♪ ANGIE MILES: In 2024, America marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education ruling.

The Supreme Court decision is considered a watershed moment in the education of Black Americans.

Up next, we'll examine some touchpoints in the journey to equal education in this special edition of VPM News Focal Point.

Production funding for VPM News Focal Point is provided by ♪ ♪ ANGIE MILES: You're watching a special edition of VPM News Focal Point.

I'm Angie Miles.

It was 1954 when the United States Supreme Court held that segregated education was unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

Virginia students were among the plaintiffs in that case.

And Virginia students have our attention now as we consider some key moments in the education of Black Americans, especially in Virginia.

One of the earliest known efforts to educate Black children in Virginia was the Bray School, established in 1760.

Our Adrienne McGibbon takes us to Williamsburg, where researchers are uncovering details about the school and descendants of the students speak about what the discoveries mean to them today.

TONIA MERIDETH: These children were some of the first scholars in the new world.

That's an American story that should be shared and taught.

I grew up believing that my ancestors only picked cotton on a plantation.

So to find out that there was a school in the 18th century before this country was a nation, there were Black children being educated and receiving what we would consider a private education.

To know that completely changed the trajectory of my life.

I'm the oral historian for the Bray School Lab.

I am creating and documenting the resiting of the Bray School and elevating the voices of the descendant community.

Education to an individual means agency.

And that's what these children had.

Despite the fact that they were being indoctrinated in the Church of England and indoctrinated that slavery was their natural station in life, they took that education and went back to their communities to help out and educate their families.

And so, to learn this information, the impact that it had on me is the impact that I want it to have on others.

For many people in the community, they don't know that they're descendants.

We are only in the record books when it pertains to money because we were property.

So that can be something that is hard to sit with.

Just talking about the fact that I'm descended from those families, what that infers is I'm descended from them because an enslaver had an ancestor of mine through the practice of rape that existed inside the institution of slavery.

JOHNETTE GORDON-WEAVER: There are not a lot of written records concerning us, whether enslaved or free, and those that are you oftentimes have been destroyed because it wasn't important because they were just Black people.

There were some free families that were- had students at the Bray School and one of those names is my mother's maiden name.

There was a Hunley child who possibly could have attended the Bray School.

I'm a very fortunate person in that I can trace my roots pretty much back to 1689 or so.

And we know from whom the mother, who was white, we know what her name was, ergo we could trace from her, you know, up ‘til the present because she had children who were not enslaved.

They were people and there were people who were often forgotten in the story of, not just Williamsburg, but in America as a whole, and it's my opportunity to let you know that they lived.

And I think African Americans, particularly young people, would gain so much and give so much to this country if they actually knew who they were and where they come from.

ELIZABETH DREMBUS: My role as a genealogist is to trace the descendant lines of the students that attended the school, that is going to include researching them in all kinds of records and see if we can move forward from the 1760s to the present day with finding their descendants and really telling their story and also kind of maybe shedding some light on their lived experiences.

The school itself in Williamsburg was in existence from 1760 until 1774.

So it's a 14-year existence.

We have attendance lists from only three of those 14 years.

So from those lists, we have 80 some names.

As a genealogist, normally you would work from the present going backwards.

Start with what you know, then talk to your parents, then talk to your grandparents, but in this case, we're doing a little bit of both.

We're doing a little bit of that with the descendant community, and they've been terrific and engaging.

And then we're also starting with the students and the student lists and moving forward in time.

I haven't hit a situation where there hasn't been records.

It's just finding those names in those records.

So, for example, if I'm talking about someone in the Peyton Randolph household, we are going to be looking at the wills and the inventories in the estate accounts to find the list, the names of the kids.

JANICE CANADAY: But who were those children?

You have the names on the list, but there are no pictures.

So I want to know what those children looked like.

Who were those children to the folks that brought them to the school?

Were they their children?

Were the children of adult males and women on the property that they owned?

Lots of things that I think about that and question about that.

I think that there's a deeper story here.

(sheep bleating) I have a great, great grandmother, Sally, who lived to be 93 years old.

(indistinct) Do I have her genes inside of me?

How many children did she have?

You're talking about people who've had the majority of everything that spices up life stripped away from them.

Whether it's your religion, your ability to write, your speech, your love of color, styling your hair, all those sorts of things.

And all those things are part of who you are.

And so for me, I think about how I love to cook, my passion for music, my passion for reading, storytelling, and say, okay, where'd that come from?

I'm really lack a quilt or a puzzle with many, many pieces.

And every piece is important.

But I think because the Bray School is here and it's now brought to the forefront, not in the shadows, it will challenge people to broaden their perspective and their focus and what they once thought.

