, and green beans—which he harvested by hand, sold at the local farmers’ market, and bartered for basic goods and services.
The storyteller joins the ranks of teachers and sages. He has counsel—not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage.
—Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a discussion of deficit-storytelling, see Daniel G. Solorzano and Tara J. Yosso, “A Critical Race Counterstory of Race, Racism, and Affirmative Action,” Equity & Excellence in Education 35 (2002): 155–68.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 123–63.
James Leloudis, Schooling the South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996): 19–20.
Dr. Martin Luther King as quoted in James M. Washington, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991): 87.
This is the case not only of blacks and whites in the United States but also in a number of colonized nations. By World War II the connection between segregation and the oppression of people around the world had been widely recognized. For quotation, see Mark McPhail, in Rob Anderson, Leslie. A. Baxter, and Kenneth. N. Cissna (eds), Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004): 221.
Robert I. Rotberg, “The Interdisciplinary Study of Political History,” in Politics and Political Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 14.
David Douglas, Reading, Writing, & Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995): 9.
Robert D.W. Connor and Clarence Poe, The Life and Speeches of Charles Brantley Aycock (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Co, 1912): 247–51.
One of the many ways the black community formed pockets of resistance and support was through social, fraternal, and service organizations such as the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Eastern Star, and the Sons of Hamm [Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2002): 97].
See James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 69.
Hughes’ narrative refigures debates over home schooling. Historically some parents have expressed dissatisfaction with graded education, but more often as it is implicated in secularizing children (and not so much training them to be good capitalists). See Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2001).
Barbara Shircliffe, “‘We Got the Best of that World’: A Case Study of Nostalgia in Oral History of School Segregation,” Oral History Review, 2 (2001): 59–84.
Henry Giroux, Border Crossing: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992): 2.
This way of thinking about whiteness comes from a talk given by Dr. Aimee Carrillo Rowe at the National Communication Association Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, November 2004. See also Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
Dreama Moon, “White Enculturation and Bourgeois Identity,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Thomas Nakayama and Judith Martin (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage, 1999): 177–97
See, e.g., Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: W.W. Norton 1995)
Ruben Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997)
Theresa McCarty, A Place to be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 2002)
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996).
Copyright information
© 2009 Kate Willink
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Willink, K. (2009). “Learn ’em to Work”. In: Bringing Desegregation Home. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100572_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100572_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37662-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10057-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)