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January 28, 2008
ANDOVER — Simone Hill ’08 had good reason to be excited last Monday. Chosen as a featured speaker for one of Phillips Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day special events, the CAMD scholar presented her research on diversity, whose trail led her back more than 150 years into the dust of family history. And in the audience were not just her peers and teachers: her parents, Everett Hill ’77 and Dr. Yasmin Tyler-Hill from Atlanta, and her grandparents, from tiny Ridgeland, S.C., where the trail ended, were right there as well.
Hill’s topic, “Adversity to Diversity: Understanding the Southern Experience,” was a uniquely personal journey that took her down parallel tracks: her own roots in African-American life in the South and the history of African-Americans’ evolving relationship to land and agriculture. Head of School Barbara Landis Chase, whose academic focus includes slavery and reform movements in 19th-century America, served as advisor on the CAMD project, and introduced the featured speaker and her family.
As part of her presentation, Hill showed historical photographs and played recordings of interviews she had conducted with her grandparents in Ridgeland last summer. Hubert and Jessie Tyler listened from the audience as their granddaughter played audio of their voices telling stories of childhoods on small farms in the South Carolina lowlands. Early on, family members were inspired by deep beliefs in the importance of education and holding onto their land. The glue that held them all together was a potent blend of family and community. Hill explained how grateful she was that the CAMD Scholarship had “given me the chance to be introspective about my family, and with themes drawn from history, better understand the challenges of the modern world.”
The CAMD Scholars program was created last spring by the Office of Community and Multicultural Development (CAMD) to allow students to apply for research grants to pursue topics in multiculturalism during their summer vacations from school. Funded by the Abbot Academy Foundation, the scholarship provides a small stipend and a faculty advisor to each student selected. Three scholars presented during the fall term and three others spoke on MLK Jr. Day.
Her greatest moment during the research, Hill said, “was finding my great-great-great- grandfather’s name, Francis Wright, and his birth date, 1851, in the records of the Ridgeland town offices.” A farm laborer, Francis was probably a sharecropper who got by as best he could, Hill said. She read from a thoughtful and revealing narrative she had created in his voice, describing his life.
His children, the next generation, began buying land and building lives of growing opportunity. Jessie and Hubert Tyler both became teachers. Their daughter, Hill’s mother, is a pediatrician and a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Everett Hill, an Andover alum, is an executive with Coca-Cola Enterprises. “My research,” Hill said, “helped me understand why I’m here at Andover and how lucky I am to have parents and grandparents so focused on education.”
Raj Mundra, associate dean of CAMD and instructor in biology, introduced all three presenters during the day. “It was a wonderful way to celebrate MLK Jr. Day! We heard about struggles for justice at various levels—personal, with an entire population, and with an educational institution. All CAMD Scholars chose their topics because of a deep curiosity to learn more about their background. Through the process, they gained insight into how complex multicultural issues can be to research and understand. They all distinguished themselves with their critical thinking, independent research, and engaging presentation,” Mundra said, looking back on the day’s events.
CAMD Scholar Britney Achin ’08 began her session with an exercise meant to educate her audience on the difficulties biracial teenagers face with identity in today’s social milieu. She asked everyone to answer the question “What am I?” in a brief phrase, then share it with a small group in the audience. Most seemed to find it difficult to capture complex selves—especially the offspring of interracial parents, as Achin is herself. Her research project was titled “I Am: A Study of Self Identification among Biracial Teenagers.” Mundra served as her advisor.
Achin surveyed hundreds of biracial adolescents through MySpace and Facebook, personal connections, and random interviews, asking probing personal questions of how they viewed themselves. She found that their responses clustered into five categories of identity: “Monoracials,” who defined themselves predominantly by a primary peer group; “Bidentifiers,” who identify confidently with more than one racial identity; “Sliders,” who were able to identify with whatever group in which they found themselves; “Raceless,” who refused to identify with any race, but prefer race-neutral descriptors such as “American”; and “Partial People,” who identify themselves as half a person, mostly as half-white, rarely as half-black.
Achin compared relative levels of turmoil and self-doubt, as well as confidence and self-knowledge, reflected by each group. She said she found that, without fail, PA students offered the most insightful responses. “I believe that speaks very highly of the work done by the school to make us aware of ourselves and others—our differences and similarities, racial and otherwise,” Achin said.
The final CAMD Scholar to present was Thomas Smyth ’08, whose topic was “From Desegregation to Resegregation: John S. Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School’s Use of Race as a Factor in Admissions.” Dean of Students Marlys Edwards, an instructor in English, served as his advisor.
Smyth went home last summer to study his own high school in Augusta, Ga., where he spent two years prior to transferring to Andover. Davidson Fine Arts was created in 1981 in response to the landmark school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The school’s admission policy targeted a student body composed of good students with artistic and/or musical talent that is 45 percent black, 45 percent white, and 10 percent other races—roughly the racial makeup of the surrounding county. His report—using a brief film and interviews with principal people involved—traced the origins of the magnet school, the struggle to fund and build it, and the challenge of making it work.
The school has been hailed as “the best model for desegregation… and the best model for education” and has won several national awards. Yet as the highly successful enterprise approaches the goal set by the original desegregation order 35 years ago, it faces a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that will, Smyth predicted, “provoke a profound change in Davidson’s admission policies and diminish its extraordinary diversity,” potentially reversing the progress of the last several decades. When a bitterly divided Court struck down school choice plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., last June, it effectively said that race can no longer be a factor in the assignment of children to public schools.
Smyth ended his presentation with a call to action, urging officials in Augusta to make Davidson Fine Arts the test case in trying to reverse the Court’s recent decision. “The tide has turned,” Smyth said, “and Davidson can only hope that school officials might decide to make them the next Brown.”
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