ERIC Number: EJ1378219
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Feb
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0018-2680
EISSN: EISSN-1748-5959
Waco's First Black School Board Trustees: Navigating Institutional White Supremacy in 1970s Texas
History of Education Quarterly, v63 n1 p59-83 Feb 2023
Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison and Gilbert used distinctly different political strategies to navigate the racially hostile school board environment, but ultimately, as this article demonstrates, neither strategy enabled them to overcome white supremacy in Waco. This seemingly obvious point reveals a notable yet underemphasized drawback of school desegregation: that it failed to upend structural racial injustice. The case of Harrison and Gilbert illustrates that this limitation was reflected in the token number of Black trustees on the boards of desegregated schools and the concerted white resistance they met in working to spur meaningful racial change.
Descriptors: Boards of Education, Trustees, African Americans, Politics of Education, Governance, School Desegregation, Racial Identification, Citizenship, Whites, Racism, Educational History, Tokenism
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Texas
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A