Right to Read: The Ann Arbor King Case
When: 2024
Right to Read: The Ann Arbor King Case is a short documentary about the 1977 lawsuit that became known as the “Ann Arbor Black English Case” or “The King Case". Brought on behalf of 11 Black students at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Ann Arbor, MI, childhood literacy, Black language, and cultural competency emerged as central themes of this case. The story resonated around the country for many reasons and prompted mixed media coverage, motivated academic study, and inspired public discussion.
"Language is to identity as oxygen is to life and the benefit of its mindful development in the formative years of children has long been documented. Like many, until I gained a deeper knowledge of this 1977 case (Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School Children v The Michigan Board of Education and Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction), I thought it was solely about the treatment of Black English in a particular Ann Arbor, Michigan school and the implications for the school’s Black English-speaking students. While that is worthy of discussion and legal consideration, diving in revealed it to be a multidimensional story, starting with the fact that the case was not originally about language.
As a language enthusiast and also a Black English speaker, my initial interest in the case was primarily sociolinguistic. I was inspired to create this documentary, in part, because of the chance to explore how the US legal system recognizes and protects minority languages and dialects. Interestingly, until the mid-1960s, language was not considered a federally protected class in the US. One of my central guiding questions was “How did the kids’ use of Black English and teachers’ perception of it affect student development?” and “How does a perceived educational inequity translate to a debate of the legal protections a language deserves?” The “realness” or legitimacy of Black English was not automatically accepted (certainly not to the level that it is today), and I became fascinated with both the social discourse this prompted as well as the challenge it posed to the King Case students’ many expert witnesses, like sociolinguists Dr. Geneva Smitherman and Dr. William Labov, and education writer Dr. Daniel Fader, who in a court of law aimed to prove the existence of Black English as a language and educate the judge on its interconnection with identity and early childhood literacy.
The King Case students all lived in the Green Road housing projects, located in a middle-class neighborhood on Green Road on North Campus. It surprised me to learn that there is a documented history that living in a low-income housing community can lead to poorer academic outcomes and a diminished sense of belonging as was the situation with the King Case students.
It’s been nearly 50 years since the lawsuit was originally filed and there’s much to reflect on. I have been extremely lucky to sit in conversation with the chief expert witness for the King Case students, the trailblazing Dr. Geneva Smitherman; two of the students Kihilee and Dwayne Brenen, whose mother Janice bravely ignited the case; Ruth Zweifler, a fierce and longtime student advocate and founder of the Student Advocacy Center, now retired; Gabe Hillel Kaimowitz, the lead attorney for the students, now retired; Lamont Walton, a participating attorney for the students; Dr. Rossi Ray-Taylor, a former superintendent for Ann Arbor Public Schools; and Dr. Jessi Grieser, a sociolinguist at the University of Michigan. While there were many records and articles that were available to support the research process, one of the biggest challenges involved with making this film was, simply, time. The case’s original media evidence (trial audio recordings and photos) have been lost to the record. Some who were originally closely associated with the case are no longer alive and some others' memories of the case have since faded or they were too young to retain certain details. In addition to sit-down interviews, I leveraged archival material like case transcripts, newspaper articles, historical footage and photos to tell this story.
I had the opportunity to visit present-day King Elementary and witnessed how it has changed in many ways, which was incredibly inspiring. The King Case makes us examine the teaching of language and literacy and how early childhood learning experiences are carried with us across time. After watching this film, I hope viewers introspect on how they were socialized to think about language as a child and then consider what perceptions about language they carry with them today. For those with school age children in their lives, I hope they take a moment to have a conversation about the importance of literacy and commit to walking with them as they grow as learners.
I’m developing an expanded version of this documentary which features more interviews and more reflections from current participants, where the culture and climate of Ann Arbor is more deeply explored, where we can better understand how language arts curriculum was built in the US and how its construction contributed to a scenario where the King Case could happen." - Filmmaker Aliyah Mitchell
Transcript
- [00:00:08] ROSSI RAY-TAYLOR: The questions that led to the King Case really centered around, what do we mean about teaching language in the classroom? I mean, that was a big debate in the early to mid 1970's. A lot of states didn't have a definition of an official language. They started to pop up in some states about that time. They were teaching African American students in this definition of what did it mean to teach students in language arts, it was being defined as teaching in standard English.
- [00:00:53] CHARLES W. JOINER: We agreed then that the issue that was before the Court was whether there's something having to do with their Blackness, their race that was preventing them the right to read, and if so, the next question was as to whether there's something the school board should have done about it.
- [00:01:45] ROSSI RAY-TAYLOR: What are those things that account for, lead to, contribute to that gap in achievement we see between students who are low-income and students who are not, students of color and students who are not. These are the very early days of trying to understand that, and one of the early discussions had to do with language and language development, the use of what became known as Black English.
- [00:02:20] GABRIEL HILLEL KAIMOWITZ: We had six claims, of which one was Black English, the other five claims were rejected. That only left the language issue.
- [00:02:37] LAMONT WALTON: That was not our plan going into the case, number 1, and number 2, the judge gave us a narrow thing to argue.
- [00:02:49] GENEVA SMITHERMAN: Then they tried to figure out how to frame the case. I was the chief expert witness. My task was to contact other linguists who had done work or research on African American speech. What is happening with the kids is that they're being put into speech therapy, they're being labeled learning disabled, and it's all the language that they're bringing to the classroom, but it's also keeping the teachers from teaching them how to read because they don't know what to do with the oral language because that's how reading starts and with young kids.
