Professor kihana miraya ross awarded Spencer Foundation “Large Grant” for historical and ethnographic study of a Black community’s struggle for educational justice

Professor kihana miraya ross, of the Department of African American Studies, has been awarded the Spencer Foundation Large Grant for her research project, “Wrestling with reparations: A historical and ethnographic study of a Black community’s struggle for educational justice.”

The City of Evanston made headlines, and history, in March of 2020 when it became the first U.S. municipality to agree to pay Black residents reparations. Black residents can receive up to $25,000 if they were affected by discriminatory housing policies and practices, which the city failed to address until the passage of fair housing laws in the 1960s. Evanston is also working to provide better affordable housing and employment opportunities to Black community members, as well as educational and learning opportunities for Black children.

ross will use her $250,000 grant to study these new reparations and policies as they unfold in real-time. The Spencer Foundation has been a leading funder of education research since 1971 and is focused exclusively on supporting that research. Their commitment is to supporting research that is rigorous, relevant, equitable, collaborative, and transformative.

“In recognizing the debt owed to its Black residents and pledging actual dollars towards repairing centuries of educational inequities, Evanston is in unchartered waters,” ross said. “The world will be watching as the first city in the U.S. to approve reparations embarks on an unparalleled move toward educational justice for its Black residents.”

Professor ross’s research draws on critical ethnographic and participatory design methodologies to examine the multiplicity of ways that antiblackness is lived by Black students in what she calls the afterlife of school segregation, a framework that illuminates the ways in which, despite the end of legal segregation of schooling, Black students remain systematically dehumanized and positioned as uneducable.

ross is also one of 21 recipients of the 2021 Northwestern Racial Equity and Community Partnership grant, which aims to address problems of racial inequity in local neighborhoods. The grant will fund a project that will amplify the voices of Black Evanston residents as they organize a community-directed redress of ongoing racialized educational harm and inequities. While independent of her reparations research, ross’ two projects are closely related.

The research will include the oral histories of Evanston community members who attended Foster School, an all-Black neighborhood elementary school in the 5th Ward. Foster closed in the 1960s, but a decades-long fight to reopen the school continues to this day. The oral histories will be made public and donated to the existing African American Oral Histories collection at Shorefront Legacy Center.

“While anchored in the stories emerging and developing in Evanston, this study will build on recent developments in literature on educational equity that have highlighted the specificity of Black students’ experiences in U.S. schools, and contribute empirically to understanding the ways anti-blackness has functioned historically and contemporarily to structure the lives of Black folks across the country,” ross said.

Read more about ross’ grants in Northwestern Now.

Learn more about Professor ross’s research.