Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville (review)

Reading, Writing, and Segregation examines African American education in Nashville, Tennessee, from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s. While participating in an interviewing project as a graduate student, Nashville native Sonya Ramsey became fascinated with African American teachers’ stories. Eventually, she returned to her hometown intending to collect interviews with African American teachers. Fifty-one interviews and more than a century’s worth of data later, the story of Nashville’s desegregation process began to take shape. Told from the perspectives of African American female educators, this study illustrates intersections of class, race, and gender in one southern city and considers how these intersections changed over time.

Glenda Gilmore, history professor at Yale University whose review of Reading, Writing, and Segregation is featured on the book jacket, asserts the book’s “great strength is its focus on black women teachers themselves . . . illuminating the culture of teaching and civic activism that these women forged over a century. An important addition to the controversy about [black teachers’ contributions to the] civil rights movement . . . this book is one of the few that tells us what it was actually like in segregated black schools.” An introduction by the author provides readers with both a brief overview of the project and a detailed description of each chapter. The remainder of the book is divided into four chapters: “By Precept and Example: Schools, Community, and Professional Teachers from 1867 through the 1930s”; “The Living Symbols of Democracy: World War II and the Cold War”; “We Are Ready Whenever They Are: Brown and the Civil Rights Movement”; and “The Only Way We Fought Back Was to Do a Good Job: Public School Integration”; and a Conclusion.

Using desegregation as a lens, Ramsey examines the connections between southern urban educators and U.S. history. The resulting text explores how female African American teachers constructed their identities as middle-class citizens, considers how the processes of desegregation and integration changed these teachers’ careers, and analyzes linkages among class, race, and gender in a segregated community.

Scholars who study public school history or African American education will find the book’s contents historically accurate and the author’s style readable. University instructors who teach educational foundations courses, such as History of American Education or Comparative Education, will appreciate having another selection for their recommended reading list. University instructors who teach Women’s Studies, as well as feminist scholars, may find the topic too limited for course adoption but still may want to add Reading, Writing, and Segregation to their professional libraries.

The book would benefit from a chapter or appendix describing Ramsey’s research methodology and theoretical perspectives. While readers who peruse the book’s cover learn Ramsey considers oral history one of her academic specialties, the phrase “oral history” does not appear in the text at all. The author chose to excerpt fewer than ten of the 51 collected interviews and devotes the bulk of her narrative to analyses and syntheses of relevant historical documents. In short, although Ramsey’s motivation for studying Nashville’s desegregation process began with richly detailed stories about female African American teachers’ experiences during the era of segregation, the resulting text reads more like a thoughtful local history than an oral history treatise.

As a teacher educator and oral historian too young to recall school segregation, I picked up Reading, Writing, and Segregation hoping to learn about that time from African American teachers’ firsthand accounts. Instead, I received a refresher course in school law. Ramsey clearly spent a great deal of time and effort researching historical documents and local archives. It is unfortunate the teachers whose stories served as inspiration for Reading, Writing, and Segregation receive so little attention in the resulting text.