- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum," we'll talk to the presidents of Saint Augustine's and Shaw University's about their alliance to press the city of Raleigh for support long overdue and meet an educator and podcaster who's on a mission to see greater equity in schools.

And he says the way forward requires a look back.

Stay with us.

- [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum" is a production of PBS North Carolina with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality Public Television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] - Welcome to "Black Issues Forum."

I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

At a recent meeting of the Raleigh Economic Development and Innovation Committee, presidents of both say Augustine's and Shaw University's collaborated in presenting a case for city support and financial investment.

As a part of their argument, they highlighted the success of an initiative in Charlotte, developed by Mayor Vi Lyles that brought over $80 million to Johnson C. Smith University.

Both presidents are here today to share more about their presentation and the response that they received from the committee and from the Raleigh Mayor, Mary-Ann Baldwin.

I wanna welcome Dr. Christine McPhail, the president of Saint Augustine's University, and Dr. Paulette Dillard, the president of Shaw University.

I'm so excited to have both of you with us.

- Good morning.

- Dr. McPhail, first, how did this collaboration with Shaw University come about?

- It was a natural happening.

Both Dr. Dillard and I are long-term educators, and we could easily see the connectivity between the two institutions.

We know that our students need support, so we frequently talk about how we can use our combined resources collectively to provide increased access and sustainability at both institutions to better serve students.

So it was a natural collaboration around a common good, common interest, and also our interest in improving higher education quality in the city of Raleigh.

And we believe fundamentally that both of our institutions have historically played a role in that.

And we want the city to know how important it is for them to invest in the future of both of these HBCUs.

- And Dr. Dillard, I imagine you feel pretty much the same.

- Absolutely.

As Dr. McPhail said, it's a natural progression for Shaw University and Saint Augustine's University to collaborate on issues that are, you know, the same literally for our campuses because we serve a similar population of students.

But even more than that, we are longstanding members of the Raleigh community.

And we are not only seeking support, but we're seeking partnership with the city of Raleigh to help the city of Raleigh and our community achieve its widespread goals.

So the whole presentation was not about just investing in our two institutions, it was about economic development for the city of Raleigh and what a critical role our two institutions can play in making sure that there is equitable engagement in all aspects of our community in that economic development.

- And let me.

- And you've got two, yeah, you've got two institutions that have been serving that population for over 150 years.

So it just seemed to make good economic sense, to both Dr. McPhail and I, that we should begin these conversations.

So that was really, and let me point out, the economic development committee of the city council reached out to us and invited us to engage in these discussions that we brought forth the idea.

So I don't want it to go unmentioned that the invite came from the Economic Development Committee to us.

- That is key.

- To engage in this conversation - That is key.

And oftentimes, that's not highlighted in the reports back.

So what would you say, and also Dr. McPhail, are the central tenets of your presentation?

And what were the appeal foundations?

What were you asking for?

- Well, actually we have had two meetings.

The first meeting was just to explore potential opportunities for Saint Augustine's and Shaw to partner with the city of Raleigh on economic development.

So we proposed two initiatives for the city of Raleigh to take a look at.

One was the Racial Equity Initiative, the Mayor's Racial Equity Initiative in Charlotte, which has been very, very successful.

And the other was a proposal to create a digital innovation hub here in Raleigh.

And again, these two ideas were for the city to explore based on our research that these would be two initiatives that would benefit the city in a lot of ways, especially the underrepresented communities within the city of Raleigh.

So those were the two initiatives from our original meeting.

And the second meeting, which was Tuesday, a week ago, we came back to hear what the city had discovered in looking into the two ideas that were proposed in that original meeting.

So again, those were the two ideas.

It was an ideation session.

It wasn't an appeal.

We haven't gotten there yet.

We are in the early discussions about it.

But these were two models that we believe could work amazingly in our community.

And the city looked into it, they assigned staff to it.

And so now we are waiting to see if there is a way that the city can be the driver of a public-private partnership on racial equity with both Saint Augustine's and Shaw being core to that.

- Dr. McPhail, let me ask you, at that presentation, and thank you very much Dr. Dillard, but at the presentation that was recently made at the city council meeting, it was indeed explained what was discovered about the MREI, which is the Mayor's Racial Equity Initiative in Charlotte.

