S10E16 – Local Stories of Desegregation: Charlotte

S10E16 - Local Stories of Desegregation: Charlotte with Dr. James Ford

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is Local Stories of Desegregation: Charlotte, with Dr. James Ford.

Dr. Val: Okay. I'm very, very excited because we are in my city for this local story.

Andrew: Yeah, a local deep dive. We did Denver, where I am, and now we're gonna do Charlotte. And really go deep on the history of desegregation attempts. Charlotte is an important place, much like Denver, you know, nationally in the conversation about desegregation. Charlotte Mecklenburg School District, uh, the Swann case from the Supreme Court. We're gonna learn about all of that. And we're joined by a wonderful guest, Dr. James Ford, to talk about it.

Dr. Val: That's right. And, you know, I am a new Charlottian, and so I've always been nervous because I'm born and raised in Florida, right? But I'm very proud to call this, the city and the state my home now, and I'm very glad that we have my good friend Dr. James Ford on here to talk about Charlotte with us today.

Andrew: Yes. Another one of your wonderful finds for a guest for the podcast. How did you meet Dr. Ford?

Dr. Val: So originally our paths crossed, via social media. We were both just educators working in the space trying to figure out how to do, racial justice and educational justice work. And so when we were searching for our new home, outside of the state of Florida, James was part of our recruiting visit and he sealed the deal. It’s been nice and, and certainly a welcoming place for my family. So just very thankful to him and his family for doing that for us.

Andrew: Yeah! In addition to being a friend of yours, also brings a wealth of expertise. He's a historian, he's a teacher. He was teacher of the year. He’s been on the state school board. He's…

Dr. Val: Woo. Woo.

Andrew: …been really deeply connected to the Charlotte scene, even though he is also, uh, you know, not as new as you, but relatively new. Did not grow up in Charlotte, but came there and, and really got to know the history of the place.

Dr. Val: That's right. And, because of his, his modeling, his example and his scholarship as a historian, you know, I've learned a lot about the city and many players involved in the desegregation of Charlotte schools and the ongoing work that is happening around racial justice and education.

Andrew: Yeah, you recently met one of those, one of those key figures right?

Dr. Val: That's right. So I was at a very special event and I had a chance to meet Mrs. Dorothy Counts. So in 1957, Dorothy Counts and three other Black students became the first to attend the previously all White high school Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. And so she's a big deal. But her story is similar to ones that you hear, right. Wasn't welcomed. There was an angry mob, there were slurs you know, they wanted her out. They did not want her to be a part of their school community. And knowing that, the people who are the first ones to have desegregated their schools, they're still here. They're still among us. Right. And, and recognizing that we have so much to learn from their experiences, and how we wanna continue the work and make them proud of the sacrifices they made. Right? Because I'm telling you, Andrew, if I was getting… if there were obscenities and mobs trying to go to school, I'm expecting everyone behind me to show up.

Andrew: Yep.

Dr. Val: For the sacrifice I made. Okay?

Andrew: For sure. Yeah, Dorothy Counts, another sort of legendary figure. Much like Christie Keyes Romero, someone who was deeply involved and who's here with us, who we can still learn from and still draw inspiration from.

Much like going deep on Denver, I hope that going deep on Charlotte and kind of the specific people and players and ways that things played out in Charlotte, that people can see ties to their own cities. I mean, obviously listeners in Charlotte will feel a real sense of history and connection to these stories, but I think it's relevant to the whole country, because so many of these stories played out in similar ways. If folks are interested in more of the local story in Charlotte, there's a great timeline, recently put out by the Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity, I found fascinating, a great insight into the story in Charlotte and also in North Carolina as a whole. So, we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Dr. Val: Yeah. I think you and I both deeply value historians, generally because we just, we see the importance of knowing our history and, both knowing like the struggles we've overcome and the steps that people have taken together…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: …to make the world a better place. And so definitely check that out.

Andrew: Yeah. And if you're looking for other people in your local community to take those next steps with, we have local chapters and we've never really mentioned it on the podcast before, but you know, part of the Integrated schools work involves local chapters. So we have over 30 local chapters now in cities around the country. So, if you want to find other people who are interested in talking about local stories and going deep, head on over to the website, integratedschools.org and click on the chapters and networks page and you can find out if there's somebody near you, who's interested in talking about this stuff. And if not, maybe you want to be the network or chapter leader in your city.

Dr. Val: That's right. I can't believe, I feel like that's the first time we've mentioned it together on this podcast.

Andrew: There is more going on in Integrated Schools than folks may know. So head on to the website, check that out. And let's take a listen to Dr. Ford.

Dr. Val: I'm looking forward to it. Let's go.

Andrew: Alright.

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Dr. James E Ford: I'm James E. Ford, The Executive Director of the Center for Racial Equity and Education. I'm an educator by heart. A former K-12, high school history teacher. A former North Carolina Teacher of the Year. Former state board of education member. Most importantly, I'm a, um, husband and a father to four wonderful kids. So, glad to be here.

Andrew: One who just committed to, uh, to a college, which is very exciting.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. Yes. My oldest daughter, graduating senior, going to North Carolina Central University. So, um, at this point it's ‘Go eagles’ 'cause they're gonna be getting my money.

Dr. Val: That's right. That's right. We're in full support of that. Uh, thank you.

Andrew: So why, why do you care? How'd you, how'd you come to be a lifelong educator? How'd you come to care about education?

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. First one. Why do I care? It's personal. It's personal. It was my experience. I know what it is to be on the receiving end of inequity. Have known what it is to be in education environments where the people who are given charge over delivering that are adversarial to you. Uh, I know how it is to feel like an outsider, like a guest in somebody else's home. And that's an experience that I, you know, I'm not certain I really knew what to do with.

So I didn't set out to be an educator. I just knew that whatever I was feeling as a young person, you know, participating in desegregation efforts in the early ‘80’s in Rockford, Illinois, whatever I felt when I got bussed across town and went into those schools, and I knew that the majority, not all of them, the adults didn't have my best interest at heart, that the kids were saying and doing things to insult me, and that nobody was being held accountable, that I never wanted to feel that again. Um, so I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to dismantle that thing, that, you know, we understand as systemic racism. I found myself becoming a teacher because I knew the impact that it had on me, the negative shaping of my educational and academic identity. And I was initially just doing volunteer work with young people in outta school time space.

Dr. Val: Mm-Hmm.