- [00:03:40] GABRIEL HILLEL KAIMOWITZ: Some of our kids were misplaced into special ed in Ann Arbor. Curriculum is set up in certain ways to generally discriminate against poor, Black, Latino, or disabled children--or non-disabled children, if they happened to speak a language such other than standard English.
- [00:04:05] LAMONT WALTON: As we investigated the matter, we detected that there was some discrimination, some rejection of the way they talked and the way they acted, and that this was causing them to be targeted or singled out and other problems.
- [00:04:26] KIHILEE BRENEN: We barely even talked in class because the instructors or teachers, they looked over us. They didn't even have the slightest idea what we were capable of.
- [00:04:38] DWAYNE BRENEN: Say, for math or other certain subjects, I was sent to a room, another classroom, but it was separate from the other students. I just remember my mother being focused on why I wasn't learning as much as other students.
- [00:05:04] JESSI GRIESER: There are multiple varieties of English, each one attached to different users based on different identities of those speakers, and that might be race, that might be gender, that might be region, and African American English is one of many.
- [00:05:23] LAMONT WALTON: There was a federal statute that said school systems had to address language differences.
- [00:05:34] JESSI GRIESER: The awareness that Black English existed and that Black English was something that we needed to be paying attention to was just starting to come into more general awareness. Right around that same time is when we start to see the work of, for example, William Labov.
- [00:05:53] WILLIAM LABOV: My job was to say whether the children in Green Road spoke something similar to the Black English we had described in the big cities of the East. I found that it was the same, there wasn't anybody ready at the trial who could speak for the defense and could argue that Black English is just a regional dialect.
- [00:06:14] LAMONT WALTON: I think they used every defense they could. When you have a legal defense, we try to argue that the law doesn't apply, and the law is not the remedy.
- [00:06:26] WILLIAM LABOV: After all that controversy, among linguists, there was a convergence.
- [00:06:31] JESSI GRIESER: That opened the door for people to be paying attention to the social importance and the social significance of Black English in a way that they weren't able to prior to that time, that scholarly time, but also the King Case.
- [00:06:55] GABRIEL HILLEL KAIMOWITZ: The Martin Luther King Jr. Case is about discrimination against Black English speakers, who are invariably poor, and most of whom live or have been in isolated Black communities often in housing projects, including scattered site housing.
- [00:07:23] GENEVA SMITHERMAN: The white population was really trying to promote social injustice and racial uplift. This is in the '60s, and they built low income housing in the midst of middle and upper middle class neighborhoods.
- [00:07:42] DWAYNE BRENEN: It was racial tension back then, especially in that area that we lived in because we were coming from the homes down there, and we're cutting all the rest of those that area was rich houses and stuff. We were the only low income housing in that whole area.
- [00:08:00] GENEVA SMITHERMAN: The Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School was one of those schools, that it was thought would promote this racial and class integration.
- [00:08:18] KIHILEE BRENEN: I remember being transferred from King School to another school because of this. I remember my mother being angry, I can picture her right now crying about it, because it was really stressful for her in a way that we couldn't even comprehend as being kids.
- [00:08:37] GENEVA SMITHERMAN: Ruth was really a stateswoman, diplomat between these, essentially opposing communities--school teachers and the parents and the Green Road housing project.
- [00:08:59] RUTH ZWEIFLER: The case raised a lot of questions about who the law protects and how they protect because schools are so autonomous. I think that's part of the shock at the time of anybody challenging the school district that maybe they were not doing the right thing. We, early on, went from being an adversary to being a partner with people prominent in the administration of our local school districts who certainly were on the side of the children all the way.
- [00:09:52] CHARLES W. JOINER: I found that they weren't learning to read, that this did have an implication upon the race, that I found further that the teachers testified that they really weren't treating these people any different than they were treating other people, and the law said that they were supposed to treat these people a little differently than otherwise. Therefore, the school board ought to do something about trying to help the teachers to take this into consideration in teaching these youngsters how to read.
- [00:10:20] LAMONT WALTON: The judge gave us a legal victory, the school system, when it voted got to appeal, gave us another victory.
- [00:10:46] GENEVA SMITHERMAN: Got a court ruling that legitimizes the language, and that, in fact, affirms that the schools have an obligation to teach children to read.
- [00:10:55] RUTH ZWEIFLER: He saw this as a cry for help for another generation. His decision is really beautiful.
- [00:11:07] LAMONT WALTON: After the case, that's when you had discussion of "what does this mean?" Should we broaden this to other students, to other schools, and that did not happen.
- [00:11:25] DWAYNE BRENEN: This case had an impact on me, I went through an inferior complex all the way to my mid 20s, just from this case, and I can remember when I broke free of it, I found out that we're no different than anybody else, but it took a toll on me mentally for years.
- [00:11:50] ROSSI RAY-TAYLOR: King was a step in what is, continues to be an open discussion, and until we actually address issues of equity throughout our societies. We won't be successful in addressing and sustaining it within any one segment of society.

Media
2024
Length: 00:12:50
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
Downloads
Subjects
Film
Martin Luther King Elementary School
Black English Case
Ann Arbor
Education
History
Local History
Local Issues
Rossi Ray-Taylor
Gabriel Kaimowitz
Lamont Walton
Dr. Geneva Smitherman
Kihilee Brenen
Dwayne Brenen
Jessi Grieser
Ruth Zweifler
Dr. William Labov
Charles W. Joiner
Ann Arbor 200