I wrote an article called “Reflections on Whiteness: Integrating Upward Bound in the 1960s” and published it in Schools: Studies in Education 21:2(Fall 2024). Thanks to editor Andy Kaplan for his support.
Here’s the abstract:
Upward Bound (UB), created in 1965 to provide educational enrichment for low-income youths, had to be racially integrated. In 1966, I was among three White northern teens sent to integrate UB at Xavier University in New Orleans. My family had lived in North Carolina in the early 1960s, participating in civil rights actions, so I had had some exposure to White responses to integration. I excerpt my letters home that summer of 1966 to assess the essentially White curriculum of UB. Two years prior to my stint in New Orleans, Freedom Schools had emerged in 1964 in Mississippi. Freedom Schools were in stark contrast to White Citizens Council schools that flourished in response to the Brown decision. Freedom Schools and, to an extent, UB, offered powerful alternatives to segregated educational settings. As an older White woman shaped by the civil rights movement, I now work in a coalition for educational reparations.
The letters that I wrote home to my parents that summer were the impetus for these reflections. My 13-year-old handwriting and diagrams endeared me to my younger self, despite the attitudes I expressed. The article has some illustrations, but publishing the scans of my letters wasn’t an option. So I share them here.
I’m grateful to my father for saving all my letters, moving them from place to place from the time I left home in 1971 until he cleared out many of his filing cabinets before his death in 2017.
