“We got what we wanted…but we lost what we had”:

A Counterstory of Brown v. Board towards narrative and educational justice

Abstract

Race-based exclusion was fundamental to the creation and segregation of US schools, and the racial school-based trauma (SBT) continues in U.S. public schools today. The stories our nation tells of desegregation – of Ruby Bridges, the Little Rock Nine – are lauded as testaments of American progress. But these stories are often told from the white-dominant perspective.

In this paper, our research team of 6th and 7th-generation Black Chapel Hillians and education scholars examines retellings of school desegregation in the 1960s to bring narrative justice to America’s historical record (McGregor, 2018). Oral histories from elders about their experiences in Lincoln High School and the Orange County Training School serve as counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) that illuminate truths about community care and Black brilliance even in the face of injustice and segregation (Bullock et al., 2012). We compare the popular iconography of desegregation with the experiences of Black communities who themselves desegregated schools, revealing a chasm between reality and the false dominant narratives of US school desegregation.

Our interpretive analyses and coding attend to community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and Systemically Trauma-Informed Practice (Authors, 2020) and contribute to findings about how whiteness operates to construct distorted desegregation narratives, erasing the school-based trauma of Black children and communities. In addition, we consider the policy- and practice-based consequences of over six decades of narrative injustice in the retelling of the history of desegregation.