But in order to tell that whole story, you've got to be open-minded and willing to understand that it wasn't just one set of people who were doing, it was everybody.

ANGIE MILES: Children enrolled in the Bray School were taught that slavery was their fate, and they should simply accept it.

It was precisely the refusal to accept her fate in a segregated and unequal school that prompted a young girl in Prince Edward County to take action.

And her action led to Virginia joining the Supreme Court case against separate but equal.

Adrienne McGibbon tells us about memorializing Barbara Johns.

(soft music) STEVEN WEITZMAN: If you read the story about Barbara Johns, it's extraordinary.

It's so heroic.

ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Artist Steven Weitzman is putting the finishing touches on a statue of Barbara Johns.

She was 16 and attending the segregated Moton High School in Farmville when she decided to take a stand.

STEVEN WEITZMAN: And here you had a young lady that just was just fed up with the inequities of the school system and promises made, but not kept.

ADRIENNE McGIBBON: In 1951, she gathered 400 classmates into their school auditorium and called for a walkout.

STEVEN WEITZMAN: And the story is what created the design, or the concept behind this sculpture.

ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Once completed, this statue is destined for the U.S. Capitol.

Barbara Johns will be one of two people representing Virginia in Statuary Hall, replacing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Johns died in 1991.

Recently, her sister, Joan, shared her family story with a group of Virginia teachers.

(audience applauds) JOAN JOHNS COBBS: I thought that the white community would try to harm us, and I was worried that our parents would discipline us too.

They were shocked, but in some ways they weren't so surprised because they knew Barbara was outspoken.

ADRIENNE McGIBBON: For her safety.

Johns finished high school with family in Alabama.

She went on to attend Spelman College, married, had five children, and worked as a librarian.

117 students at Moton joined as plaintiffs in the US Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in schools.

JULIE LANGAN: It was easy to reach consensus.

ADRIENNE McGIBBON: Julie Langan was part of the commission that decided to put Johns in Statuary Hall.

JULIE LANGAN: The commission was looking for a subject that really represents Virginia today.

JOAN JOHNS COBBS: And I think the fact that they chose her was one way they're trying to rectify what happened in the past.

♪ ANGIE MILES: And what about now?

Did the victory in Brown lead to a more unified and equal education?

Segregated and unequal education remains a challenge today, as does implicit bias in our education systems.

I spoke with several high achievers and researchers about impediments to closing the achievement gap for students of color.

ANGIE MILES: LaShawn Payton is an educator LaSHAWN PAYTON: This vowel says it's, what?

Its name.

That's right.

(children conversing) ANGIE MILES: Who remembers what it was like to be a student.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: I did not like it.

The teachers were not really kind they were not really nice.

And the learning to me was just so rigid and so...

It was just, it didn't welcome me into the work.

It was boring to me.

'Sit at the table.

Do what I say.

Move when I tell you to move.'

I felt like, you know, almost like it was prison.

ANGIE MILES: She says she cried at the start of first grade and got sent to a coat closet.

Payton is now head of the Montessori school she founded in Northern Virginia.

Here, she strives to make instruction responsive to the students' interests and needs.

She says, her own start in school was the opposite of that.

As an adult, she's had to shrug off the weight of others' low expectations, based in part, she says, on her ethnic-sounding name.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: Seeing my name on the resume, it probably got skipped to the bottom.

Plenty of times I got overlooked in positions where I was overqualified for a position, but they gave it to somebody else.

So, many times, just through my name, I've been overlooked or people just judge me based upon my name.

ANGIE MILES: And she says that name bias began when she sat in classrooms taught by white teachers.

Corey Harris and Cedric Jennings are educators, both teaching at the college level and both Ph.D. candidates.

Harris recalls being the lone Black child in his suburban classroom, when his teacher without assessing him, planned to label him, "In need of remedial help.” COREY HARRIS: That was very upsetting to my mother because at that point I could already read and write.

I ended up helping, you know, to read to the class.

I ended up reading to the class, which was, yeah, it really showed me a lot about at a early age, about the implicit biases within teachers.

ANGIE MILES: Harris was later identified as, "Gifted," but has misgivings still about bias against Black, brown and low income students within a system that, he says, is not designed to help them achieve.

COREY HARRIS: The effect of the history in this country, where Black people have been racialized and we have been continually, shown or depicted, I should say, as those who are behind or in need of some sort of help.

You know, and even when that's the case, it's often assumed that the reason we're behind is because of some innate quality.

ANGIE MILES: Jennings, whose early life is chronicled in a Pulitzer Prize winning book, says the burden of low expectations came when he left his impoverished Washington, D.C. High School and arrived at his Ivy League college.

