As I was reading Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, I found it helpful to visit this interactive website that PBS has created for students: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories.html.
It's really interesting and offers numerous videos and sound clips of those who suffered segregation in the South. Some of it is also relevant to today. There's a video that talks about the importance of voting, and it connects today's election with voting in the time of the Jim Crow laws. Let me know what you all think!
It's really interesting and offers numerous videos and sound clips of those who suffered segregation in the South. Some of it is also relevant to today. There's a video that talks about the importance of voting, and it connects today's election with voting in the time of the Jim Crow laws. Let me know what you all think!
I’m glad you posted this website, Sunny. I thought it was very illuminating to read about all the different people who lived through Jim Crow segregation. One person who really stood out to me was Lucy Craft Laney. Laney received her degree from Atlanta University and went on to found the first school for black children in Augusta, Georgia, where she eventually acquired over 200 students. Laney, needing to expand the school to accommodate more children, appealed for financial assistance to the Presbyterian Church, where she garnered support from the Women’s Department of the Church. At her newly expanded school, Laney taught several subjects, including French, German, sociology, and physics. She also incorporated job-training skills into her curriculum to prepare her students for the work force.
ReplyDeleteLaney’s determination to provide a quality education for her students ties in perfectly with the discussion we had in class today about the differences between white schools and black schools. Since many black schools had dedicated teachers like Lucy Craft Laney, African American students received a more personalized education from teachers who were truly invested in their students’ success. Although segregation sought to restrict black education, it actually gave blacks the ability to develop their own educational system. The introduction to Chapter 4 in Remembering Jim Crow explains one way that black schools benefited from segregation:
“Although the segregated school symbolized inequality, it also came to represent a degree of space and autonomy for black communities. Subjects like black history, which were ignored by white teachers and administrators who defined the official state school curriculum, were covered in black schools. When the curriculum did not call for African American students to learn trigonometry, their teachers taught it anyway, endeavoring to level the disparities between white and black students.” (154)
This quote surprised me upon first reading it because I had never thought that segregation could have benefited black education; I only thought about the ways that education might have been hindered. On that note, I highly recommend that everyone check out this website that goes along with our Remembering Jim Crow text. It has some great information that helps to support the topics we have been discussing in class.