Using Counterstories and Reflective Writing Assignments to Promote Critical Race Consciousness in an Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Course

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron on a Montgomery bus. Her act of resistance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ushered in the mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement. Although Parks occupies a prominent place in United States history, she was not the first to challenge racial segregation. Elizabeth Jennings was an African American schoolteacher who was ejected from a streetcar in New York City in 1854. Her lawyer, future President Chester A. Arthur, sued the streetcar company and won. Jennings' and Parks' stories serve as examples of counterstories that can raise critical race consciousness to matters of racial inequity in historical narratives and school curricula. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to examine whether students in an undergraduate teacher preparation course at a major university in a metropolitan region of the Southeast demonstrated critical race consciousness with reflective writing assignments by analyzing the counterstories of Elizabeth Jennings and Rosa Parks.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Racial Basis for Interstate Highways and Urban Renewal

This article analyzes how Interstate Highways were used in Montgomery, Alabama, to maintain racial hierarchies during the civil rights movement, how the routing of Interstate Highways through Montgomery changed over time, and the connections between Interstate Highway routing and the racially volatile political environment after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To address these issues, the article analyzes the planning of the Interstate Highways and the Urban Renewal areas in the city. The article concludes that highway engineering in Montgomery took a more racially motivated turn after the Bus Boycott with the rise of a racially charged political environment in 1959.

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

Our Aims Are High and Our Determinations Deep

This chapter discusses the history of Alabama State University during the crucial period between the New Negro Era and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. It was during this period that Montgomery, Alabama became a launching point for one of the most important protests in American history – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet few understand the crucial role that Alabama State University played in sowing the seeds of that movement by training the leadership that helped to carry it out, and generating a spirit of resistance long before the boycotts took place. It was the members of the Women’s Political Council, a group of educators teaching at ASU, that designed the ideas for a massive boycott, and it was their leadership on campus, alongside the college president Harper Councill Trenholm, that transformed that campus into one of the most militant centers for student activism in the deep south. The campus soon came under the watchful eye of Jim Crow legislatures who controlled the purse strings and held the keys to the institution, but not before the communitas of ASU summoned the vision and the will to carry out their own sit-in protests in downtown Montgomery.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

Using Counterstories and Reflective Writing Assignments to Promote Critical Race Consciousness in an Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Course

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron on a Montgomery bus. Her act of resistance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ushered in the mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement. Although Parks occupies a prominent place in United States history, she was not the first to challenge racial segregation. Elizabeth Jennings was an African American schoolteacher who was ejected from a streetcar in New York City in 1854. Her lawyer, future President Chester A. Arthur, sued the streetcar company and won. Jennings' and Parks' stories serve as examples of counterstories that can raise critical race consciousness to matters of racial inequity in historical narratives and school curricula. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to examine whether students in an undergraduate teacher preparation course at a major university in a metropolitan region of the Southeast demonstrated critical race consciousness with reflective writing assignments by analyzing the counterstories of Elizabeth Jennings and Rosa Parks.

Critical Models: Antigone, Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin

Chapter 6 treats the figures of Antigone, Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin as models for the contestation of constitutive exclusion. First, Antigone’s constitutive exclusion from Thebes excludes her from the terms of intelligible political agency. When she challenges that exclusion, her contestation is politically unintelligible. While the radical alternative Antigone represents leads to her death in the play, that challenge survives in the multiple performances and adaptations of the play. Second, the choice to organize the Montgomery bus boycott around Parks rather than Colvin reveals the multiplicity of constitutive exclusion, since Parks could play some axes of her identity off others in her contestation in ways Colvin could not. The effect of this choice reinscribes the political unintelligibility of Colvin and reifies Parks as apolitical. While the terms of political agency are defined through the exclusion of Colvin, the radical potential she represents remains buried within those terms.