Voices of My Elders: Forgotten Place, Invisible People - A Phenomenological Exploration of the Experiences of African Americans Living in the Rural Southern Black Belt During the Jim Crow Era

Abstract

The systemic racism imposed on the lives and education aspiration of six of my elders who stayed in the racist South during the ferociously deleterious era of Jim Crow is the focus of this phenomenological critical race study. These stories centered the voices of my elders as powerful weapons to expose white supremacy and the psychophysiological trauma imposed upon my elders. These stories were about the lives, lived experiences, and educational trials and triumphs of six of my Brown and Black hue American elders whose ancestry was born out of slavery and delivered into the vicious Jim Crow era. My work was grounded in Phenomenological Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory validates my elders’ narratives and their narratives fortify the tenets of CRT. For you see, racism was an everyday phenomenon my elders experienced as residents of rural Southern America. My elders came to understand “what” they were, Black, by understanding “who” they were not, White. Furthermore, this qualitative phenomenological critical race study was guided by three inquiries, what experiences have you had with Jim Crow; how or in what ways did your experiences with Jim Crow affect your education; and how or in what ways did your experience with Jim Crow affect your life? These inquiries produced four intersecting themes, 1) the survival of racism as part of everyday life, 2) economic exploitation of Black labor, 3) denial of equitable education, and 4) the sociopolitical construction of racial identity, and three significant findings, racist place, sociopolitical oppression, and inequitable education.