What would you say were the reactions?

How did you gauge the reaction of the leadership and the mayor and what was your reaction?

Do you still think what happened in Charlotte is something that's possible in Raleigh?

- I'm gonna start with the latter part of your question first.

My reaction is that this is a beginning.

This is a conversation that, of course, must continue and then we must dig deeper.

It's very important for the city of Raleigh and others to understand that Shaw and Saint Augustine's University are major employers in this area.

And I don't think that's as obvious to many people as it should be.

We bring a huge economic impact, and we are some of the, as I mentioned, the largest employers in this area.

And many times we are engaged in the conversations about economic development after the fact.

So we're saying, because we have such a unique history in this city and we bring a considerable amount of assets to the conversations, recognize the impact that we can have, that we have, in terms of expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We have the capacity to help the city of Raleigh deliver, in a very huge way, their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

We don't have to establish new policies to reach marginalized students, underserved communities, et cetera, so that all of our citizens will have access to quality of life.

That's what we do.

That's what we've done historically.

So that's what we bring to the table already.

So in terms of what I thought the city did was to go and do the exploration.

Now, I think we need to, we talked about collaboration earlier.

I think that we do need to have Dr. Dillard and myself in the room with the city staff, with the city team, to say, "This is what we see that emerged from your exploration.

Let's see how we can take that conversation to the next level."

Now, the conversation could possibly stop if the city believed that Dr. Dillard and I were asking for the same amount of money that the Charlotte leaders put into the equation.

- And were you?

Were you asking for that amount of money or what were you actually asking for?

- We were asking for possibilities, to take a look.

And I'm gonna ask Dr. Dillard to expand upon this because she has an eloquent explanation as well.

Look at the capacity of the city of Raleigh.

Let's take that into consideration and then let's determine what it is that this city can do.

We can't compare the city of Raleigh with Charlotte.

We can say, "Here's a good model that we can learn from.

Now how can we apply the best practices from that model to the city of Raleigh?"

- Absolutely.

- And that's where we are.

- And we have about a minute left.

Dr. Dillard, did you wanna share what you think are the next steps?

- The next steps, we believe, is to continue to explore with the city what we can do, as Dr. McPhail said, in Raleigh.

And what can we do to leverage the historically Black colleges and universities in the city of Raleigh to achieve the economic development goals of the city, especially as it relates to communities of color.

- So you feel very positively about what happened at the last meeting and about the next steps?

- Absolutely.

- Very good.

Very good.

And you as well, Dr. McPhail?

- Yes, we're eager to help the city of Raleigh democratize economic development in the city of Raleigh.

And we know that we are prepared to do that.

We're looking very much forward to being contributing partners.

- Well, I am excited for what is to come and what can grow for both institutions.

Dr. Christine McPhail and Dr. Paulette Dillard, thank you so much for your time.

- Thank you for your support.

- Thank you.

It's always a delight to see you.

- Likewise.

And we have been talking to leaders in higher education about how HBCUs can generate equity.

Our next guest is also an educator, and he and a group of his cohorts have recognized the impact of inequity on the mental health and academic performance of today's students.

He and others believe the way to dismantle inequity is knowledge of how we got here.

I'd like to welcome Michael Parker West, an administrator in the Wake County Public School system and host of a podcast titled "The Way Out is Back Through," available on Apple iTunes, Spotify, and wherever podcasts are heard.

Michael, thank you so much for coming and being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure, it's a pleasure.

- Well first, just explain, what's the meaning of your podcast title?

- Yeah, so "The Way Out is Back Through" is a phrase I first heard from one of my mentors, Deena Hayes-Green, who is the executive director of the Racial Equity Institute.

She's also on the school board in Guilford County schools.

And she borrowed it, I believe, from a pastor in New York named Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood.

But the name and the meaning of that title is really about this idea that the way out is back through, that I believe that the way forward is first to confront where we've been and to be honest about it, right?

I feel like we have a fundamental problem in this country with telling the truth about how we got here.

And it's why I believe that so many of us are confused about where we need to go next.

- Well, what motivated you to wanna learn more about the history of public schools and to just get into this work at all?

- Yeah, so, you know, all the educators that I know, right, we're working in a house that none of us today built and too few of us ever take the time to examine that house's foundation.

