Listening Journeys

After hearing the youths’ experiences with racism across Cobb County School District, the group realized it was important that the community be made aware of the significant amount and extreme degree of racism in CCSD. Leader of the Unity Church in East Cobb Richard Burdick offered the use of the church’s facilities to Stronger Together’s project. Over the course of 10 months, we hosted 4 sessions. At each session, audience/community members watched an episode of America to Me, a docuseries about a school district in Oakdale, Ill. The series, which aired on Starz, was part of an coordinated effort to create a toolbox for local communities to work through issues of school-based race/racism at the local level.

Audience members had a range of reactions to the Stronger Together youth participants’ experiences as Black students in Cobb County School District. The stories were extreme and alarmingly ubiquitous. Forget about implicit bias that seemed to be a popular term at the time, our youth were clearly targets of explicit bias, county wide. Whether the students attended predominantly Black schools or mostly White, they had been affected by anti-Black racism in their schooling.

They wanted to get their stories out. They wanted people to know what was happening in these schools, particularly because the superintendent nor the Board of Education would listen to our concerns about the trauma being inflicted on our kids.