Waterbearers Against the Dark: Black Women of the South Carolina Sea Islands and the (Re)Construction of Black Education

Amber Johnson

In this critical ethnographic study, I consider water a material and metaphorical force of Black knowledge. It is what I argue Black women have carried and nurtured with Black children in intimate ways, even as formalized education was first introduced to formerly enslaved communities in the U.S. South during Reconstruction. Turning to the South Carolina Sea Islands, I build upon W.E.B. DuBois' urge to consider Reconstruction as Black praxis and, thus, examine how Black women have made and remade Black knowledge (re)production processes amidst changing and complex sociopolitical landscapes. By bringing together public memories of Black Sea Island women (as scattered in archives) and private memories (as they live through Sea Islanders' oral histories), I examine how these women have cultivated Black knowledges with children and the interplay of such knowledge work with public education. As a result, this dissertation offers a layered story that contends with the tangled relationship between state-sponsored education for Black communities—and its necessity for physical and material survival—and intimate Black knowledge (re)constructed by Black communities—and its importance for epistemological survival. Ultimately, I invite expansive notions of Black Education that privilege quotidian knowledge and Black communities' unyielding commitments to (re)construct these cultural knowledge ways amidst landscapes that require the foreclosure of Black life. Equally importantly, this study positions Black women, especially of the South Carolina Sea Islands, as progenitors of Black knowledge in the U.S., everyday educators, and custodians of Black life. They are waterbearers against the dark.

About Amber Johnson

Amber Chevaughn Johnson is a critical scholar pursuing mundane and everyday invitations for personal and collective liberation and living. As a former middle school language arts educator for almost a decade and current Ph.D. candidate, she pursues a range of interests that center the ways Black communities render expressions of full, complex lives. Crossing disciplinary boundaries to explore the interplay between history, Black geographies, Black feminisms, and education, she explores the multidimensionality of Black folks' lives and the ways they produce space and knowledge. Currently, Amber's work explores the intimacies of space, the speculative, and spirit as it concerns Black education, generally, and Black women, specifically, and the ways Black women's knowledge reproductive work is indispensable to the Black Radical Tradition and the continuance of Black life. Ultimately, her aim is to produce work for Black folks who hold truths about their lives and their worlds in the bellies of their being, but whose souls forage for language, love, and community in the dark places.