On the Road: Wake Forest University’s Social Stratification in the American South Course

by Jean Beaman, Academic and Professional Affairs Office

In summer 2003, Wake Forest University students brought their research skills outside the classroom for their Social Stratification in the American South class, which toured the Deep South for two weeks. The course, designed by professors Angela Hattery and Earl Smith, examined inequalities generated by race, gender, and class in the post-Civil Rights Movement South. Traveling 2,600 miles through five states, the class visited cities such as Atlanta (Georgia), Tunica (Mississippi), and Nashville (Tennessee) and sites such as the Birmingham (Alabama) 16th Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by White extremists in 1963, and the Lorraine Hotel, home of the National Civil Rights Museum.

In addition to lectures, students conversed with local leaders and citizens to learn about everyday life in the South and created demographic profiles of various communities using U.S. Census Bureau data. As Wake Forest is a participant in ASA’s Integrating Census Data Analysis (IDA) into the Curriculum initiative, Hattery and Smith participated in the IDA training workshop this summer and were able to integrate tools and techniques from that workshop into the course. “As we began to design our census modules for our classroom courses, we realized that our summer course would provide a unique opportunity to examine social stratification in the deep South using census data and observation,” explained Hattery.

Students brought laptop computers to access and present information while on the road. They used a high-tech bus equipped with audio-visual equipment and seating that facilitated discussion and group work. CensusScope proved a valuable teaching tool, because students had information on segregation and poverty at their fingertips and were able to compare census data with their observations of the actual community. “Our students were able to do projects that required them to explore relationships such as race, gender, and poverty for the counties we were visiting [while visiting them],” said Hattery. “This brought census data alive and provided a context for what they were seeing out the window.”

Smith notes that this course was a great example of “public sociology,” as students were able to see firsthand the outcomes of stratification in the South and then use census data to analyze their surroundings. Nineteen students from a variety of academic majors and backgrounds participated in this course and were chosen during a selective application process. Hattery and Smith created “diverse learning groups.” Each day the groups prepared an analysis of a particular community and the next morning they presented their analysis to the rest of the class. Commenting on the students, Smith said, “It was helpful and unique that they were not all sociology students [and] were at different levels in their sociological training. At one point, it was the students who were teaching each other [not just the teachers teaching the students].” Students also wrote journal reflections that were uploaded daily onto the class website so others could follow their trip.

The trip’s sites were carefully chosen by Hattery and Smith to expose present-day inequalities in the South. At each site, the class asked the question: “What has happened here since the Civil Rights Movement?” In many places, the answer was very little. One of their most memorable visits was in Parchman, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, where students had the opportunity to talk with prisoners and officials. The prisoners, mostly African-American males, are kept in small, non-air conditioned cells with four other inmates and work on a former plantation all day. Afterward, one student wrote, “Studying the effects of social stratification and social inequalities, I know that societal conditions acting against Walter the African-American male and Mississippi Delta youth made his future bleak before he was even old enough to think about making a decision, planning an action, or even robbing someone.”

The students also visited the Crystal City Café in Greenwood, Mississippi, where White waitresses dine, while African Americans bus tables but do not dine. They found that the restaurant staff and patrons were shocked at the presence of this mixed-race student group, as many were throughout the South. Students also did community service work at Café Reconcile in New Orleans.

Before the 2003 educational excursion through the South, Hattery had read about a similar course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and had approached Smith with the idea of adapting a tour of the South to a sociology course. They felt there was a need for an off-campus course in the United States, as opposed to studying abroad, and that a sociology course would fully examine social inequalities. “We built this course around the fact that simply having knowledge that more than 85% of the population within the Black Belt counties of Alabama and the Mississippi Delta are on welfare is something different from knowing what this looks like and knowing how this affects everyday life,” commented Smith.