Name: Olivia Propp
Social Justice Group: Race and Education
Date of Fieldwork: January 19, 2018
Name of Organization: NAACP
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Audrey Gaul
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
Our group went to the NAACP workplace and interviewed a woman named Audrey Gaul who is the head of the education department in the NAACP. The NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We asked her questions about why she is interested in working with the NAACP and if her childhood education influenced working with this organization. She gave us a lot of information and we were really glad we could meet with her because the NAACP is a very well known organization that can help us learn more about our topic.
What I learned:
We learned that it is very important for parents to be involved in their children’s education. Ms. Gaul told us about a program that the NAACP started called Lifted. Lifted is the name because they want to lift their children up. Lifted is a program where people from the NAACP go to public schools once a month, and inform and teach parents about how to be more involved in their child’s education and how to help them. One of the main reasons why it’s so hard for parents to be involved in their child’s education is because they have jobs and have to earn money for their families, so even though they care about their child their priority is to earn money to help the family. Ms. Gaul was very fortunate and didn’t receive discrimination from other children growing up in New York City, but she knew that kids in the south were being treated very unfairly because of their race.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
We learned that although there are laws saying that all kids should have equal education, it’s still not happening. Kids in Harlem each are worth 11,000 for education tools, but in Scarsdale each student gets 75,000. That is what inequity is. This motivates Ms. Gaul to try to fix this problem. Although progress has been made, there is still a long way to go.
