Caswell County Training School, 1933–1969: Relationships between Community and School

The history of education has many references that depict the inequities African-American children experienced during the pre-integration era, but few studies that describe the positive interactions in segregated school environments. In this article, Emilie Vanessa Siddle Walker discusses the case of Caswell County Training School of North Carolina. In this study, ethnographically approached, the author explores the relationships between school and community as they existed in a segregated Black school in the South that was defined by its community as a "good" school. Specifically, Siddle Walker considers: 1)the ways in which the community supported the school; 2) the ways in which the school supported the community; and 3) the implications of these relationships both in their historical context and in informing the current school reform debates.