Because Gaither hit the woman back, administrators accused the fifth grader, a straight-A student with a pristine record, of having anger issues, and they attempted to move her to a special education wing of the building for the remainder of the year. Gaither’s parents threatened legal action, then transferred her to a new school in Queens with a Black woman at the helm.
It was a traumatic ordeal, but the experience was something else, too: a catalyst.
“People often ask me for my ‘why’,” says Gaither. “This is what keeps me going.”
Now a doctoral student at the University of Delaware Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration studying education policy, Gaither is on a mission to protect a new generation of students from racial trauma in the classroom. In the fall of 2023, she will launch the Ascend Legacy Academy, a boarding school slated for West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Black educators will affirm the identity of their Black pupils.
“I’m not saying there aren’t great teachers who are white — I’ve had many,” says Gaither, who earned her master’s in public administration from UD in 2013. “But when you send your children to school, you want to know they are being cared for, that they’re being nurtured. And for Black children — I’ve seen it so many times — this is not always the case. They deserve an option where their psychological safety is protected.”
This summer, a pilot program will introduce potential scholars to the school’s ethos: On Ascend grounds, loving will be just as important as learning.
“I think of education as a form of ministry,” Gaither says. “You can’t speak to people’s minds until you touch their hearts.”
A storied history
The Ascend mission has deep, uniquely American roots.
Prior to the court-mandated desegregation of the 1960s, several hundred historically Black boarding schools operated throughout the country. Largely opened in the South by philanthropists and religious organizations after states failed to provide education for Black children following the Civil War, the institutions maintained a sterling reputation, setting high standards for pupils not just in terms of academics, but character.
“It’s not like Black children appeared after the Brown-versus-Board-of-Education decision and said, ‘Here we are’!” Gaither says. “Scholarly excellence was already happening in the Black community. People fail to realize the expectations that were in place. These schools may not have had the same books or resources as the school down the street, but they set the bar high.”
Regardless of their performance, after integration, the institutions struggled to find funding. Popular, if naive, wisdom held that the issue of educational discrimination had been put to bed when Ruby Bridges made her legendary walk into a Louisiana elementary school in 1960. And given the successful rebuke of the nation’s separate-but-equal doctrine as racist, potential donors worried about contributing to any initiative conceivably perceived as such. Today, only four Black boarding schools remain in the U.S.
With the shuttering of these places, the door closed on more than just buildings.
“We forget that integration happened only for students,” Gaither says. “What happened to the educators? The teachers were displaced, the administrators were displaced, and these people had been pivotal to the education of Black children — to their coming of age — both in the classroom and out. They attended church with the families of their students, they went to a student’s home if something was wrong. With integration, these connections disappeared.”
For some, the loss still carries a sense of grief.
“I’m not going to make a blanket statement that integration was horrible or that it should never have happened,” Gaither says. “But I do think it distracted the Black population from maintaining a sense of its own community.”