Dr. James E Ford: Um, doing tutoring and stuff like that. Found myself being a director of a teen center, doing truancy intervention, all working with young people and it was the type of kids that everybody writes off and says, there's no hope for these kids. And when I express interest in like, you know, I wish I had more time with them, you know, like just cool outta school time, four to nine, but I want to teach them about stuff. Like I want to be in charge. And I was like, yo, you describing teaching? That's it must must be what you're, you know what, who you really are.

And when somebody, a mentor told me, okay, that's great but don't go into secondary ed because it's too late. Go get ‘em early in the early education. I was like, you should have never told me that. 'Cause I'm the type of person I'm gonna be like, now I'm gonna do it. Just 'cause you said not to. So, went back, got my master's of arts and teaching, started teaching as a certified teacher at 29 years old. So it was late.

Dr. Val: Oh, you were late in life. I mean, not really.

Andrew: Oh, that 29 is young. Don't get that for sure. It's still very, very young. [everyone laughs]

Dr. James E Ford: Right, right. But yeah, so that's important. It was discursive, that's what got me here. But the charge and the sense of mission to dismantle racism, this was just the selected field to do that. It took me a while to get there, though.

Andrew: Mmmm, who poured that into you? What in your background was like, okay, this is a problem that needs to be solved, and I'm the one to be part of solving it.

Dr. James E Ford: My parents man, did a, I gotta give them a lot of credit. They did a phenomenal job at making us really racially literate very early on. They didn't leave it to chance for us to try to navigate and figure out why we were being mistreated. They explained it in plain terms and they themselves are pretty, pretty cultured folk. You know, like they could explain with nuance, how systems and structures work. They anchored us in our history. My, you know, my dad always kind of gave us a Pan-African lens so we understood, not just racism in the US American context, but globally, right. We have always kind of, without saying, so considered ourselves part of the African diaspora.

So it was nothing for us to understand global conflicts and, you know that Andre 3000, picture when he did a concert, he's like, why do all across the globe people who are darker suffer most why? Right? Like, my parents were always interrogating that question and they taught us how to defend ourselves. You know, my mother taught us how to engage intellectually. How to spar, and how to advocate for yourself when nobody else would. And so I, I want to say that there's some trauma that goes along with that because it makes you anxious and you're always, you know, you talk about fight, flight or freeze, you're always ready to fight.

But it, it, it, what it did teach us how to do what's, like, you're not just gonna trample on us, like we're going, we're gonna engage and we're going to assert ourselves and, uh, we will defend ourselves against, the scourge of racism whenever it manifests itself. And I don't care who the perpetrator is, they're an adult. You know what I mean? We were taught to get in there. And so that scrappiness, I know is just part of my upbringing and, you know, my siblings are, are the same way.

Dr. Val: So you found yourself here in Charlotte, and part of the reason why we are excited to talk to you about it today is because in addition to being a phenomenal educator and leader, you're a historian.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And you, and you really dug into Charlotte's history around desegregation and segregation, especially in education. Tell us how you got interested in that specifically.

Dr. James E Ford: That's a great question. Nobody ever asked me that. Uh, so as you, as I mentioned, I'm from Illinois. I started teaching in Illinois and got up and moved to Charlotte in 2010. But I taught in East Charlotte, at Garinger High School, was like the most diverse, just beautiful rainbow of Black and Brown kids you've ever seen. But it was highly segregated and I knew that. And, you know, also students experiencing poverty and in what you realize is when the school opened, it wasn't always like that, right? It mirrored what was happening to the east side of Charlotte.

You know, initially it was an all White school, you know, the opening, the mid sixties. And so just being fascinated with the city, I think I started to want to know more about how Charlotte came to be Charlotte, and then, you know, Charlotte holds itself out as kind of the capital of the New South too, right? Like it's a new South city, and then you start to realize that the resegregation that I was experiencing at Garinger flew in the face of Charlotte's history as kind of being the national example of how to properly desegregate, right?

I had no concept of that. At the time, I was teacher of the year, student reassignment was being deliberated, and there were books out, articles out, people were advocating and they were retelling the story of how Charlotte, once upon a time, got it right. They showed the rest of the nation how to desegregate. And when I heard that, I was like, really? You know, I didn't realize that the superintendent who oversaw that was Garinger, right? That was the namesake of my school. So I was like, oh, interesting.

So in trying to advocate for more diverse schools and, you know, uh, disrupting pockets of poverty, I kept getting bits and pieces of the Charlotte history and I just found it more and more fascinating. And there was a time, I gotta be honest, when I wrote a op-Ed about the need to break up concentrations of poverty and to return to our history of desegregation and the Swann case, which I'm sure we'll talk about Swann vs CMS, and I got pushback from some Black folks in the community. And I was devastated because I was like, whoa, I'm out here thinking that I'm, you know, advocating for something that I know I've experienced has benefited my life. And they were like, yeah man, we don't really want all that man. We just want, we just want our schools to be adequate. And it threw me for a loop. And for the first time I had to sit back and be like, I think I should probably do more listening and figure out what's the history here before I get out and start publicly declaring that this is what's best for kids of color 'cause there's actually more nuance there, right?

So when I started looking at that, I said, let me really dig into local Charlotte history. And for my dissertation I chose to focus on a historical case study of the first Black public high school in Charlotte called Second Ward High School in the area of Charlotte that had the highest concentration of African descendant people in any enclave in the state, known as Second Ward Charlotte. This place, like so many other Black towns and Black cities all throughout the south, was its own thing, its own economy, its own environment. And I really dug into that. And I was like, this is unsung and deserves to be investigated more. And that's kind of what I think really drew me to the Charlotte history 'cause it's an amazing city. It's been good to me, but it's not been good to everybody. And the story's been kind of one sided all about how we navigated and did desegregation right. And there's, there's an underbelly to that that doesn't often get heard. And so that I made, I made my business to try, to try to unearth that.

Dr. Val: Nice.

Andrew: Yeah. Let, let's unearth that because I do think, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the Swann case there is, there is a way in which it does sort of get held up as an example of what went right. Tell us the story of the Swann case and the impact that that had on Charlotte and the good things that maybe came out of that, but then also, where it missed the boat.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. So the thing about Charlotte is that much like many cities throughout the south, after the Supreme Court case, right? Brown one and Brown two, they had about a 10 year period where states really didn't do anything, right? So that's why true desegregation didn't really happen until you had localized court cases that forced the hand, right? Or the enforcement of like Civil Rights Act, you know, withholding of funds. It kind of forced districts to do anything.

