Dr. James Pratt, Jr. distinctly remembers both times he received paddlings at school. The 13-year-old and his friends had been using the computers in the new computer lab inappropriately when a classmate reported them to the teacher. Pratt and his friends were sent one by one to the office to meet with school administrators—including the assistant principal.
“He used to walk down the hallway, and if kids were acting up, he would point the paddle at them and say, ‘I’m going to beat your behind,’” Pratt told the Mississippi Free Press.
Pratt knew what awaited him. When it was his turn, he placed his hands on the desk in front of him and bent over. He felt the wood connect three times before it was over and the assistant principal sent him back to class.
Now the Fisk University Criminal Justice and Homeland Security program coordinator, Pratt has also done extensive research in corporal punishment and has co-authored “Historic Lynching and Corporal Punishment in Contemporary Public Schools in the South.” The study examined student discipline in 10 southern states during the 2013-2014 school year and compared them to lynchings between 1865 and 1950. They found that corporal punishment in school was more common for all students—but especially Black students—in areas where lynchings had historically occurred.
Dr. James Pratt Jr. will speak at the inaugural education conference of the Mississippi Coalition to End Corporal Punishment. He is the program coordinator for Fisk University’s Criminal Justice and Homeland Security and has extensively researched corporal punishment. Photo courtesy James Pratt Jr.
“My primary research area is cultures of islands in the South, and so that experience definitely shifted my overall kind of paradigm and what I seek to examine,” Pratt said. “(Because of) that specific experience, when I got the opportunity and was told about this project, I wanted to jump right on.”
“It makes me passionate about getting rid of corporal punishment, and it gives me a purview on how to ask the questions and how to get to it and how people justify it,” he added. “It definitely influenced the way
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