Summer School Succeeds in S. Carolina

On page ninety-eight of the South Carolina state history text is a picture of a young Negro boy sitting on a pile of cotton and eating watermelon. The caption under the picture reads: "This is a Negro child."

Pandamonium broke loose in my classroom last summer in Charleston, South Carolina, when I introduced this picture as the composition topic for that night. Students quickly added examples: postcards that always showed Negroes dancing and picking cotton and the local paper's policy of printing pictures of Negroes only when they committed a crime.

The discussion soon moved to the expectations that people built up on the basis of these stereotypes. Millicent Brown, the first Negro in South Carolina to attend an integrated school, told about the children who ran past her in the halls during the first few weeks shouting "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!"

Then, as it often did during the six weeks of summer school, the discussion somehow turned to the summer of 1963 and the Charleston Movement. Many of my students went to jail that summer, and all of them remember it with pride and excitement. As Ralph Dawson said in his essay the next day, "I showed them that summer that I wasn't the boy in the picture."

But Southern education remains geared to "the boy in the picture." Most Southern school districts have done almost nothing to give the Negro student the educational skills that will allow him to assume a role consistent with his new-found conception of himself. Most Northern liberals have heard this problem before and think they understand it.

But you can't really undesrstand until you see forty-five of the brightest Negro students in Charleston below grade level according to national standards in reading and mathematics and unable to write a coherent paragraph. (Most had never written an essay in English, which in Charleston consists of twelve years of grammar.)

Our six week summer school tried to provide intensive individual help in reading, writing and mathematics for these forty-five above average students. We wanted to interest them in continuing their education and give them the competence that would allow them to continue. The five of us, three graduate students and two experienced teachers, had come to Charleston as a result of cooperation between local community leaders and the Southern Teaching Program. We tried to use a combination of small classes and daily individual conferences in every subject to keep close watch on the progress of each student.

The driving ambition of most of our students to succeed, a spirit many of them carried from the Charleston Movement, spilled over into the class room. In the 95 degree heat of the South Carolina lowland summer, they voluntarily attended classes six hours a day. They started classes themselves when the teachers were late. They stayed after classes were supposed to end, talking about Raisin in the Sun, set theory, Storm Thurmond, and Malcolm X. Most of them did more homework in those six weeks than they had in the previous year. None droped out.

Their final achievement record was dramatic. According to standardized tests, the average student gained two years in reading comprehension during those six weeks. After a regimen of a composition a day most could write a decently organized four-paragraph essay. Most had a firm grasp of the basic principles of their next math course presented in the context of the new math. This preview of work to come was especially crucial for several who would be adjusting to previously all-white schools in the fall. The rapidity of this academic development-almost like time-lapse photography in students with so much potential denied for so long-is something that few teachers have the privilege of experiencing.

But academic achievements didn't begin to exhaust the satisfactions of the summer. The most striking changes were changes in attitude; the image many students had of themselves and their capabilities and goals was permanently altered. Ralph Freeman, one of seven children of illiterate parents, will probably attend Yale. Reginald Dawson has decided to top off his entry into a previously white school by going out for the football team (a recent letter from him says they use him very effectively as a decoy.) Two others, bitter and undirected since going to jail in 1963, say that discussing Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes has given them a clearer conception of themselves and their future goals. They are both anxious to go to college.

The growth didn't all come on the part of the students. You could hardly teach a unit on courage in literature with Millicent Brown in your class without learning something about courage yourself.

Such interpersonal contact characterized the experience of most of the 150 graduate students in the Southern Teaching Program this summer. About half of them taught programs in Negro and integrated schools and colleges, which, like the Charleston Tutorial Project, concentrated on basic academic skills. The other half taught regular college summer courses in all academic subjects, replacing faculty members who studied or did research. They taught in every Southern state, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They taught at colleges ranging from a few that were good by almost any standard to a few where most of the students and some professors were illiterate.

Many instructors entered a situation much more difficult than Charleston. Negro faculty members, who felt threatened by the presence of white Northerners, were often openly hostile or indifferent. Courses lacked promised textbooks and sometimes promised students. In a few cases open hostility erpted between the instructors and the administration. One graduate student was fired from a college in South Carolina when he complained about the steam heat being on in his classroom in July. In the most spectacular incident of the summer, eleven instructors lost their jobs at Bishop College outside of Dallas when they organized a protest march against the bookstore, which was overcharging students.

Most instructors did not find it necessary to provoke such a showdown. They made enough peace with the system to discover their Millicent Browns. And the sum of such personal encounters has apparently had an overall impact. For many colleges, a special summer program has become a permanent fixture. For others, summer contact with graduate students has spurred them to search actively for full year instructors from other parts of the country. Many of the summer instructors have stayed to teach for a year or more.

The response to the community programs is especially encouraging. Local Negro leaders in Charleston can point to the accomplishments of last summer as evidence of a need for new educational programs. They have forced the schoolboard to sponsor an expanded version of last summer's program for this coming summer. And the success of the Charleston program has prompted people in eight other South Carolina communities to plan similar projects. In place of five teachers and 45 students, the South Carolina program will have 90 teachers and 900-1000 of the most capable youngsters in the state from limited economic backgrounds.

(Donald R. Moore is second-year student at the Graduate School of Education. He will be coordinator of community projects in South Carolina this for the Southern Teaching Program.)