Charlotte was no different in that regard. They persisted in, you know, participating in de facto segregation. Everybody knows about Dorothy Counts’ token integration efforts at Harding high school in ‘57, and how she got chased up out of there after being spat on and jeered. So about ‘64, ‘65, you know, Darius Swann, who was a missionary in the Presbyterian church, had just returned from being over in India and had been experiencing, you know, a much more cosmopolitan experience. You know, he wasn't seeing the sort of Jim Crow, state mandated and legislated segregation that was existing here. So he came back with a much more global orientation. And so when moving back to Charlotte, you know, he wanted his child to attend the local elementary school, which just so happened to be a majority White elementary school.

And instead, you know, the powers that be said, essentially, ‘Yeah, no, your kid can't go here. We'll assign him to this majority Black school.’ And the Swanns talk about how, you know, they just weren't willing to accept it. They had seen better, they had seen a different side of life and they knew that a better way was possible. So they decided along with other families to engage in litigation, right, to fight that because again, everybody was defying Brown to begin with. And so I think it was high time to start enacting some sort of justice when it came to desegregation. And so that case was tried and heard, and initially it lost and it was appealed in the Fourth Circuit Court, and it was tried by, um, a young lawyer who went to North Carolina Central, uh, who was a luminary in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, named Julius Chambers.

Dr. Val: Ah!

Dr. James E Ford: Also a brother of Alpha Phi Fraternity Incorporated, but that's beside the point. [everyone laughs] That's beside, you know, but, um, much of the surprise of many, he litigated and tried that case in such a way that he really tried to show numerically how this was disadvantaging students of color, this scourge of segregation, and ended up persuading a relatively conservative judge for that time to overturn this right? And to say, you know what? This is wrong. This is not in, keeping with the spirit of the law. And, these schools need to desegregate and you have to understand that this was a surprise to folk. Right. And this is like in ‘69, right? I think most folk had just assumed that, you know, we, we've been able to drag our feet and engage in all sorts of stall tactics.

Andrew: I mean it's 15 years after the Supreme Court says, you know, in theory, separate is inherently unequal. So it's been 15 full years. So why would people think it's not gonna change now? It's been 15 years. Where, like, why, why would anything change?

Dr. James E Ford: Absolutely. I mean, I think folk had gotten comfortable. So when he does hand this down, Charlotte kind of panics. And the story of Second Ward is related because in ‘69 when this decision happens, not long after that, Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board closes all the Black schools. Beginning with Second Ward, which was again, most communities have a really luminary Black school as this part of that community. To close Second Ward to do that, right, with the stellar level of education that was being offered in the face of segregation. To do that blatantly was the ultimate disrespect. And it would happen purely because they really didn't want White students from Irish Park, have to go to Second Ward.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. James E Ford: So that's significant. The Swann case ends up being appealed and going to the Supreme Court where it's upheld, and furthermore, the remedy of busing is introduced as a way to desegregate. Right. So that's kind of the Swann legacy. Swann vs CMS is that, you know, busing becomes introduced as an instrument of desegregation, which works for a while, right? It becomes the model and the mode. It's literally what I experienced in the late eighties, right? So as I was talking about being bused in Illinois, being bused from my side of town to the other side of town, that's the legacy of Swann, right?

So I grew up as a result of the Swann case, experiencing, you know, being bused across town because of this case. So for about a 12 year period, Charlotte is the picture of a desegregated school system. And you know, even after other school systems start going back to more neighborhood school models, which they did in the late nineties. These years have produced such a cosmopolitan mixed group of graduates who had experienced or tasted desegregation. And I tend to distinguish desegregation from integration, right? And integration is a state of harmony, right? Desegregation is more numerical. But you know, Charlotte used to defend desegregation.

There's a story about Ronald Reagan coming down in the mid ‘80’s and talking about how, you know, you know how people do that, talk about families don't want their kids being bused across town. And by this time, Charlotte is experiencing a boom economically. Harvey Gantt is mayor, Hugh McColl, who is the father, Bank of America, they're working together to build uptown, right? It's gaining steam. It gets the Charlotte Hornets, right? So now it's becoming a proper city. And in large part, Hugh McColl will say this, it's because businesses knew that they could come, they could headquarter in Charlotte 'cause they wouldn't have to deal with all the overt racism and some of the places that were more resistant. And he credits the Swann case and desegregation for doing that.

So there's a connection between the economic liability of Charlotte and school desegregation in ways that folks don't necessarily see also, right? So the local chamber of Commerce was also behind championing this. So when Ronald Reagan comes, he makes his speech and he tries to decry busing. The business community's like, uh, nah, like, we like our schools. And Reagan is beloved, right? But in that era, Charlotte kind of stood 10 toes down and said, nah. Like, you know, we, we like our schools, and we appreciate what we built here.

By the late nineties, however, after experiencing this influx of migrants from the Northeast and the Midwest, the composition of people in Charlotte no longer are the folks who lived through this desegregation. And they don't have the same affinity for, you know, this, this history. Okay? So what they're coming down saying is, yeah, that's not what I moved down here for. I came down here for my company and I don't care about, you know, all you all's legacy of desegregation. I don't want my kids going to school with those people. And so it was a case, Capacchione vs CMS in ‘97. That ends up being the case. It's a father from the Northeast who moves down and claims that his child was discriminated against because he is White and couldn't go to a particular school. That leads to the eventual demise of the heyday of desegregation in Charlotte that gets overturned. Eventually they go back to more neighborhood school models, and then Charlotte Mecklenburg schools start to resegregate and we end up where we are now.

Andrew: Can you just tell us a little bit about what schools look like now in, you know, so we had kind of the Swann case, ‘71, we had the, the end of efforts in the 90’s and then the resegregation of the district. How segregated is the district today?

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. The school district is very segregated. But in large part because you have a mass exodus of White students to charters, private schools, suburban schools. It's about 75% students of color. Of that Black students make up about half of the student population. The majority of schools are schools that are experiencing high levels of poverty, not all of them. Where poverty does exist, it exists pretty intensely. It's a growing district. Some schools are overcrowded, need to be built, and they're building new schools. But, it is not changing the dire needs that are concentrated.

What's happening is what we refer to as double segregation, right? Gary Orfield is the first time I ever heard somebody talk about that. So it's not just racial segregation, but socioeconomic segregation. A lot of what are quote unquote neighborhood schools, have the most inexperienced teachers in those buildings. You know, the same stuff that you can expect to happen. And the things that occur in community spill over into the schoolhouse.

Dr. Val: I've shared this with Andrew before, like, I live in a super diverse neighborhood, but you could not tell it by the, by my kids' schools. I'm like, where are the White kids? Where do they go? Because you would never… not public school.

