Desegregation State

College Writing Programs after the Civil Rights Movement

Annie S. Mendenhall

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781646422036
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The only book-length study of the ways that postsecondary desegregation litigation and policy affected writing instruction and assessment in US colleges, Desegregation State provides a history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs from 1970 to 1988. Focusing on the University System of Georgia and two of its public colleges in Savannah, one a historically segregated white college and the other a historically Black college, Annie S. Mendenhall shows how desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation efforts in southern and border states.Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today. Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.

1

“Technologies of This Theory”

Desegregation as Remediation, Early 1970s

In 1972, several prominent social scientists—Martin Deutsch, Thomas Pettigrew, Kenneth B. Clark, and Hylan Lewis among them—published a collection titled The Educationally Deprived, devoted to exploring the “particular problem of improvement of higher education for Blacks” (Clark et al. 1972, v). Rather than arguing for postsecondary reform, contributors debated how programs for Black children—everything from remedial education to automated literacy learning machines placed strategically in supermarkets—might create equal educational opportunity. Noticeably absent were colleges themselves. College desegregation was, in many ways, focused on what happened before college. The Educationally Deprived illustrates how a theory of “cultural deprivation” became “an integral part of the controversy about the quality of education provided for Negro children in de jure and de facto segregated schools” (5). Remedial literacy programs, dubbed “the related technologies of [cultural deprivation] theory,” were seen as key to equal opportunity, the solution to segregation (9).

Proponents of cultural deprivation theory considered racial gaps in academic achievement—and, by extension, segregation in colleges—a consequence of early childhood experiences. As historian Mical Raz (2013) explains, both policymakers and social scientists sought to explain why Black students on average scored lower on standardized tests than white students, without repeating by then outdated claims about biological racial inferiority. These parties, however, could not formulate a theory outside of anti-Black beliefs about racial inferiority. Enter cultural deprivation theory, which hypothesized that Black children living in “broken” homes in segregated, low-income neighborhoods lacked sufficient linguistic stimulation (2013). This theory equated segregation with isolation and borrowed findings from sensory deprivation experiments in psychology—which examined the cognitive effects of blocking a person’s sight, sound, or touch for hours or days—to explain how culture and environment influenced learning (2013). This political misapplication of psychological research stigmatized Black literacy practices and communities, diagnosing the deprived1 child as having “peculiar or bizarre language patterns; lack of verbal stimulation; absence of father or stable male figure in the home; and lack of books in the home” (Clark et al. 1972, 5). Although these “symptoms” made no mention of race, they were based on racist stereotypes about single Black mothers, who failed to provide sufficient linguistic stimulation for their children by abandoning their homes to work for a living (Raz 2013). It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t explanation that offered up remediation as a tool for enforcing social norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class through literacy. By locating deprivation in the childhood home, the policies that emerged from this premise also located the solution for college students outside the normal educational track, in remediation. Cultural deprivation shaped the very time line for how desegregation could unfold.

By 1972, the role of cultural deprivation theory in directing educational policy was well recognized, but debate over the concept in social science circles signaled the beginning of the end of the theory’s academic acceptance (Raz 2013). Yet cultural deprivation already had, as Kenneth B. Clark and colleagues (1972, 6) wrote, “profound and widespread influences on educational policies and practices.”2 Just a few years later, Geneva Smitherman (1977, 202) observed that cultural deprivation had institutionalized “a framework of black pathology” in college-level remedial writing programs, which continued to present Black literacy practices as inappropriate in social interaction and workplace communication. For decades, even progressive publications, such as Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin’s (1990, 3) Right to Literacy, described how the “isolation, fragmentation, and dissociation” in families and communities negatively affected literacy practices. Through the 1990s, composition scholars referenced race euphemistically, using synonyms for cultural deprivation, such as “culturally disadvantaged” and “underprivileged” (Clary-Lemon 2009, W6). Why did a theory about childhood literacy development based in a misapplication of psychological research end up influencing college writing for decades? Cultural deprivation theory operated on a chiasmus: remediation facilitated school desegregation, and, in turn, desegregation remediated the cognitive deficits of segregation. When colleges began to desegregate, this theory outlined a process that placed very little responsibility on white colleges: pre-college, non-credit literacy remediation integrated Black students into white mainstream literacy norms to compensate for linguistic deprivation. Once Black students adopted these literacy norms, they could enroll as full students at white colleges with equal opportunity for social mobility. This was the path to desegregation in the white imaginary.

