Reading the South

A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation As You Go.
By David W. Beckwith.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 384 pages. Cloth $29.95.

The trouble with David Beckwith’s fascinating memoir about his year (1969–1970) spent teaching in Leland, Mississippi, as one of the first white teachers in a black high school is the ending—regrettably after an apparently successful transition to teaching, Beckwith left it behind and support for public schools in the Delta eroded precipitously as the region embarked upon school desegregation. While scholarly readers may view Beckwith’s work with uncertainty because it comes from his diary turned manuscript nearly 40 years later, he offers, at the very least, an instructive tale of one white man’s awakening to the liberal conscience via teaching across a racial divide in an ostensibly transformative time. Arguably, Beckwith offers more—including a window into the contemporary as a prologue to challenges facing educators today.

From the perspective of an educational historian, Beckwith’s account provides an invaluable daily record of school happenings in a black high school as Mississippi school districts embarked upon desegregation first by mixing teachers, a final act of desperation to stall progress in a longstanding history of massive resistance to racial equality in education. Beckwith, who earned bachelor’s degree in business administration and had neither teacher certification nor experience, became an unwitting participant in this diversion. When desperate for postgraduation employment and motivated to save money for graduate study, he signed on to teach English or history in a Leland public high school. Unbeknownst to him, he was soon assigned to teach history at Lincoln Attendance Center (the historically black high school).

The essence of Beckwith’s story involves the day-today of his experience and newfound collegiality with African American teachers and students in close proximity. As the distant and strange become familiar to each, both black and white, barriers melt away. A bittersweet story emerges, one sated with the semishocking tribulations of classroom management, student discipline, and school politics inherent to novice teaching in a high poverty area. Aside from oral histories, Beckwith’s enhanced journalistic account fills an important gap in the materials made available to educational researchers who often find so little about what was actually happening in schools from school board records and official documents. Some aspects, such as corporal punishment or that we called schools “attendance centers” may shock contemporary sensibilities but, suffice it say, Beckwith’s is a good but sobering read.

A New Day in the Delta appears upon the heels of a growing body of literature about the negative effects of school desegregation policy and its implementation. One genre of this literature explores teachers’ experiences of transition after Brown v. Board of Education and during desegregation. Advanced by Vanessa Siddle Walker and Adam Fairclough, among others, this work seeks to measure the real “costs” of Brown to the black community. Thinking in terms of the community leadership that black teachers and school principals brought to their communities through black schools, some of this work, but not all, expresses a tone of lament for the past. Albeit with a slightly different twist as Beckwith is white, his book shares a bit of this tone when through his overpowering examples from his interactions with black students he questions the ability of white teachers and desegregation to meet the cultural needs of black students.

Tapping into another genre, Beckwith’s account demonstrates the fallibility of educational policy and policy-making, in the spirit of scholarly studies advanced by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, for example. This work shows how segregated housing patterns, standardized testing, and a “color-blind” judiciary along with other forces has accelerated resegregation of American schools in many places across the country, a pattern signaling the abysmal failure of federal efforts to promote equality. Given the gravity of the host of consequences that arise from public policy, including those that are intended, unintended, and dysfunctional, Beckwith’s subtitle, "Inventing School Desegregation As You Go," highlights the vacuum of planning and leadership that often marks federal educational initiatives that play out quite dubiously on local levels—in this case, school desegregation.

That school desegregation in the Delta occurred ostensibly “on the fly” from Beckwith’s perspective comes as little surprise. In addition to an entrenched resistance to racial progress, paternalistic leadership models diminished the participation and voice of many school teachers and especially black teachers and black schools in policy implementation on the local level. Most certainly, Beckwith’s account demonstrates that he and his colleagues did have questions and strategies to offer up, but in the heat of the day-to-day they lacked any sort of mechanism for broad-based planning, consultation, or insider role in school or district governance at the time. Thus, Beckwith’s story shows how teachers in public schools became left behind, as work spaces inadequate for attracting and retaining young teachers who might otherwise want to have a say in how to establish and maintain good schools took shape.

Given the recurrent nature of inequality and segregation despite our nation’s presumptive “best” efforts, scholars are asking whether or not the South should “turn back” from desegregation. Even if he does not offer a regional remedy, Beckwith’s A New Day in the Delta does give pause to consider his capability for turning back time to provide us with such an expressive take on local history. To the extent that his “new” day strikes a familiar semblance with the often overwhelming challenges faced by novice teachers related to classroom management, student discipline, and facilitation of meaningful student learning experiences, we can learn important lessons about the nature of schools and teachers’ work. He sounded to me like a pretty good teacher . . . if only we could have kept him around.

Amy Wells