And there's a great resource out there by Dr. James E. Ford and Ethan Roy called "Deep Rooted."

It's a resource that talks about the history of race and education in North Carolina and how those two things are linked.

But was always wild to me going into educational spaces and you know, teachers and school leaders are not required to know or to learn anything about the community that they're serving, right?

So I taught history for many years, and my first teaching job in North Carolina was in Vance County.

I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is largely a mostly wealthy, white suburb of Philadelphia.

- Mm-hmm.

- And there was a history that had been kept from me, right?

So about 15, 20 minutes away from my hometown was Levittown, this story of the Myers very family, right?

- Yeah.

- And so, this family was confronted with racism, that I was led to believe, was a uniquely southern problem, right?

And so one of the things I've had to unlearn as I've gotten older is like, this is not a uniquely, this is an American problem, right?

And so this idea that, an instructive exercise, I think, for everyone in this country, but particularly for white people, is if you live in a community that is mostly made up of white people, chances are it's not just serendipitously white.

It's almost certainly deliberately and intentionally white.

And it's worth it to know how it got to be that way because it helps explain modern outcomes.

So when I moved down to North Carolina and I began teaching in Vance County, I learned that Vance County was mostly Black, and that too was deliberate and on purpose.

So Vance County was created in 1881 through an insidious racial gerrymandering scheme to isolate the Black vote.

So here is a community that was designed to marginalize, to isolate, right?

And then we look at modern outcomes and we have the audacity to be shocked at, right, how this history plays into what we see today.

- And so you feel like understanding that history certainly helps you to serve the students that you are teaching, but also kind of collaborate with the community of teachers and educators that are in that community?

- Absolutely, and the resilience of the folks that are there.

Like, it's amazing.

I still have people that I deeply love and I think of as extended family that are in Vance County.

And I just think about the ways in which how few of us, particularly white folks, know that history, and yet are sanctioned by the state to teach in these schools that we're not required to know or learn anything about the history of that place.

So that's where that whole podcast came from.

- And you know, Michael, you've done a lot of research for your podcast and also to build a presentation about how we got here.

And most recently, you facilitated a conversation at the 2023 Color of Education Conference.

Can you share a few historical highlights from your presentation that are core to understanding why the way out is back through?

- Yeah, yeah, so the history of public school policy in North Carolina, a lot of it is based on backlash, right?

A backlash to reconstruction, a backlash to the Brown decision.

We are living through a backlash right now of ideas around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And so our state constitution, which was rewritten in 1868, has some of the most progressive language about the need of the state to guard and maintain the right of the people to access public education.

So it's actually, even today, a remarkably progressive document.

But if you know anything about the history of North Carolina and the South, you know that the gains of reconstruction were short-lived.

You have the white redeemers who come through and take back power by any means necessary.

They try to do it through ballots in the case of, like, Vance County, for example.

But when they couldn't do it with ballots, they would do it with bullets, which is what happened in 1898 in Wilmington.

- We're very familiar with the 1898 insurrection.

And oftentimes people will compare it to the insurrection that we recently experienced.

- That's right.

That's right.

And so out of that white supremacist campaign of the late 19th century, you have folks like Charles Aycock, who becomes the so-called education governor.

And it's said that for every day he's in office, a school is built somewhere in North Carolina.

And he ran on a platform, an unabashed platform, of disenfranchising Black folks and removing their right to vote.

And so one of the ways he got that accomplished was through literacy tests, because he couldn't say, after the 15th amendment, you can't just bar Black folks from voting on the basis of race alone.

So he had to find some other way to do it with race neutral language.

So literacy tests were key to that strategy.

But also at that time, there's a sizable number of white folks who also couldn't read and write at that time.

So how do you solve this problem?

So one of the ways they did this was to have a massive building campaign in North Carolina about building schools.

And Aycock is very clear, there's no dog whistles in 1900, right?

And so he's literally saying that the white child under 13 years old who can't read and write before 1908, which is when the literacy test grandfather clause they put in place was set to expire, he says they will have no excuse because the way that he goes about doing this is putting a grandfather clause in place and says that if your grandfather voted prior to 1867, you're exempt from taking literacy tests.

So then.

