Adam Fairclough is Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History and Culture at Leiden University.
Adam Fairclough has written a masterful book, full of insight,
complexity and nuance. Always sensitive to the ambiguities black
teachers faced, he nevertheless celebrates their strength and
accomplishment in making possible the ongoing struggle of black
Americans for racial and educational equality.
*William H. Chafe, author of Private Lives/Public Consequences:
Personality and Politics in Modern America*
In this hugely impressive study, Adam Fairclough shows how black
teachers coped with the basic conundrum facing them in the
segregated South: how to advance within a system designed by white
people to stop them from advancing. Fairclough's clear-eyed account
chronicles heroic achievements and countless small victories in the
face of overwhelming odds.
*Tony Badger, Cambridge University*
Adam Fairclough is in a class of his own when it comes to
elucidating the history of the segregated South – this is a
valuable addition to that historiography.
*Julian Bond, Chairman, NAACP Board of Directors*
Fairclough chronicles the circumstances in which Southern black
educators worked from emancipation to the 1970s. He devotes most of
the book to the burdens of white patronage, the influence of
religion and politics on acquiring teaching jobs, and the struggles
for training and wages. The most compelling portions are the brief
biographies of teachers about whom many readers have probably never
heard, such as Robert Harris and Sarah Webb. The dilemmas facing
teachers and students in African American communities when schools
became integrated are addressed as well. Although Brown v. Board of
Education raised educational standards for African Americans, it
also resulted in the closing of schools in their communities and
the loss of teaching jobs. Some of Fairclough's topics have been
addressed in James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the
South, 1860-1935 and Heather Andrea Williams's Self-Taught: African
American Education in Slavery and Freedom, but his enlightening
chapters on the training of black teachers and their struggles for
equality endorse the purchase of this book for academic and public
libraries with education collections.
*Library Journal*
You know those stories some of our folks like to tell about the
days they had to walk for miles to school on dirt roads in
scorching heat and biblical rain? They're true. Read A Class of
Their Own, an inspiring account of Black teachers' relentless
struggle to provide a quality education for our people. Civil
rights historian Adam Fairclough charts the impressive strides
teachers made in the segregated South during a 100-year period,
beginning just after the end of the Civil War in 1865. In one-room
schoolhouses, without running water or plumbing, and at red-brick
all-Black land grant universities and other halls of higher
learning, gifted Black teachers encouraged students to become
achievers. Although these devoted educators seemed unflappable to
their students, Fairclough reveals the enormous challenges they
faced from White school boards, whose members often discouraged
their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
*Essence*
Although few histories devote much attention to black teachers in
the South between 1865 and 1965, these men and women were in many
ways the backbone of the black middle class. The educational
infrastructure that they painstakingly erected did a great deal to
discredit Jim Crow, and the accomplishments of these unheralded
educators were just as dramatic and important as those of better
known heroes of the civil rights movement. Adam Fairclough, a
British historian who has written widely about that movement, tells
this story very well. A Class of Their Own is a judicious
exploration of a largely unstudied subject; it belongs on any
well-stocked shelf of scholarly works on the Jim Crow
South...Fairclough makes clear that the nostalgia of many African
Americans since the 1960s for the Good Old Days of all-black
schools is rose-colored. Only through desegregation could black
children hope to attend decently funded public schools in the
South. And yet A Class of Their Own demonstrates that the arduous
struggles of black teachers 'made it difficult, nay impossible, for
whites to turn racial segregation into a full-fledged caste
system.'
*Washington Post Book World*
A Class of Their Own is scholarly history at its very best: A
richly textured and nuanced book, it tells an important American
story that should not be forgotten.
*Wilson Quarterly*
In A Class of Their Own, Adam Fairclough--a professor at the
University of Leiden and one of the most diligent and careful
historians of civil rights--explores the often overlooked
complexities of black Southerners, emphasizing teachers and
education leaders.
*The Nation*
[A] magisterial work of research.
*River Falls Journal*
Although standard accounts treat Brown as an unambiguous triumph
for African American, many Southern blacks did not see it that way.
"We felt betrayed," said the principal of a black high school in
South Carolina. W. E. B. Du Bois, the major black figure among the
founders of the NAACP, and the novelist Zora Neale Hurston
denounced the decision. Hurston regarded the ruling as "insulting
rather than honoring" her race, because it assumed that black
children could not learn without the uplifting presence of white
classmates...Adam Fairclough's book is a salutary reminder of what
de jure segregation was really like, and a clear demonstration that
the educational opportunities open to African American children
have expanded dramatically since Brown.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Students and scholars who have an interest in southern history or
African American history have much to learn from Fairclough’s
study. Famous villains like James K. Vardaman and Ben Tillman
appear on these pages along with the names of hardworking,
dedicated teachers whose names are not well-known. Fairclough never
sugarcoats black teachers. Some were snobs, and others spied on
NAACP meetings for white superintendents in order to enhance their
own salaries or to gain more secure positions. Fairclough also
demonstrates the equality gap between black and white public
schools and carefully explains the mean-spirited racial politics
that characterized the South before the civil rights movement. This
is one of the finest books this reviewer has read in many
years.
*Virginia Magazine of History and Biography*
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