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At last, a diploma for Black deaf students who set historic precedent

2023-07-27 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Robbie D. Cheatham knew her worth. She also knew other people didn’t always see it.

“She had a lot of things that happened to her in life, really hard, hard stuff, because of being deaf, because of being Black, because of being a woman,” Cheatham’s daughter Krissi Spence told me. “She was so strong mentally and emotionally because she had to be. She had to fight.”

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She had to fight in ways that Spence only fully realized after her mom’s death in December at the age of 86.

It was then that she learned Cheatham was part of a group of Black deaf students who weren’t allowed to attend the only school for deaf children in Washington, the city where they lived, until their families filed a class-action lawsuit in 1952. Then, despite a court victory, they weren’t treated the same as the White students who attended kindergarten through 12th grade at the Kendall School on Gallaudet’s campus. Black students were enrolled in the Kendall School Division II for Negroes. They were placed in a separate classroom with separate teachers, and when it came time for them to graduate, unlike their White peers, they weren’t given diplomas.

On Saturday, Gallaudet University held a poignant ceremony aimed at righting that wrong. Officials handed out diplomas for 24 Black deaf students who should have received them more than six decades earlier. Five of the six students who are still alive made it to the ceremony.

For the other students, the recognition came too late for them to witness it. Family members accepted the diplomas for them.

Spence was there on behalf of her mother.

“I wish this was done while she was alive,” she said. “I wish she could see this.”

She imagined what that moment would have meant to Cheatham: “She would have appreciated being recognized. She would have taken that moment to say, ‘See, I am worth something. I did do something.’”

The ceremony was significant not only because it showed an internationally known school reckoning with its past. It also offered a look into a significant moment in American history that has gone mostly unseen and unacknowledged. The court case that forced the school to accept Black deaf students has been credited as setting an important precedent at a critical time. The case Miller v. D.C. Board of Education took place two years before the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in schools based on race was unconstitutional.

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A historical account from the university shows that Black students were permitted to attend the Kendall School between 1898 and 1905. Then, the parents of White students complained. As a result, Black deaf children in D.C. were forced to attend schools located hours away in Maryland and Philadelphia, an arrangement that caused hardships and separations within families.

Louise B. Miller filed the lawsuit along with other families, including Cheatham’s, after the oldest of her four children, Kenneth, was denied admission to the school.

The 24 students who were honored on Saturday attended the school between 1952 and 1954 and were only given certificates of completion when it came time for them to graduate in the years that followed. After 1954, when school segregation was ruled illegal, Black deaf students were educated with their White deaf peers on the campus. Two schools, Kendall Demonstration Elementary School and the Model Secondary School for the Deaf, now sit on the campus and are part of Gallaudet’s Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center, which is federally funded and tasked with creating and disseminating educational opportunities for deaf students nationwide.

At the ceremony, the honorees wore caps and gowns and speakers used the phrases that come when too much time has passed: “It’s about time.” “Better late than never.” “At last.”

Kenneth Miller, who is one of the surviving students, said that last phrase using sign language after he walked across the stage and pumped a fist in the air. It was impossible to look at him and the other survivors and not realize how long the injustice they experienced had been allowed to go unaddressed. It was hard not to think about the doors that diploma might have opened for them and the students who died before getting that piece of paper they had earned.

At the event, university officials didn’t only give the students diplomas. They also gave them an apology.

“Gallaudet deeply regrets the role it played in perpetuating the historic inequity, systemic marginalization, and degradation of the twenty-four Black Deaf individuals and their families when Gallaudet committed the grave injustice of denying them a full diploma upon completing high school,” reads a proclamation that members of the university’s board of trustees stood onstage and recited. The proclamation says the school “sincerely apologizes to,” and names each of the 24 students.

The proclamation describes July 22 as a “day of remembrance of the ‘Kendall 24’ and a sober reminder why Gallaudet’s commitment to inclusive excellence, equity, and belonging cannot waver and must be continuously renewed.”

I write often about disability issues and the D.C. community, and before learning about the ceremony, I hadn’t heard about those 24 students. That surprised me until I spoke to some of their relatives. The obscurity they knew is not a side note to their stories. It is telling — of the times they lived through, of how they were treated throughout their lives, of the stories we, as a society, see as deserving of remembrance.

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Those students broke down walls and opened doors, but even some of their family members didn’t realize that.

Spence was her mother’s only child and the two were close. Even so, her mother never told her anything that indicated she and those other students were trailblazers.

“What I realize now is that it’s not something that they considered to be very heroic or pioneering because they were just figuring it out as they went,” Spence said. “Back then, they were breaking barriers every day. Every day was a struggle. Every minute was a struggle.”

Spence created a GoFundMe page that tells of her mom’s accomplishments — she worked for 38 years with the IRS — and the challenges that remain for Black deaf children. “The Robbie Cheatham Memorial Fund will honor Robbie and her mother’s life work by paying that work forward to help more deaf Black girls graduate from high school and have an equal opportunity at life,” the page reads.

Marcellus Hartsfield said he didn’t know until after his mother, Mary L. Arnold, passed away in 1988 the role she and the other students played in integrating the campus.

“I don’t even know if she knew what the magnitude of that was, because she never talked about it,” he said.

He said she was a single mom and worked most of her life at the Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind as a seamstress. He recalled the frustration she felt when she had to turn to government agencies for help. He said those workers often didn’t offer interpreters and weren’t always patient with her as she tried to communicate with them through writing.

Hartsfield, who formed a ministry that provides interpreting services and on one occasion served as an interpreter for Barack Obama when he was a senator running for president, shared with me the certificate his mother received when she left Kendall. It noted that she had studied through the highest grade, and it was signed by the president of Gallaudet and the principal of Kendall. It resembled a diploma, but it was not one.

On Saturday, Hartsfield wiped away tears as he accepted the diploma on his mother’s behalf. He told me beforehand he knew she would have been proud to see this day come.

“It’s a historical event,” he said. “And it is history that needs to be known.”

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