- So there's there connection there.

- That's right.

- And some familiar language as well.

- That's right.

That's right, and so you fast forward to '54, and Brown versus Board of Education, which ruled that separate is inherently unequal.

And North Carolina, as well as the rest of the South, in many cases, were openly opposed to complying with the Brown decision.

And some places in the South closed schools altogether for months or years at a time.

- And that was the backlash.

- That was the backlash.

And so you have, North Carolina institutes a Pearsall Plan, which among other things, number one, it moved authority from the state of public schools to local municipalities so that if the state got sued, much like your father, that he'd sue the local school board and not the state of North Carolina.

That was a deliberate strategy to avoid culpability in that regard.

- And for those who may not know, my father's family initiated the effort to integrate Raleigh public schools.

- That's right.

- And that Pearsall Plan was very integral to being a stop gap, a measure to make sure it wouldn't happen.

And so now what we have facing us, if we can bring it forward, is a voucher system.

- Yeah.

- A voucher system that is sort of another name for school choice.

And so I'd like for you to kind of share how we often emphasize the importance or the need to emphasize the importance of history and looking back, but don't necessarily make the connection.

So how can you make the connection between what we're looking at today in terms of school vouchers and school choice, and what has happened in the past?

- Yeah, so two things I would say to that.

So a lot of folks forget, or conveniently forget, I guess, that the Pearsall Plan had a provision, a freedom of choice provision in there, that allowed families to use state money to finance their child's public education in a private school.

That's the origin of school vouchers, which it was a white escape valve in the post Brown world.

And so that part of the conversation, when I see talk about vouchers today, I find, is very conveniently left out of the conversation.

The second thing I'd say about vouchers and school choice is, and I'm not an expert in school choice, but what I will say is that those with the means already have choice.

They've always had choice.

One of the most important things that families say when they move to an area is that school quality is a major driver in why they move there, right?

And so there's an argument about having folks that don't have the means access to options.

But the most recent expansion of scholarships in North Carolina in the voucher program don't target low income folks, folks without means, it's actually removing an income threshold and allowing folks that already have kids in private schools to get state dollars to finance those private school vouchers.

And so, the main question I think that we have to ask is like, who is this designed for?

Who is it benefiting?

And so that question should be applied to both private schools and public schools.

And I think that the way forward has to be first to confront where we've been.

- Now as an educator, what kind of feedback have you received from your colleagues and from others as you've made presentations talking about the importance of looking back?

After all, right now, we're in a time period when, after George Floyd, rather, people had once proclaimed, "We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, never again in our country."

And now those words have become somewhat of a negative thing and people are not really using them as frequently.

What are your thoughts on that?

- Well, as Dr. McPhail said that, you know, we don't need new policy, we need to work on living out the policies we already have.

And so I think the most important work for any educator, any system, any institution, is to close the gap between what we say we believe and what we're actually doing.

And I'll tell you that bringing this history up and highlighting it as a way to cajole our institutions to move is not always met with universal praise.

But I will say that I think it's received differently from a straight white man than it is from people of color, other marginalized folks.

And so I think there's a role that white people need to play with other white people, men need to play with other men, to help move people toward closing that gap between our values and our actions.

- Just quickly, do you support educating on history in your current work?

- Absolutely, I don't know how you can be effective if you don't.

If you don't know how you got here, and one of the things that one of my mentors, Dr. Jeff Duncan Andrade, talks a lot about is the idea of moving through cultural responsiveness.

And he says that he actually wants us to be more community responsive.

And he says, if you're community responsive, you are by default, culturally responsive.

But if you're community responsive, you're recognizing that the culture and the language and the history where you do the work is unique to that space.

And when he says unique to that space, he means unique to the building that you're in.

So, so many of our schools have such a rich history, and so few, I find, of the folks working and teaching and learning in those spaces know little about the history of their own buildings, which is, you know, that to me is a good starting point for us.

- Well, also, they can certainly join you on your podcast and we hope that they will and wish you the very best.

And thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us today.

- Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

- Michael Parker West.

And we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BlackIssuesForum.

You can also find our full episode on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS Video App, video.pbsnc.org.

Thank you for spending time with us.

I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

Make the most of today.

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum" is a production of PBS North Carolina with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.