OPINION: Dr. Jane Ellen McAllister Symposium presents an African American icon and combats educational racism

Vicksburg and the Vicksburg Campus of Hinds Community College hosted a two-day conference on October 24 and 25, 2024. (The 24th would have been the 125th birthday of Dr. Jane Ellen McAllister, who was being honored by the symposium.) While the major purpose of the event was to acquaint a younger generation and broader world with the legendary, giant of an educator, its secondary purpose, exposing and combating ongoing racism in education, was also ever in the forefront.

The driving force behind the symposium was Dr. Bettye J. Gardner, a cousin of Dr. McAllister. She assembled a group of supporters, creating the Dr. Jane Ellen McAllister House Foundation Board, planning the symposium, and securing funding from the Mississippi Humanities Council and other donors. The presenters at the symposium included keynote speakers Dr. Ralph Eubanks, Dr. Maryemma Graham, and Dr. Jarvis Givens and panelists Dr. Joi Spencer, Ms. Kaynetra Tucker, Dr. Deidre Wheaton, Dr. Doris Ginn, Mr. David Rae Morris, and Dr. Ivory Phillips.

Thanks to a documentary film being produced by Morris and comments made by Gardner, Eubanks, Graham, Givens, Spencer, Ginn, and Phillips, the audience was able to learn a great deal about Dr. McAllister. 

She was born October 24, 1899, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her mother, Flora and father, Richard saw to it that she and her siblings were well educated. After graduating from high school at 15, she attended and graduated from Talladega College at 19, she began a teaching career that took her to Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. In the meantime, she earned a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan in its inaugural Master’s Program in Education and became the first Black woman to receive a Doctoral degree in education in the world.

As a teacher educator, she worked with Black teacher associations throughout the South. She also wrote extensively on education, especially on rural education in Black schools. 

She perhaps was at the pinnacle of her career as director of the teacher education program at Miner Teachers College in D.C. She became nationally known for her work and labored there for 25 years. Then with the aging of her parents, she returned to Vicksburg to teach at Jackson State College, from which she retired in 1969, after developing such pioneering things as the College Readiness Program, the Tele-Lecture Series, and Town Meeting on the Air.

After retirement, she lived alone in the family home in Vicksburg. She died in 1996, donating her body to science.

As the speakers presented their research, the audience could realize even more her importance as a teacher educator during her lifetime and in these days of violence-prone, rising conservativism. She offered prescriptions for the problems facing Black schools. One can see the resurrection, or at least the manifestations of such problems today.

Dr. Ralph Eubanks, Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, for an example, talked about the historically racist environment of Mississippi, particularly about the phenomenon of segregation and the later, so-called freedom of choice and desegregation plans. These he described as illusory, things that enabled the perpetuation of racial division and disparities in education. After describing his own public education experiences, witnessing the unfolding of matters following Brown v. Board of Education and Alexander v. Holmes and after talking with contemporary freedom school attendees, he concluded that there can be no real justice without real integration.

Dr. Joi Spencer, who serves as Dean of Education at the University of California Riverside, characterized her work in education as being about freedom. Education must be about the freeing of individuals to fully develop and express themselves and about freeing communities to be full partners in America and the world, not shackled by racism, sexism, and other such impediments. She described the work that her school of education does as “fugitive pedagogy” and as designed to make her students schoolhouse activists.

Dr. Maryemma Graham, Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas, concentrated on McAllister’s role in the humanities. She talked about the role of McAllister in the 75th anniversary celebration at Jackson State College, emphasizing McAllister’s modesty as she worked with Margaret Walker Alexander and others on such projects. Speaking forcefully on McAllister’s rejection of the idea of “cultural deprivation,” she stated that “cultural literacy” was high on her list as the antidote to the cultural exclusion imposed by racism in America.

Dr. Jarvis Givens, an Assistant Professor in Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, spent a substantial portion of his time describing how McAllister involved herself in speaking to Black teachers’ groups, in helping them revise their curricula and in organizing for their own power and self-help. He described how one teacher in a rural Louisiana school subversively taught her students from the writings of Carter G. Woodson. He indicated that most of the Black teachers who wrote dissertations on Black education were those who had attended HBCUs. He ended by referencing the research, digitizing and archival establishment that he had set-up and was operating.

At the end of the first day’s sessions, Morris showed the documentary on McAllister’s life and commented the next day on how such a source could be used to help sustain her memory and vision. On the panel with Dr. Deidre Wheaton, Dr. Doris Ginn, and Dr. Ivory Phillips, Mr. David Rae Morris re-emphasized that point. Dr. Wheaton showed a video to explain how JSU’s college of education was sustaining the kinds of things that Dr. McAllister had done. Dr. Ginn referenced the kind of work being done by several of McAllister’s students as ways in which McAllister’s vision is being sustained. Dr. Phillips pointed out that programs and actions such as the College Readiness Program, the 13-Colleges Curriculum Program, and the Ayers vs. Waller lawsuit had been designed to sustain McAllister’s vision. He also stated that activists needed to be more engaged in order to forestall the current book bans in schools and libraries and to help secure increased compensation and respect for teachers as professionals. Those things, too, would help sustain the vision of McAllister.  

The symposium was one of high quality and can yield great results if its messages can be widely distributed. Meanwhile, the symposium encourages us all to realize the importance of education and that access to genuine, comprehensive education is a human right that can, should, and must be fought for every day.