Dr. James E Ford: That's the thing, you know, is they've opted out 'cause they can, and there's a stigma around traditional public schools

Andrew: I think there's also, the Urban Institute, I think it's like 2020 data, but they have this segregation contribution index. Looking at how much does any individual school contribute to the segregation of the district? So, all of the wealthy kids and all of the White kids tend to be clustered in a small handful of schools. And so, so even though you could have schools that, though across the board were 25% White kids, but we don't see that in, in any, you know, large city where you have these global majority school districts, you end up with small pockets where most of the segregation comes from and it's from White people hoarding, you know, resources and all congregating in one, one or two handful of schools.

Dr. James E Ford: That's right. And come on. Global majority school districts. Alright Andrew. I see you. [Val laughs]

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. James E Ford: I see you. I see you talk and speak facts. Right. We gotta contextualize it. But you're right. And in our case, like Valentine, my sister used to teach there and I mean, wildly affluent and not that there are not kids experiencing poverty there. There are, but it's what you're, it's what you described.

Andrew: And I'm guessing the old days of the business community saying ‘we really value our desegregated schools,’ has also ended.

Dr. Val: Mm-Hmm.

Dr. James E Ford: Charlotte's open for business. It is a banking town. B of A is headquartered here. Second used to be Wacovia. Now it's Wells Fargo, second largest. You got Ally, you got, Truist used to be BB&T, all are here. And so it's open for business, but there's not this induction into the culture, into the history of the community that there really should be. It's a tragic story.

Dr. Val: It is! No one onboarded them about what Charlotte was about.

Dr. James E Ford: No they didn't. And that's the knock And so it's sad.

Dr. Val: Oh.

Andrew: I mean, that's why, yeah, tell, telling the story. I mean, it's part of why we're doing this series on, you know, going, kind of going deep on local stories because it's a similar story in so many places. The local details change, but the same sort of arc plays out very similarly. In Denver, we talked about the Keyes case and the timeline is pretty similar. Keyes was decided in ‘73, court ordered desegregation was terminated in ‘95. And you know, people show up now and there's just like no understanding of that history. What does having that kind of historical context that you were drawn to trying to understand better, trying to make sense out of… How does that inform how you think about the schools today in Charlotte?

Dr. James E Ford: You know, I'm a history teacher, right? Like, so I feel like you can't divorce situations from the historical context no more than you can like tear pages out of a book, right? So it just helps to situate you and socially locate you. Where am I? How did I get here? Why are things the way that they are? But I also think it makes you feel like you're part of something bigger.

Andrew: Mmmm.

Dr. James E Ford: Here I'm teaching at Geringer. Kind of wondering, like, alright, so I don't really know why the school is composed the way it is, but what's the story here? Why are there so many Black and Brown kids? Why in the five years that I taught at Geringer, can I count probably on two hands how many White kids I've had? Right? And yet one of the most wealthy enclaves in the city, country club is a mile down the road.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. James E Ford: Right? Like what's, what's the, what's the story there? So for me it was about story. I need to know the story of this place. And I love the term, the values onboarding, right? I feel like within any culture, right? It should be a right to passage or anything…

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. James E Ford: …you know, you gotta anchor folks in something. And I think Charlotte's story is that of a place that is inherently, ah, it's something about this place. It ain't perfect. There's no city that's perfect, but Charlotte's got something, man. I mean…

Dr. Val: It does.

Dr. James E Ford: …it's, it's, it's, first of all, it's in the Black belt, in the South.

Dr. Val: Mm-Hmm.

Dr. James E Ford: And it has one of the largest populations of Black folk, particularly the upwardly mobile Black folk. But the other thing is this Charlotte, and you know, Raz Chetty, scholar on economic mobility found out in 2014 that when looking at the 50 largest cities across the country and looking at the relative economic mobility, so the ability to move from the lowest quintile of poverty up to the highest quintile of income, found that Charlotte ranked dead last of the 50 largest cities. This was an embarrassment for Charlotte, but one of the factors of the variables that they identified were the schools.

Dr. Val: Mm-Hmm.

Dr. James E Ford: And so I think that for me it's about making sense of the economic picture. That yes, there's lots of Black folks down here and it seems like they're doing well, but for native Charlottians, folks who have been here, who were born here, that is not the case. Most of the Black folks you see, self included, are immigrants. We came in.

Dr. Val: Same.

Dr. James E Ford: Folks who are from the soil, right, who've been here for generations, native Charolottians, they haven't experienced the growth.

Dr. Val: I'm curious about what you think our responsibilities as migrants to Charlotte are to our native Charlottians who might not have the same experiences that you and I have.

Dr. James E Ford: Mm-Hmm. I think our responsibility, and I think you do this quite naturally, as do I, is to get involved in community and to literally go find the folks who are from here. 'Cause the joke is, man, anybody in Charlotte, ain’t from Charlotte, Charlotte's half New York. You know, the other half is Ohio or whatever, you know, and there's a lot of truth to that.

But if that is the case, then it's our job so that this place doesn't lose it’s identity or that we don't find ourselves being guilty of like, appropriating is to go find these stories. Right. Um, and, and to give ourselves a place-based education on what Charlotte is, how it came to being. To visit places like the Levine Museum of the New South, right. To go to the Harvey B Gant Center. And to learn as much as we possibly can to try to be true to the spirit and the institutions that built this place. I think that provides and demonstrates a level of honor and respect. And I think it changes us, it makes us more aware of how we move. Right. I think that's our responsibility.

Andrew: Thinking about that gap between kind of the experience of newcomers versus the people who have been there, what do you attribute that to?

Dr. James E Ford: In large part, it's been because of the inability of the schools to make good on the promise of desegregation.

Dr. Val: Mmm.

Dr. James E Ford: Quality education and larger. I, I go beyond desegregation, say the mantle of equity, right? Because I was a 100% proponent of desegregation by any means necessary. You could not tell me otherwise. After doing this research and spending time with community, talking to alums, living alums of Second Ward, who love their schools. Who would tell you in a heartbeat, I never thought I was inferior. You know, who would tell you, like we had nothing but the most amazing teachers, who can tell you with evidence that these were some of the more educated teachers, Black teachers in North Carolina during segregation was the only state where the Black teacher population was actually more educated than the White teacher population. They have more credentials. And now it makes sense why them folk told me, Hey, we don't agree with your article. Like, we just, we just want our schools back because this is literally where critical race theory comes from. Derek Bell, in some of his earliest articles, is critiquing Julius Chambers. It's Critiquing Swann, and he’s saying…

Dr. Val: Oh, wow.