CEDRIC JENNINGS: Being part of a underrepresented population, not only are you trying to do the best job you can do academically, but going into settings and rooms where you know and can feel, your white peers question your worthiness of even being able to come in and sit at the table.

That's challenging, whether or not you want to ask a question 'cause you don't want to be seen as stupid or dumb.

ANGIE MILES: University of Virginia, Professor Tonya Moon, has spent decades studying the Black-white achievement gap.

She says it makes a great deal of difference, not only what expectations and support students experience but also, what their economic lives are like before they ever reach the schoolhouse doors.

TONYA MOON: Oftentimes, what we see is kids who come from enriched environments, quality healthcare, nutrition, rich family learning experiences.

Those kids often times come to school either as an early reader are already as a reader.

Kids who don't have access to those things.

oftentimes, don't come to school as an early reader or a reader and so, at the outset, kids start behind.

And that mostly, is not a Black-white issue, it's really an income issue.

ANGIE MILES: So if the Black-white achievement gap is not primarily because of race, then why does it appear that way?

Possibly because of the disproportionate number of Black students who live in poverty.

In America, more than 12% of children are living below the poverty line.

What that really means, is about 7% of white children and nearly 18% of Black children, live in poverty.

And for children of Hispanic descent, the number is even higher.

Black and brown children are about three times more likely to be poor than white children.

A recent study by Harvard researchers found that traumatic events connected with poverty can adversely impact the brain development of children.

And according to the study's authors, the differences are not genetic, but are race related to the extent that systemic racism might be subjecting some to more poverty than others experience.

And until we can figure out how to eliminate the inequities that we see in our society, we'll always deal with the inequities that we see in achievement in schools.

Oftentimes, kids who dont have access to higher levels of income also go to educational systems in areas that are economically deprived.

ANGIE MILES: That was the case for Jennings, who graduated from a high school in an impoverished, urban community while dealing with hard days at home.

Jennings describes his single mother as a supermom, a federal employee with a strong work ethic and abundant Christian convictions, who was always looking for enrichment opportunities for him, expecting him to learn and excel.

But finances were a major challenge.

ANGIE MILES: Could you describe what life was like at school, and what life was like at home and some of the more traumatic things that you experienced during your youth?

CEDRIC JENNINGS: When I left for school I knew that I had to eat.

And I was on free and reduced lunch so I made it a point to eat breakfast and I made it a point to eat lunch because on some days I knew that if I didn't eat, I wouldn't get a meal at home because there was no food at home.

You learn to appreciate the heat (chuckles) when you're at school in the wintertime, knowing that there were periods where we didnt have heat.

You had to boil the water to even take a bath, a hot bath.

ANGIE MILES: Jennings says that enduring multiple evictions, learning to go without, taught him to go within to focus intently on getting an education as the surest path to a better future.

He says that teaching incoming students at Northern Virginia Community College opened his eyes to how poverty does not discriminate in its negative effects.

CEDRIC JENNINGS: And it is a high proportion of people of color who experience the sting of poverty.

But there's some white folk who experience it too, and they end up in my classes as well.

So it's just an interesting dynamic engaging those students, helping them to really navigate the environment.

I deal from compassion.

I deal out of the experience of what I would've wanted people to say to me when I first got to that environment.

ANGIE MILES: Compassion is what Payton says is key.

And as the girl who was sent to cry in a closet at the beginning of her school career, who became an adolescent, who cut school, made trouble, got expelled, she says, "It's the compassion, cultural understanding, and access to resources that will help close the achievement gap and improve outcomes for all children."

There is research to support her viewpoint.

One University of Virginia study finds that the Montessori approach, which Peyton offers at her school, appears to shrink the gap as these learners continue with their education.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: When it comes to Montessori, they don't need to ask for pencils, paper, crayons.

Everything is right there.

They don't need to ask the teacher for snacks, it's right there in the environment.

If I'm hungry, I can go get a snack and then I can go back and focus on my work.

If we just follow the lead of the child, Montessori gives them that freedom of choice.

And that's one of the benefits that I see in the Montessori environment.

My son, he chooses to read.

I don't tell him he has to read.

He chooses to do it.

If we put the funding into early childhood education, and we make sure that those programs are at quality level, when they leave early childhood education they know the alphabet.

They know the sounds.

They can read.

They can understand simple sentences.

They can understand the concept of numbers.

If we put the resources in the foundation, the achievement gap would be nonexistent.

ANGIE MILES: The need for better economic health for all American children and families, the need for high expectations that are free from implicit biases and supported by a responsive and well-funded early childhood education.

These are some of the suggestions, based on research, and based on the experiences of these high achievers.

And the research suggests the achievement gap is not the result of a genetic or innate flaw in the students, but more about the environment that shapes them before they arrive at the school doors and after.

