“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Nelson Mandela
Education was a core value cherished and transmitted by my colored family and community. Education was the key to colored children reaching their full potential, a tool for racial uplift, and leadership. Acquiring an education was the primary tool of empowerment, a means to gaining equality in American society.
It was and is the use of education to disempower African American children that led me to an unintended career choice. In 1992, I established Diversity Training Associates, with the intention of changing the conditioned consciousness of many educators regarding African American students. The stereotypical belief in the cultural, intellectual, and moral inferiority of African Americans was pervasive in the schools in which I consulted and trained.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its landmark decision, Brown versus Board of Education, that segregated schooling based upon race was unequal and unconstitutional. The decision failed, however, in not mandating that stereotypical beliefs about African Americans be refuted, and all educators required to demonstrate freedom from these beliefs.
Instead, African American students were denied access to equal educational opportunities. They were tracked into lower-level classes, overwhelmingly placed in special education classes, and denied access to gifted classes, as was the experience for my son.
By the 1990s, schools across the nation had re-segregated. This post-Brown segregation is similar but drastically different in ways that negatively impact the academic motivation and achievement of African American students. Like my colored segregated school, schools with majority “minority” and poor students, receive less funding and access to educational resources.
Despite this inequality unequal funding, poor facilities, and few resources, however, the environment of my colored schools provided the affective atmosphere, institutional policies, and teacher excellence that enabled me and others to achieve academically and experience success in the larger society. The culture, climate, and curriculum of our colored segregated schools was informed by an empowerment pedagogy. Our teachers resisted and circumvented the caste educational system designed for us.
Over six decades after the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” schools to be unconstitutional, schools today remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity. African American students today are disempowered by the educational system as I, a colored girl, was empowered. Equal educational opportunity remains an ideal rather than a reality for many African American students.
"In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This is my reflection as a colored girl." This phrase opens each essay in the series “Reflections of a Colored Girl” from Martha R. Bireda, Ph.D. being aired on WGCU FM. Dr. Bireda is a writer, lecturer, and living history performer with over 30 years' experience as a lecturer, consultant and trainer for issues related to race, class, and gender, working with educators, law enforcement, and business, and civic leaders. She also is director of the Blanchard House Museum of African American History and Culture of Charlotte County, in Punta Gorda, Florida. Bireda was born in Southwest Florida in 1945 but spent the first 10 years of her life in a small town in Western Virginia. Her family then moved back to Punta Gorda, where they have deep roots. This is one essay in her series. Read more essays here.