Dr. James E Ford: …'cause when he was engaging in this, he's saying, I don't think we actually listened to the community and we made racial balance the only metric. And I really think what these Black communities were asking for was equity. What I'm saying is we kind of took our eye off the ball a little bit and here we find ourselves again.

Dr. Val: Hmmmm. This has come up for us in our last couple of episodes, right? We recognize that Black folks, especially in that era, loved their schools, loved their teachers. They had highly qualified teachers. In an instance that Dr. Fenwick talks about, the most egregious, a Black principal was replaced by a White milkman. So egregious things happened. And yet I heard you say like you were all in with desegregation. So now that you've talked to communities and you have your previous feelings, where are you sitting now? We understand this to be a nuanced conversation.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Where are you sitting?

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. I think specific to the Charlotte context, I think we have to balance two things in our hands. On the one hand, I think ideally, desegregated schools with the most diverse populations represent the closest thing to the democratic ideal. Right? It gets us closer to this notion of humanism, of global education. So I'm forever still gonna champion that, right? That is a noble idea worth pursuing. And that the spirit, you know, what Dr. King called the ontological assumption of segregation was evil, right? So I'm gonna stand firm in that. I'm also gonna say that racial balance itself is not the single metric of whether a school can be successful because we have historical precedent that that's not true.

So, in the event where that's not achievable, our mission then becomes how can we make these schools the best they possibly can be? And the premise that because there are not White people present is one I inherently disagree with. And I think it's work avoidance. And it's an excuse. So then what's our mantle, you know, you got a district that's 75% students of color. You gotta make it happen. You know what I mean? Regardless of what the composition is. Our job at this point in time is to make it happen with the composition of the schools that we have. And still as best as possible, try to break up concentrations of poverty where we at least have socioeconomic desegregation.

Andrew: Yeah, make it happen with the kids we have in the schools we have as we have them now. I like that. You went out and came to understand the history better. You feel this, you know, sort of charge to do the best for kids given the current reality. And as you mentioned, you did a dissertation on the first Black high school in Charlotte. What did you learn from studying that school?

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah, the way I looked at it was through the lens of cultural capital. I used community cultural wealth as my framework. And what were the cultural capitals that were present in these schools and the communities? 'Cause the whole thing is, okay, we're not going back to those days. Segregation was an artificial environment. That's important to remember is it was socially engineered, right? So yes, we had Black businesses, you had Black, institutions, but it was because we were prevented and prohibited from participating in White society.

That's not the case now. We, for the most part, you have options and just about everything you want to do. And the teaching population is not like it was, those were, they were all Black teachers. That's a mere picture negative of what's in school districts these days. Right? 80% White, uh, teachers. So does that mean we can't teach Black kids? No. It means that there probably is something that those Black folks, those expert Black educators were doing back in those days that can be translated pedagogically. Right? Come on, Melanie Acosta.

Dr. Val: That's right.

Dr. James E Ford: To the present day. And that's kind of my mission. And I just, I learned a lot about the beautiful things that those Black educators engaged in. And so I think that the important thing I learned is that our communities have capital. They, they're just not always being recognized, particularly in the way that we do school. And so my job as a researcher is to try to figure out ways to resurrect that, bring that to a contemporary global environment.

Dr. Val: Thank you.

Andrew: And that led you to Creed. So tell us about CREED. 'Cause it seems like that's the culmination of, maybe not the culmination, but this, this current iteration of that work for you.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah. So CREED precedes my dissertation work, but it's all related, right? So, I was the North Carolina teacher of the year, 10 years ago. That was an amazing experience that took me throughout my new adopted state and taught me everything. I didn't, I thought Charlotte was North Carolina. It is not. You get outside Mecklenburg County, 30 minutes. You head to Anson County, you and you out, you know, you out in North Carolina. I was in the mountains. I was out on the coast. I was in the Sandhills. The thing that I saw that was depressing was that everywhere I went, urban, rural, suburban, Black and Brown kids were experiencing the same stuff as they were at Garinger. You know, whether they were in the majority, whether they were in the minority.

And I was like, um, y'all don't see this trend here? And I thought an organization should exist that would address that, right? Like, is anybody gonna respond to the like, very explicitly racial demarcations of all these outcomes? And nobody, like, kind of would, it was kind of a hush thing, like, yeah, we see it, but yeah. Yeah. It's just, uh, you don't talk about that. And that's not, again, I told you that's not how I'm built.

So after that year, and I knew I wasn't going back to the classroom, I really wanted to focus on understanding race at the statewide level, and doing it through the lens of education. And I worked for a think tank, Public School Forum of North Carolina that's still around. And, uh, they were fortunate. Uh, they, I was fortunate enough as were they, to allow me to serve as their program director and to experiment with a lot of early work that they were doing around race and they were doing a study around racial equity and I got to lead that or whatever.

But after that I was bit by the bug. I was like, this is all I wanna do. I don't wanna do anything else. I just wanna focus on racial equity. And I thought there was space for an organization that explicitly focused on that at the statewide level to come into existence to do really quality research that was rigorous enough to get published in a journal, but accessible, right? Not behind a paywall, written in a way that stakeholders could understand it. To do programming that helped to try to change the tide, right. And raise up leaders and build coalitions and create space and affinity, for teachers of color and they do consulting, when called upon.

And because that organization didn't exist, I created it. And so in 2019, officially is when we went public. And so we'll be five years old this August. We go by CREED, Center for Racial Equity and Education, and um, yeah, amazing team of folks who are dedicated, who love this work, who are smart and just about the same cause, right? We're about making the crooked way straight and eliminating race as a predictor of education outcomes.

Andrew: Hmm. I love that. Tell us about some of the work that CREED does.

Dr. James E Ford: CREED does a lot for a small but mighty organization, we do a lot. I mentioned we do research, we do what we call engagement, which is really our programming, you know, we have a fellowship that's in it’s fifth year, a coalition of organizations throughout the state that are mission and vision aligned, a network of educators of color, et cetera.

But one of the cool initiatives is new under our engagement or programming umbrella is called the JAE Initiative. And the JAE is an acronym for Jeanes Arts and Education Initiative. And in my learning about North Carolina history, I encountered, when I met the illustrious and amazing Ann McCall, uh, an education attorney and scholar, these folks called the Jeanes teachers.