COREY HARRIS: It's assumed that theres nothing wrong with the system, and it's only the children need to get in line.

But actually, I submit that there's really something wrong with the system.

If you look at the history, and history of education in America, it's not working for everybody.

And going forward, we need to interrogate what's wrong with the system and how the system can meet people where they are instead of having people meet the system where it is.

LaSHAWN PAYTON: We could talk about statistics.

We could talk about all the research.

We could talk about all of these things.

We've talked about it for many years, its still existence, its still happening when we think about the achievment gap.

Let's put the same resources that we put in wealthier communities into these lower income communities.

The fact is, is we need people who are willing to put down the pens and the pencils and get out here and do the work.

We can bridge that gap.

♪ ANGIE MILES: Another hindrance to equal education for black students is the high rate of suspensions and expulsions, disproportionate for the same types of infractions in schools.

Keyris Manzanares shows us a program in Lynchburg that is reaching for a better approach.

(traffic humming) KEYRIS MANZANARES: For the past year, Lynchburg City Schools have taken a new approach when it comes to suspending students.

Instead of serving suspensions at home, Lynchburg City middle and high school students now come to the Restorative Suspension Center at the Amelia Pride House.

ROBERE SANDIFER: I greet 'em every morning I dap 'em up.

'How are you?'

If they're frowning, 'Nope, we're not going in there.

Let's go talk.

What's going on?'

You know what I mean?

Whatever made you mad outside of here, don't bring it in here because I didn't do it to you.

You just have a good day, so.

And it seems that it's contagious.

Guardian is up.

You guys should be all working.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Robere Sandifer gets students ready for the day by playing relaxing music and enforcing a cell phone-free policy.

At the Restorative Suspension Center, students are engaged in all-day programming that helps them complete their classwork so they don't fall behind.

They also focus on resolving conflict, repairing harm, and healing relationships.

ROBERE SANDIFER: You know, I always tell 'em that you can use your past, you know, we all have adverse, you know, things in our past.

You can use it.

You can either use it as an anchor to weigh you down for the rest of your life, or you can use it as stepping stones.

Hindsight, how you think you probably should have handled that role?

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Sandifer says what helps him connect with students is that he's a Lynchburg native who's been in their shoes.

ROBERE SANDIFER: At the end, I think it's just repairing relationships that we have, that they have tarnished with the teachers, with each other.

You know what I mean?

I'm helping them restore all that, everything, restore themselves, you know what I mean?

'Cause a lot of 'em come from backgrounds where they don't have anybody at home helping 'em out, you know, to remind them what they can be.

You know what I mean?

So they're only hearing it here sometimes.

JERETT MARTIN: Whose done a Restorative Circle before?

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Jerett Martin, the center's coordinator, leads a circle that focuses on healing and understanding.

JERETT MARTIN: We're setting some boundaries and guidelines within the circle that transitions to the classroom and transitions to home/life balance, different things like that, that helps the kids.

And then one of the questions that I asked the kids today was, 'What's one of your biggest fears?'

KEYRIS MANZANARES: He also works with students on a game plan that will help them as they transition back to their base school.

JERETT MARTIN: Some students just want you to do small check-ins with them, and bring them treats or rewards because they've been doing so well.

So sometimes we do 21-day challenges where we reward the students for being consecutive for 21 days, and working off some habits that they may need to break.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Dr. Derrick Brown, the Director of Student Services at LCS, says the Restorative Suspension Center is already making a difference.

DERRICK BROWN: 80% of the time, when a student comes over here, they don't return.

So that's much better than the 60% that we were seeing, that they were continuing to get re-suspended.

And additionally, it was really encouraging to see that students aren't coming back for the same offenses.

And so only 10% of the time, students are returning for the same offense.

Whereas, before they were being suspended over and over for the same behaviors and the same referrals.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: Dr. Brown says this program holds students accountable, while also sending them a very important message.

DERRICK BROWN: We don't just throw them away.

It's important for them to be restored and for them to have people that care about them.

They need to know that when they make a mistake or they mess up, that doesn't mean that they're a bad student.

It just means that they made a mistake.

And we're all humans.

We make mistakes.

But we should always grow from those mistakes and we should learn and we should get better, and we shouldn't repeat those mistakes over and over and over.

KEYRIS MANZANARES: For VPM News, I'm Keyris Manzanares.

♪ ANGIE MILES: As you've seen in our stories, there is still work to be done to level the opportunities and outcomes for all students.

And there are institutions and individuals determined to be the positive change.

Thank you for joining us for this special edition of VPM News Focal Point.

We'll see you next time.

Production funding for VPM News Focal Point is provided by ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