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Educator Narrates Experiences of Racism in the Education System

Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims, also a community activist, worked hard to reform the education system to meet the needs of everyone, regardless of race.


Atlanta, GA – WEBWIRE

Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims extends her dedication to education from the classroom to the system that governs it.

Like most African-Americans who were born during the Jim Crow era and the Great Depression, Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims experienced her shared of racism, especially in the education system. She shares the details in her autobiography “One Peanut at a Time: Autobiography: One Woman’s Trek of Trials and Triumphs” (Xlibris, 2016).
 
Whitehurst-Mims recalls her first experience with economic racism. She applied for an office job at a department store – and given the social atmosphere of the day, she wasn’t treated nicely by an office staff, and she didn’t get an interview. At another job application, an employer was reluctant to hire her even though she had done well on the test. He was looking for someone who could operate several different office machines, but Whitehurst-Mims could infer he was just looking for a white applicant.
 
When she became the first black woman to work in her university, the older women treated her as if she was an invisible woman. Whitehurst-Mims found racism prevalent in the education system, especially when she began to teach. She saw white teachers preferring white underperforming students over black overachieving students, and observed how the system is poorly equipped to meet the learning demands of students, especially black and poor people, given the lack of school materials, competent teachers, and emotional and social support. For Whitehurst-Mims who would later go to establish her own boarding school, racism in education is the most destructive racism because “it kills the embryo before it can grow.”
 
For readers who want to mentor underprivileged kids and create a positive impact in schools, Whitehurst-Mims’ journey to reform the education system is worth reading.
 
“One Peanut at a Time: Autobiography: One Woman’s Trek of Trials and Triumphs”
Written by Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims
Published by Xlibris
Published date: July 7, 2016
Paperback price: $19.99
                                              
About the Author
 
Dr. Cleaster Whitehurst-Mims is an educator, political activist, and philanthropist whose journey carried her from the peanut fields of Enterprise, Alabama to founder and CEO of her own private boarding school, the Cleaster Mims College Prep and International Boarding Schools, which is the first African-American-owned international boarding school for fourth through eighth grade students in Ohio, USA. As a sharecropper’s daughter, she was raised in a unique farm culture where she learned lasting lessons in family and community unity, faith, fortitude, and frugality. She spends her time developing a private archive and a family learning center in honor of her husband, the late Julius C. Mims.
 


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 Educator Narrates
 Experiences of Racism
 Cleaster Mims


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