These were majority Black woman educators who were strewn all throughout the south, during the Jim Jim Crow era. And they were tasked with delivering education, particularly in the rural south to Black communities where although the right to education had been secured all throughout the south, during reconstruction, folks were not building schools and they were not funding teachers.

So it was an endowment left by a, White Quaker woman named Anna T Jeanes from Pennsylvania that was used to support the salaries for Black women educators to be pretty much the administrators of rural Black education. And these are like, you've heard of Hidden Figures, right? And like the folks in NASA that you didn't know about. This is like them to like the hundredth degree, right? Like these are Black women who are literally the queen mothers, the carriers, the midwives of education throughout the south.

And when I started learning about these folks, I was like, I really want to dig up the North Carolina story, the North Carolina history. Who were these women? Where did they come from? What were the communities that they served in? And so we've gone on this project at Creed now at the behest of Ann McCall, of taking all her research and other available research and trying to find ways to make it publicly available, utilizing the arts to make it come alive, right? And to offer really cool interpretations on this history so that it's not static, it's more dynamic, but also through education. To do the research on these folks, develop it into curriculum materials for educators themselves, to kind of bring forward to the present day, the same competencies and the, and the approaches that they had, but also making sure that the profiles of these folks are never again hidden. Making sure that our state knows who these Jeanes teachers were because they deserve to be celebrated, commemorated, and really kind of inducted in a celebratory hall of fame sort of com commemoration ceremony. And so that's something that we'll be doing in 2025. But right now we're doing a lot of the research around it. And Val, you can attest, like the stuff we're learning about these folks.

Dr. Val: It is goose bumpy. Seriously. It is incredible.

Andrew: Give us some names, give, give us some of that historical context.

Dr. James E Ford: I can tell you about Annie Holland.

Dr. Val: Yes.

Dr. James E Ford: Annie W Holland was the Jeanes supervisor for the state of North Carolina. She's from Virginia. And the thing that made her such a, is this a kid's podcast? Such a bad blank. Okay. Such a badass…

Dr. Val: Good. You're good.

Dr. James E Ford: …Was that much like so many other Jeanes supervisors, she was not merely an educator. The best way to look at these women is through the modern language of like community organizer. She was not just over the state and the administration and having to negotiate with N-C-D-P-I, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and the, particularly the, the Division of Negro Education, DNI, but also managing and being, subversive, right, and delivering what was really quality education in ways that the White power structure at the time certainly had no intention on, uh, Black kids receiving, while at the same time interacting with the state apparatus and the Jeanes fund.

And she also was the founder of the equivalent of the Black PTA in the state. So she was not only that, she was raising funds for health related initiatives in the community, raising funds for the building of schools, the Rosenwald schools.

So we have just gotten a historical marker approved for her, uh, in Gates County where she served at. And so in 2025 we're gonna be having a community event where we unveil it and we celebrate her as well as the other class of Jeanes teachers. But Annie Wealthy Holland is luminary, in the state of North Carolina and deserves to be commemorated. So I'm really happy that her history and her legacy is gonna be a part of that with the historical marker installation. So, yeah, that's just one, uh, there's several others.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: That history, I mean, you, you're a history teacher. You're clearly like, you know, history is in, is in your blood. You, it, it's important.

Dr. Val: You can tell it, right?

Andrew: It's, oh, yeah, yeah. To go back to Vanessa Siddle Walker, she talks about the three a's you know, advocacy, access and aspiration. That that was what Black teachers were fighting for in desegregation. And they kind of got access and the rest of it was sort of destroyed. But, why is it worth telling the story of these Jeanes teachers for today?

Dr. James E Ford: First of all, Queen Mother Siddle Walker is responsible for, you know, the work that I engage in. Right. It was her work that kind of transfixed me. So, um, I think that's the point. I think that when you unearth and when you shine a light on these folks, there's an energy, their spirit and their contribution is still alive.

And what happens when you breathe that in? When you take that in? Is it animates people, right? Because it anchors you in something larger than yourself, and then you feel a sense of duty, you feel compelled to like advance the ball forward. And I'll capture it in a story. You have me here, right? This Black kid from northern Illinois who went through desegregation, you know, was a struggling student, ended up getting his PhD and becoming North Carolina teacher of the year. My grandmother is from rural Arkansas, right? She was a sharecropper. But what's interesting about her is that she got her high school education. And doing research, I found an article about the Jeanes teacher in her county. She went to that Jeanes teacher's school and she worked for her.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Dr. James E Ford: So I'm literally the living progeny of the work of the Jeanes teachers.

Andrew: Whew.

Dr. James E Ford: Right? It's like when I found that article, I said, oh wow, so you mean that I come from someone who is a recipient of the education provided by the Jeanes teachers? This is ancestral work. And when you discover that, I think anybody with a beating heart feels a need to spread those seeds so that they can take boom, that's really our job. You know, somebody else maybe waters it and, you know, cultivates, breaks up the ground or whatever, but like, it has its own spirit and energy, and I think that's why this is so important.

Andrew: I think about the, you know, Anna T Jeanes, the White Quaker. I think about the Rosenwald schools, there's been this role for White people to play. You know, you talk about kind of the ancestral tradition in history that you tap into that animates you. A lot of White folks don't have that because you don't have to go back too far to find problematic ancestors.

This is maybe not the conversation for the two of you to really, to really have this is like, this is White people work, but how do you think about what stories we should tell who, who should get elevated? I think we've spent obviously like far too long centering White folks in the story of history, but, where are there stories that are worth telling that White folks can tap into some of that spirit of animation?

Dr. Val: Real quick before you answer, before you answer. Andrew, do you feel like you can't connect to that story as a White person? Does it not feel like you can tap into that activism spirit?

Andrew: That's a good question. It feels like White folks coming to racial justice work, newly now feel like we have to create from whole cloth a new way to be White people. That we don't have role models to look up to. And, and it's hard to hold up role models of White folks because we tend to lionize White folks, and I think there's like a White person tendency to want, like the checklist. JPB Gerald talks about like checklists and merit badges. Like, tell me the four steps to being a good White person. And so… [they all laugh a little]

Dr. Val: I have been asked that.

Andrew: Right. So we have to like, we have to push back on that. But also the abolitionist movement was full of incredible White people. And, you know, I don't know anything about Anna T Jeanes until today, but it sounds like this is an incredible White person. There's like a tradition and a history of White people being on the right side of history, of engaging in this work that it feels important to try to sort of hold up as, an example, as a way to say we don't have to come up with something entirely new from scratch as a way to think about our role as White people.

