Book Review by Bobby Austin

A CLASS OF THEIR OWN: Black Teachers in the Segregated South by Adam Fairclough

A Class of Their Own, by Adam Fairclough, is a muscular testament to the grit, guts and resilience of African American teachers following the Civil War. Many of us who are descendents of these teachers have never thought of them in the ways that Fairclough describes them. They were bold audacious and fearless. We have never been brought face to face with the personal dangers that they faced, from harassment to murder, all because they wished to teach to their own.

According to Fairclough, they were a professional and persistent brigade of educational warriors. This brigade included many white Northerners who took up the cause and suffered many of the same abuses as Southern African American teachers. Until now, the stories of these Northerners were better documented than those of the Southern African American teachers, thanks to histories of the American church and the abolitionist movement. But all of these great American heroes are faithfully and painstakingly recounted in this massive account. These individuals were our first civil rights heroes, politicians and race leaders.

I hope the following excerpts will cause you to avail yourself of A Class of Their Own, if you have not already. To read it is to be made aware of a glorious history of pioneering men and women. Men and women, who fought many of their battles alone against a mean and demented foe. They had no protection, neither an NAACP nor a government entity that they could rely on to protect them, just their faith and their belief in the next generation. A CLASS OF THEIR OWN: Black Teachers in the Segregated South.