Cobb resident Jillian Ford is a founding member of Stronger Together, an organization that engages in conversations about race-related problems in local schools and advocates for more communication between school officials and families around issues related to race.
A 20-year veteran social studies educator and professor of social studies education at Kennesaw State University, Ford says multiple perspectives are necessary in teaching history, especially those of oppressed groups. In this guest column, Ford contrasts the recent response of Cobb leaders to Jewish leaders and families alarmed over high school students drawing swastikas on bathroom walls to what she considers a historic indifference to the concerns of Black parents in the county.
By Jillian Ford
I planned to speak at the Sept. 16 Cobb County Board of Education meeting regarding the district’s seeming inability to acknowledge violence directed at certain groups of students based on those students’ identities. I have spoken at numerous school board meetings over the past three and a half years to protest the ongoing racial violence directed at Black students.
As a founding member of Stronger Together, a community group formed to push back against the anti-Black racism in Cobb County Schools, I have also witnessed many others appeal to the board about the same topic. This month, I planned to speak specifically in support of Jewish students — and all students in general — who attend schools that are part of a district with leadership that refuses to recognize students’ humanity.
Based on the superintendent’s decision to remain silent in the wake of antisemitic graffiti at Pope and Lassiter high schools earlier this month, I figured Superintendent Chris Ragsdale and the four white board members would block requests to meet with members of Jewish communities. Further, based on the superintendent and white board members’ previous treatment of Black and other racialized students and parents, I assumed they would insist there are no inter-group problems in the district, despite obvious evidence of the contrary, and proceed through both monthly meetings without ever recognizing the instances whatsoever.
I half-expected one or more of the aforementioned board members to publicly gaslight Jewish communities, suggest Jewish people are the reason Cobb County Schools are struggling, or propagate antisemitic stereotypes. These are among the tactics they have used against Black students, families, and communities for years.
My first clue that things might be different came from the school board’s announcement that they were going to postpone the monthly meetings one week, because the originally scheduled meetings would fall on Yom Kippur. I was pleasantly surprised that the district had done something to acknowledge students’ and parents’ rights to feel safe and be heard in the wake of such psychologically harmful events. Although I would not be able to attend the following week, I was glad that those most affected would be able, even encouraged, to do so.
I am a 20-year veteran social studies teacher and tenured professor at a local university with a doctorate in social foundations of education from Emory. I have always been committed to teaching the truth about history, so it is important I remind readers that the history of Cobb County is comprised of white leadership who have been and continue to be committed to maintaining power over all others. We live on the unceded, stolen land of the Eastern Cherokee and Lower Muscogee Creek people, most of whom were killed or forcibly removed such that Black enslaved people could work the land for white prosperity.
The county was named for Thomas W. Cobb, a U.S. representative and senator. Cobb is perhaps most remembered for his admonishment of Congressman James Tallmadge of New York, a slavery opponent who wanted to tie statehood for Missouri to the eventual termination of slavery. On the U.S. House floor, Cobb warned Tallmadge, “You have kindled a fire which all the waters in the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.”
The Cobb school board did not vote to desegregate until 1965, 11 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separating students by race violated the U.S. Constitution. That same year, Cobb opened Wheeler High School, named in honor of a Confederate general. Despite the admirable efforts of dozens of Wheeler High students and alumni to change the school’s name, the current white members on the board voted last year to disband a committee set in place to investigate the possibility.
What unfolded at Thursday’s rescheduled board meeting should serve to illustrate two important things.
First, the BOE clearly has the ability to hear community concerns, acknowledge and address them. The board chair and the superintendent both spoke of a resolution in the works to articulate the district’s values in the wake of these antisemitic acts.
Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said, “the district does not and will not tolerate hate in any form ... and refuses to dismiss this incident as some sort of prank.” I won’t lie: the immediacy of the response and respect the board gave Jewish students and their families took my breath away and the threat of tears stung my eyes.
Second, it is evident — to anyone who still claims not to see — that a specific kind of degradation is reserved for Black people by Cobb County Schools leadership. At least since the spring of 2017, the BOE has ignored dozens of requests by Black students, parents and allies to address multiple incidents of anti-Black violence.
When a white North Cobb student sent a SnapChat message to the school in 2017 calling for “exterminating all (n-words),” Ragsdale and the white board members remained silent.
That same year, people vandalized Kell and Pebblebrook High Schools, praising the KKK and using racial slurs. The district leadership did not acknowledge the Kell incident except to say “The matter was determined not to be criminal in nature and has been turned over to the Kell High School Administration to handle as a student disciplinary matter.”
When students reported that a South Cobb teacher threatened to hang students if they did not stop talking in 2018, Ragsdale refused to meet with the affected students and their families.
When a Black student and her mother reported a white student followed her down the hallway making whipping sounds with an app on his cellphone in 2020, the leadership at the school responded that the student “had no ill intent.”
And when other school districts around the state and the nation passed resolutions to address racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Cobb County’s white board members blocked the effort by refusing to include the term “systemic racism.”
In fact, the only time the district has backed any resolution on racial matters was this summer when they successfully passed a resolution to ban Critical Race Theory. Not surprisingly, none of them was able to define CRT. These are only some of the incidents that have made it to the media. There are countless others that characterize most Black students’ experiences in Cobb County schools.
Are the local rabbis who thanked the district for engaging in productive dialogues aware that the superintendent has repeatedly denied requests of members of Black Cobb communities to ever meet with him even? As a Black woman, whose beloved grandfather regaled with stories about his Orthodox Jewish childhood in London, I am asking that all families and leaders in Cobb use their social, racial, and economic capital to come alongside Cobb’s Black and brown communities to force the school board and Cobb County Schools to do right by our children, too.
The author of this guest column, Jillian Ford, is a Cobb resident and a college professor of social studies education.
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