Dr. Val: Thinking about James' journey through his history, like what is the journey White people should take to be inspired in this way? Because I do think White folks have to take their own journeys in this work. James, please jump in.

Dr. James E Ford: Yeah, I think that's a fair question. I'm, I'm, I'm literally processing it. I'm thinking about what I would do if I was White, and it should be stated that I'm anti-racist, pro-equity, Pan-Africanist. You know what I mean? But I'm a democratic humanist. And so I do think that when you talk about White supremacy or anti-Blackness or racism, it really is anchored in tendencies and flaws of shared humanity, right?

So, in this case it's race and in another place it's, you know, it's gender or sexuality, but it's the tendency of humanity to find reasons to subordinate and mistreat other folks to make themselves feel better. So, whereas I'm not White, I may find myself and I do, in another group membership where I need to do some self reflection. What I would do if I were White is I would do my own self study. 'Cause I would be clamoring for positive ancestral, we use that loosely, uh, ideological examples of folks who look like me who are engaging in this sort of work that I desire to be a part of. I’d be looking high and low because we know they're out there.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. James E Ford: We know they're out there. It is not as if summarily White people are evil, right? So like, oh, there's no good White people. Nah, there are, I don't believe in centering and making them centerpiece of the stories that we tell. But as a matter of personal business, I'd be trying to find folks who inspired me.

Gary Howard talked about positive, White identity formation. I think a lot of what we lack is, you know, White folk don't have anything to replace negative White identity. Because Whiteness is so predicated on domination that if you don't have anything to replace it with, that's also a problem. bell hooks talk about that same thing with men. When you get rid of misogyny, we get rid of patriarchy and you're not giving men something to replace that with or if men aren't finding for themselves, let's say that they got their own agency, something to replace that with and they are gonna be kind of meandering and may revert back to where they came from. Same thing with White folks.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I do think one of the insidious ways that White supremacy replicates itself is by erasing those stories, is by consolidating White people into one homogenous group by, forcing the relinquishing of past ties to individual cultures.

You know, the Irish come and they want to be White. You sort of have to release some of your ties to being Irish, the Italians, the Jews, you know, there's this sort of process of separation from other identities in order to hold onto the identity of Whiteness. And Whiteness in and of itself, like, only exists to be counter to, Blackness or Brownness. Or Asianness or, or something else, right? Like it, it exists in order to replicate this, you know, that Heather McGee talks about the hierarchy of human value. That, like, that it's, its sole purpose is for that. And so the, the less ties you have to something other than White, the harder it is to hold on. And I think you're right. Yeah. Then you're sort of floundering without like, well, what is the, what is this other thing that I hold onto? And I think to me, it's humanism. To me it's collectivism. To me it is the fact that we are all human and, and that there is some value in kind of, you know, collective liberation in all of us being free. But I think that Whiteness is designed, I think, to get in the way of that.

Dr. James E Ford: Oh yeah. There's tons of really solid White folk who have engaged in ways large and small to contribute to dismantling this thing that we know as racism and White supremacy, and Anna T Jeanes, if she inspires one, find other folk like that and make it your life's work to engage in small contributions, you know, and ways of adopting as part of your own personality? ‘Cause yeah, there's abundant examples of the worst sides of, of Whiteness, don't get me wrong, but that doesn't mean that there has to be, you know, everybody's human in this thing, so…

Andrew: This, yeah, it's such an insightful conversation. So much I've learned about Charlotte, about North Carolina. I think, you know, your work is incredibly important, both for North Carolina, for Charlotte, but also for the country as a whole, holding up these stories, telling these stories, tapping into our history so we can, we can, as we always say here, know better and do better. Really grateful for you coming on and for sharing.

Dr. James E Ford: Thanks for giving me the space and opportunity and having such, um, candid conversation. We need more of this, so thank you.

Dr. Val: Thank you Dr. Ford.

Dr. James E Ford: Thank you Dr. Brown.

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Andrew: So Val, what'd you think?

Dr. Val: Oh my gosh. One, something that I thought about throughout the course of this conversation is, how do we show up and I asked him the question, as I'm, I'm new here, right? This is not the city of my birth or where I was raised, but I have adopted this city and I think it's very easy to come into a city, as I'm sure many of our listeners do, and, and not know the history.

And I'm equating it to White folks coming to global majority schools. Right? You don't actually know the full history and the full story. And so you can show up just all wrong, right? And you think you're doing the right thing and you think you plugged in the right way. And hopefully, hopefully, you realize that I'm missing a piece of the information. And it's not just about, hey, I arrived, right? But how do I fit into this community that's been here and thriving like before I got here? And how do I not mess that up?

And so I'm really, I'm really sitting with that because I do wanna be a good neighbor. Because I feel fully embraced by this city. And I really do love that. And I want others to feel that as well, but not in a way that erases the folks that have been here, that have fought here, and that continue to make this a city in which I can feel welcomed and comfortable. So I'm really sitting with that and making the connection around, attending global majority schools for White folks and how they might feel showing up.

Andrew: Yeah. I love that. I appreciated the way that Dr. Ford walked us through the Swann case and through the ways that Charlotte not only was viewed by the country, but viewed itself as this kind of bastion for how to do desegregation right, and the power of that. And then the ways that that was let go. And so, you know, it's easy to show up now and think, well, like it's got affordable housing or it's got a good banking industry that I can become a part of, but not knowing what the history is, not understanding kind of how to situate our current context in the history of a city makes it easy to show up in ways that maybe can be harmful.

I love that tie to the ways that we show up in school communities. And you know, sometimes that's in the actual school itself and maybe your school has been around for a long time and has a history that you need to learn and you know, get to know the people who have been players of that. And maybe it's more on sort of the city level, you know, in terms of the, you know, educational activism that's happened there.You may be going to a school that is relatively new that doesn't have that history, but that doesn't mean that your city doesn't have that history. That doesn't mean that the people who have been in your city for a while don't have a story to tell and don't have a way of looking at the things that get held up as progress that maybe don't feel like progress.

Dr. Val: Yeah, and one challenge I have for myself and for our listeners is to really try to start deeply understanding your city. I can share that when we came to visit you, you were able to give us a tour, tell us like, here's what happened here, here's what happened there, here's what this was, because you grew up, like you're living in the neighborhood where you grew up and you went to school and your kids go to school there.

