School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness

by Jarvis R. Givens

A chorus of Black student voices that renders a new story of US education--one where racial barriers and violence are confronted by freedom dreaming and resistance

Black students were forced to live and learn on the Black side of the color line for centuries, through the time of slavery, Emancipation, and the Jim Crow era. And for just as long--even through to today--Black students have been seen as a problem and a seemingly troubled population in America's public imagination.

Through over one hundred firsthand accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Professor Jarvis Givens offers a powerful counter-narrative in School Clothes to challenge such dated and prejudiced storylines. He details the educational lives of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison; political leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis; and Black students whose names are largely unknown but who left their marks nonetheless. Givens blends this multitude of individual voices into a single narrative, a collective memoir, to reveal a through line shared across time and circumstance: a story of African American youth learning to battle the violent condemnation of Black life and imposed miseducation meant to quell their resistance.

School Clothes elevates a legacy in which Black students are more than the sum of their suffering. By peeling back the layers of history, Givens unveils in high relief a distinct student body: Black learners shaped not only by their shared vulnerability but also their triumphs, fortitude, and collective strivings.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Social Justice, History, Race

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2023

About the author

Jarvis R. Givens is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Amy Alyse · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good reminder that the past is not just the past- it’s a lived history

[Chanecka · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Black person who has left the classroom recently, I wasn’t all that impressed but I was affirmed and challenged. I wanted so badly for Givens to give us solutions (although he told us, he had none). I know and Givens states the Black children have known or (used to know) they were apart of a history, a progress but what he doesn’t state is that this context has been lost on so many. He is missing a critical piece of this collective memoir. I would say the last 50 years need to be documented in this book. I would love to see a YA adaption of this because I’m so curious as to how Black youth would respond.

[Tamyka · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is EVERYTHING! This book was everything that I always wanted. A collective memoir tracking the advocacy, persistent and tenacious fight for education for Black Americans across time. He uses primary resources from the archives in multiple forms plus some literary works to paint the picture of their education experiences in their own voices. It’s genius! The scholarly approach alone is a methods course/exemplar. I highly recommend and look forward to reading more of his work.

[Sierra Luce · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. What a book.

Brilliant brilliant brilliant. History of attacks (physical, legal, structural) on Black education and students deftly woven with Black students’, families’, and educators’ resistance. Alive and engaging and a call to action.

One of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read.

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The content of this book is excellent and essential. It is well-researched and fairly comprehensive — for its size — of the subject matter. However, I can't give it a full five stars because it is, somewhat ironically, less effective as a teaching tool than it should be. I am a high school English teacher and I intend to use portions of this book to help students contextualize the periods and experiences of individuals whose lives may inform the norms of characters and settings within texts we may read in class. Unfortunately, this book is written with such a focus on academia that some of its content is less accessible to a younger audience. This focus on intellectualizing is in the language choices and sometimes in the sentence structures as well. While the target audience is educators, the stylistic choices make it difficult for this book to speak directly to those being educated, which is a shame.

[Malia Sample · Rating 5 out of 5]

Givens provides a captivating and crucial broad stroke history on Black education in the US—mainly by highlighting and including several specific Black student and teacher experiences starting in the 19th century—in this book that is necessary for all educators in the country to read and learn but that has so often been neglected in the training of teachers and in the classrooms of Black youth. I recommend for all educators.

“Black students are not without history. Their educational heritage is one of persecution and ongoing resistance. It is rich and vast, and it provides necessary cultural armor for navigating the educational landscapes we inhabit today. Black students have been looking back, documenting their worlds across generations. Their witness deserves an audience.”

[Beverlee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not an accident that I found School Clothes while I was debating buying Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy. I remember clearly that I was searching for something meaningful and connected to my career to read. As a third-year educator, I feel somewhat more confident in my ability to teach and definitely more comfortable with my content but…there’s an awareness of how I define myself as a teacher & how do my students perceive me as their teacher. I ask my students fairly often what do they expect to learn and that question somehow stuck in my conscience-what do I expect of me as a teacher?
Reading School Clothes was affirming in that as a Black woman who teaches my students get an opportunity to see a professional who looks like them, someone who has some degree of shared experience. The book begins with a explanation of what school clothes represented for Givens personally, the clothes that were worn to school were not to be played in and handled roughly; this was representative of presenting one’s best self to the world. Another way to think about school clothes is to consider the outer appearance as a visible manifestation of standards set in one’s home and presented to the community.
A recurring narrative that has come up in education classes I’ve taken tend to focus on academic weaknesses, what African American and Hispanic children supposedly can’t do. School Clothes takes a different approach and focuses on Black students’ experiences in school and how those experiences are the foundation for adulthood. As a teacher, reading about different student reflections inspired some reflection, a reminder to be the kind of teacher I wished I had when I was a K-12 student. Expectations for myself as a teacher are primarily to inspire students to be aware of their immediate community, to be active in improving it, to have a greater understanding and appreciation of history and know that they are greater than any negative buzzword used to describe them.
Something to be understood-

What is fugitive learning (origin in slavery)-learning despite violent white opposition.

Concealment and subterfuge (particularly during Jim Crow)-wear a mask of compliance when there was no other option but transgress this system when left alone.

Understanding of double consciousness and the veil as explained by WEB DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk.

“Black literacy was a mode of expressing freedom and a resource in fighting against white supremacy. It was used to correct the written record , which often condemned Black life. It was a means for Black people to document the world as they knew it- an opportunity to record their counterreadings of the word and the world” (p 120).

Recollection of Black teachers during segregation from an elder- “insisted on excellence and on high standards. You had to strive to be your best. If you didn’t, you were in trouble” (163).

Metaphor of school clothes as a covering- “Black students’ school clothes were more than attire demarcating some imitative performance of dominant society and its sartorial norms. Black students were covered by dreams, and stories, and promises of a world that had yet to exist, all of which could be taken up as resources in the journey toward building the new world they were searching for” (186).

[Alison Freiwald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, gained some new perspective. Recommend.

[Marci · Rating 4 out of 5]

Began this book with a DIB reading group. The discussions have been enriching. The book honest and open. I’ve really enjoyed the experience!

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this if you need a reminder of why you became a teacher.

[kathryn donovan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked his concept of a fugitive pedagogy.