In this chapter, I describe how this redefinition of desegregation as remediation made linguistic stimulation and cultural integration the tenets of remedial writing instruction. Political and educational stakeholders blamed deprived students for de facto segregation. In its earliest versions of a desegregation plan, the University System of Georgia (USG) denied racial discrimination, stating, “All materials submitted in this document are prefaced by the specific observation that the University System is neither now nor has been in recent years operated in a manner discriminatory toward any minority group. . . . Students disadvantaged in either a material or educational sense are provided with financial aid and remedial studies programs designed to compensate to the greatest extent possible for their previous conditions” (Regents 1974, 2). Blaming de facto segregation on deprivation fed into anti-Black racism by presenting African Americans as culturally inferior and thus a threat to academic “standards” at white colleges. This threat was used to justify what Eric Darnell Pritchard (2017, 53) describes as the “regulation, policing, and surveillance” of raced and classed literacy norms in the form of technologies of literacy assessment, which began to exert greater control over admission to and graduation from college. Desegregation, both in US political discourse and the specific southern context of enforcement, established a set of policies and norms for literacy remediation that affected writing instruction for decades afterward.

Remedial Programs and the Redefinition of Desegregation

The influence of cultural deprivation theory resulted from its political popularity in explaining widespread protests against racism—in the streets and on college campuses. By the late 1960s, ongoing segregation was a recognized national policy failure and threat to civil order in the United States. Demand for an end to segregation and racism prompted hundreds of race riots in cities across the country in the late 1960s, spurring action to address ongoing segregation, seen as the root cause of racial inequality. President Lyndon B. Johnson, seeking to develop a policy response, formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. Although progressive in its acknowledgment of white racism, the 1968 Kerner Commission’s Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or the Kerner Report, attributed violent protests to culturally deprived, segregated Black communities, drawing on research from the National Institute for Mental Health and social scientists’ testimony (Raz 2013). “Civil disorder,” the report claimed, was the outcome of a “culture of poverty that results from unemployment and family breakup,” which left “Negro students . . . falling further behind whites” in “verbal and reading ability” (National Advisory Commission 1968, 7, 12). By connecting low educational achievement to participation in riots, the report fed support for compensatory education, specifically for programs enrolling Black students in white schools to cultivate “the image of a nonrioting citizen” (Raz 2013, 162).

The policy solution to racial unrest was integration. The Kerner Report explained, “We support integration as the priority education strategy. . . . It is indispensable that opportunities for interaction between the races be expanded” (National Advisory Commission 1968, 12). Integration, as the report defined it, might allow for the support of “ghetto enrichment” programs in the short term, but the long-term goal was “to encourage the integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto” (10). Integration meant moving African Americans into white spaces. According to the report, accomplishing this movement would require remediation, specifically “intensive concentration on basic verbal skills”—judged to be the problem that affected “every other aspect of the later school program” (248). The Kerner Report’s conclusions reflected a shift in justifying desegregation enforcement in a way that was more socially palatable to many whites: desegregation was necessary, not to remedy past segregation and racism but to create a more peaceful citizenry through exposure to white literacy norms.

Adopting white literacy norms was framed as the path to educational success for Black students in desegregation literature. One pamphlet for Georgia K–12 school administrators described Black students’ “language skills” as the “first and often biggest hurdle” to desegregation—not because students couldn’t speak or write but because white teachers had difficulty “understanding what many Negro students say” (Johnson and Hall 1968, 29). Thus, Black students must “acquire an additional method of speaking—i.e., ‘Standard English,’ ” which should be taught “using methods resembling those for teaching foreign languages” (30, original emphasis). The assumption that desegregation would move Black students into white schools, without upsetting a racial order that prioritized whites, was critical to literacy remediation. This assumption supported a pedagogy called “bidialectism,” an instructional philosophy that ostensibly validated all English dialects as legitimate but still stressed Standard English for professional and civic communication (Redd and Webb 2005). Some language scholars of the time criticized bidialectism for expecting Black students to integrate into white culture without any reciprocal effort to bring Black language and cultural practices to white students and schools (Sledd 1969; Kaplan 1969; Smitherman 1971; O’Neil 1972). Desegregation literature, however, justified bidialectism using arguments rooted in anti-Black racism. These arguments tried to define the possible audiences for Black literacy practices: white teachers in white schools, white bosses in white workplaces, and, by extension, white politicians, white juries, and white cops. The goal was to make Black students legible (not equal) to white audiences.

In 1970, a newly elected President Richard Nixon wielded these ideas to argue that the federal government should not intervene in de facto segregation except to provide educational remediation. Nixon’s victory over Johnson in the 1969 presidential election was due in part to white backlash to busing in K–12 desegregation, which he promised to stop (Minchin and Salmond 2011). In a policy statement before the US Congress in 1970, Nixon fulfilled this promise by announcing that he would limit federal intervention by drawing a sharp line between de jure and de facto segregation. De facto segregation would no longer be constitutionally suspect, even where legal segregation once existed, and federal efforts would focus instead on enhancing the educationally disadvantaged, who were “isolated” in racially segregated schools and cities (Nixon 1970, 12). He explained, “It is not really because they serve black children that most of these schools are inferior, but rather because they serve poor children who often lack the home environment that encourages learning,” such as subscribing to newspapers or owning books (17–18). Nixon represented Black literacy in the language of cultural deprivation: children in segregated black communities are isolated, deprived of stimulation, and stuck in a cycle of de facto segregation as a result.