And I wanna invite our listeners to, to really get to know their cities because even if you've grown up someplace, there's, there's opportunities to, to learn more about it and to really understand why the highway is here, or why this school is now, segregated or, or, or why there's this part of the area is underdeveloped, or who was responsible for this decision that was made. Right? Understanding your place and being rooted in that, feels important. It feels especially important in a world in which there, there can be like faux connections to other places.

Andrew: Mm mm-Hmm.

Dr. Val: To actually be grounded, in your community. I think it's how we get the change in the communities that we're, we're all working toward, at least here, you and I.

Andrew: Yeah. No, I love that. And, and I will say like, I probably had sort of a leg up from having grown up here and most of the stuff that I know about the city now is not stuff that I knew growing up. Right. Some of the puzzle pieces are already there because I grew up here, but it's still like putting in the time and effort to, to come and to understand like, well, how do those things connect? Because certainly I didn't get any of that in school. There was no, like, you know, Denver history class that was available to me. It takes work and it's work that anybody can do.

It's what led Dr. Ford to, you know, this sort of question of how is it that these schools got to be the way they are, led him to this real curiosity about his own newly adopted city, and that that led to all of his work.

Dr. Val: So at the end of the conversation, we started talking, you and I kind of had a sidebar 'cause you, you, you posed a question and I, and I wanted to bring it back to you regarding how do White folks show up in this space.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I think it's something I've been thinking about a lot. Obviously I don't have it all figured out. I'm constantly learning and trying to grow and deepen my own understanding. And this has come up before on the podcast, but you know, I, I don't think there are a lot of great like White role models out there that we hold up. And it's a tricky line to walk because the history books certainly that are taught in most schools are full of White folks that are meant to be lionized, and it's easy to reject that. But, as Dr. Ford was saying, you know, what do you replace that with?

So I was definitely inspired by people like Anna T. Jeanes, a Quaker who had this family fortune that she was looking to give away. And, rather than building a building with her name on it or donating to university or something, she, you know, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a network of Black teachers all across the rural south and I'm gonna fund this Jeanes Foundation.

Thinking about resources, what resources we have, putting those resources closest to the people who are trying to solve the problems. That's a pretty good… and I don't know enough about her life - should she be lionized? Should she be held up? I don't know. But I think that that act of saying, here are these resources I have, there's probably problematic ways that I came about them. I'm gonna do something about it. And that thing is gonna be towards, you know, putting those resources closest to the people who are trying to address the problems. That feels like an, uh, sort of empowering and inspirational model to tap into.

Dr. Val: So one I'm thinking about, that work had to be done in community with Black folks on the ground, and I'm thinking specifically about the Black women who were the majority of Jeanes teachers, and one who actually taught. James' mom, right? Like, remarkable story. You don't, you don't know what's gonna happen when you, when you put your efforts out there. And so we can lionize all of the Black women who were part of this effort in North Carolina and in Charlotte, who worked with the resources that Anna T Jeanes was able to provide.

And so, for me, the work has to be done together and, I think back to Heather McGee and the solidarity dividends, right? Like in solidarity we can do so much more together. Anna T Jeanes wasn't of the south, but she was like, here are where Black folks are who could use these resources. And so how can I meet them? How can I be in solidarity with them in order to move us further faster? And I think if you are doing that as a White person, then we gonna be alright. We gonna be alright.

I really enjoy these local stories and it's my hope that we continue to get folks calling in to share their local stories with us.

Andrew: Yes, I don't have any perspective on Denver 'cause it's my own story and I was deeply involved in it. It felt interesting to me. But, digging into Charlotte, a city that I know very little about that I've, you know, only been to a few, few times and, don't know the history of also felt very interesting and worthwhile, investing that, that time and energy in, because I do think there, there's so many lessons to pull out from that story and seeing the similarities, you know, the Swann case…

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: … was in the early ‘70’s, there was this massive backlash to the idea that busing, you know, both was a legitimate solution to segregation and then, you know, Keyes two years later says it could happen outside of the south and you have this kind of freak out. And then the nineties come and we say, ah, maybe we've done enough. Maybe we've stopped. And you know, in Denver it was the judge just sort of saying, okay, I think we're done. In Charlotte it was a lawsuit from a White parent saying, you know, my poor White kid isn't able to get into the school they want to. But the result is the same that we sort of say, alright, I think we've tried enough. Maybe we're past this and then, you know, this retrenchment happens and, and we go back to resegregation.

Dr. Val: As you're recounting the history, I was thinking, wow, I, it's, it is just now our turn,

Andrew: Hmm. Right.

Dr. Val: right? It's our turn

Andrew: Yep.

Dr. Val: to do the next right thing. Right. And so this wheel that, that we're turning, because very easily it could roll back very easily. Like we feel that, so we have to actively be on the side of, of making sure that it doesn't, and that's my challenge to everybody listening here

Andrew: Absolutely. Yeah. And, and that means, right, we all have a role to play and, and we don't know what the results are gonna be, right. Certainly Anna T Jeanes had no idea that giving this money to fund Black teachers would someday result in Dr. James Ford's

Dr. Val: Dr. James Ford,

Andrew: mother getting an education that then led to Dr. James Ford being, being who he is now. And so I think, you know, that idea of, of what are the ripples? We don't know, but we have to kind of put our best foot forward and do the best - the next right thing.

And, and, and you know, what, what does that mean and what does that look like? Is gonna look different - but I do think certainly if we're gonna take anything from the model of Anna T Jeanes, putting resources where they're most needed feels really relevant. And so for any listeners out there with the resources to give, we had a link to the Center for Black Educator Development last episode with Sharif El Mekki, the work of CREED and Dr. James Ford's work there. We'll put a link in the show notes to his organization. If you have resources to donate, certainly those are groups who are on the ground directly connected, having a real impact and that's certainly a place to start.

Dr. Val: That's right. And please, continue to share the podcast with others. I mean, that is one way to continue the work, and have these conversations locally. I know you have some other people who are interested in what's happening around them. Join up with them. As we talked about in the intro, if you are not a part of a local chapter, get plugged in, create a local chapter. It only takes two people, so you got this. You can totally do this.

Andrew: That's right. Yes. And if you, after you have done your giving to CREED and the Center of Black Educator Development and others, you want to also support this work, we would be grateful for that patreon.com/integratedschools where you can support the podcast and the work we are doing here, because it is all, it is all part of the massive work that needs to be done.

And, we're doing our little part here and we're grateful for your support in that.

Dr. Val: That's right

Andrew: Well, Val, this was a really great conversation. Thank you for bringing Dr. Ford on the podcast. It was great to be in conversation with him. And as always, it's great to be in conversation with you as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time, friend, until next time.