Afterword:

Returning to my rural Alabama birth home after being away more than 40 years, when I was asked to write this Afterword, I thought how fortuitous. On the one hand, my heart and spirit leapt for joy that rural African Americans and their educational plight were finally getting attention from this much needed research and book. However, on the other hand, I was awash with sadness that only now has there begun attention to rural African Americans’ economic and education condition. It was from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the north and west from 1916 to 1970 that created African American urban spaces (Wilkerson, 2010). Yet, the research and programmatic focus shifted to African Americans in urban areas, as though they were nonexistent and completely forgotten in rural areas. As Genovese (2019) indicated, African Americans living in rural spaces face constant erasure. With “10.3 million people, one-fifth of rural America, people of color” (p. 1), it is almost unimaginable that this book would be so late in coming and highly necessary even more so now. Within these numbers, over 10 million people in rural America, one-fifth people of color, there is geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic diversity. By no means, is rural America a monolith (Chinni & Pinkus, 2019). It is the diversity of rural America that makes disaggregating the economic and education outcomes by ethnicity even more important. Captured more precisely, Chinni and Pinkus, stated,