This view of de facto segregation was a setback for desegregation enforcement, redefining segregation as a product of Black culture rather than anti-Black racism. This reframing blamed African Americans, but it adopted a race-evasive facade, as most commentators claimed that these problems had nothing to do with race but were a product of isolation also evident in other communities where people lived in poverty, including Latinx immigrant and rural white communities (Raz 2013). This race-evasive redefinition of segregation paradoxically prompted Nixon to direct resources toward educational programs, resulting in $500 million diverted to “compensatory education for the disadvantaged” and other educational efforts in 1971—an amount doubled for the following year (Nixon 1970, 26). In 1970, college campuses had around 900 remedial and equal opportunity programs that stood to benefit from this new funding (Lamos 2011). Supporting the theory of cultural deprivation could, quite literally, pay off.

In contrast, accusations that white racism caused segregation were less successful, as evidenced by response to the 1970 report of the Commission on Campus Unrest, also known as the Scranton Report, commissioned to study campus protests after students were shot by law enforcement at Kent State University (a white university in Ohio) and Jackson State College (a Black college in Mississippi). The Scranton Report found that many campus protests were about racism.3 According to the report, white colleges’ failure to recognize Black history and culture was a chief cause of unrest at 59 percent of campuses and in 49 percent of protest incidents (Scranton et al. 1970, 109). The Scranton Report proposed two courses of action: founding Black studies programs at white colleges and enhancing Black colleges. This proposal rejected white mainstream integrationism, suggesting that integration “appears to many young Blacks to be a doctrine and practice of white supremacy . . . the destruction of all things black and the exaltation of all things white” (115). Unsurprisingly, the Scranton Report was not well received by Nixon (Rosenthal 1970).

The emphasis on remediation emerging during this time obscured the problems facing Black students in white colleges. Segregation did affect academic preparation for college; in some cases, K–12 schools had closed for Black students, and many Black schools lacked textbooks and other resources (Anderson 2016; Epps-Robertson 2018). However, recasting the effects of segregation as cognitive deficiency glossed over Black students’ demands for instructional changes at white colleges and diverted attention from concerning trends in Black enrollment patterns. According to one survey of Black students in white colleges, some reported needing more college preparation, particularly in mathematics, although those data should be cautiously interpreted without comparable survey results from white students (Boyd 1974). Black students at Armstrong and elsewhere requested additional tutorial services as part of a set of larger demands for white colleges to support them (“ASC Submits” 1974).4 Yet most evidence suggests that more Black students met college admissions requirements than could attend college, due to financial need (Semas 1974; Boyd 1974). Academically successful Black students were either unable to attend college or disproportionately enrolling in less selective institutions, particularly community colleges, even when qualified to attend more selective colleges (Newman 1973; Jaffe et al. 1968). When Black students did attend white colleges, around 42 percent reported experiencing discrimination from white faculty, in grading or in interactions during or after class (Boyd 1974). The persuasive power of cultural deprivation theory lay in its ability to downplay anti-Black racism and the broader needs of Black students affected by segregation. Yet the compensatory approach became so commonsensical that it was ingrained in desegregation criteria created by the federal government.

Remediation in Postsecondary Desegregation Litigation

Within cultural deprivation theory, remediation was “compensation” for childhood deprivation, a fact that did not make it an obvious policy to apply to colleges. But efforts to litigate college desegregation established its relevance there, warping cultural deprivation theory to fit the college context. The stage for this application was set by a 1969 US Supreme Court decision to uphold a district court ruling on postsecondary desegregation in Alabama State Teachers Association v. Alabama Public School and College Authority (1968), or ASTA. The ASTA decision permitted Alabama to build an extension campus of Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, where a Black college, Alabama State College, already operated. In effect, this ruling allowed white-controlled university systems to establish or enhance white colleges or branch campuses of white colleges in close proximity to (and competing for students with) Black colleges. ASTA set up the conflict that would make it difficult to develop desegregation plans for nearby white and Black colleges in Savannah and other cities, like Nashville, Tennessee, and Tallahassee, Florida.5 This refusal to intervene in (or enabling of) college segregation was based in the argument that desegregating K–12 schools would “probably resolve” postsecondary segregation by better preparing students for college.6 In effect, college preparation—not the efforts of white-controlled university systems to secure the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Technologies of This Theory”: Desegregation as Remediation, Early 1970s
• 2. Assessing Potential: Writing Placement as a Retention Strategy, Mid-1970s
• 3. Measures of Control: Writing Programs and Institutional Identity, Late 1970s
• 4. “Who’s the Villain?”: Writing Assessment in Desegregation Policy, 1980s and Beyond
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• Index