ITS NOT AAVE, IT'S EBONICS & HERE'S WHY 🧵🪡
ROBERT LEE WILLIAMS & THE BIRTH OF EBONICS
Robert Lee Williams was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) Arkansas on February 20, 1930 during the Jim Crowe era. His father Robert Lee Williams worked as a millwright and died in 1935 when Robert was just five years old; his mother Rosie L Williams cleaned homes until her death in 1978. He had one sister named Dorothy Jean. Robert graduated from Dunbar high school at the age of sixteen and attended Dunbar Junior College for a year. After receiving a lower than expected score on his IQ test he dropped out of Dunbar College, saying he “felt discouraged” after the test recommended a labor job instead of going to college.
What Williams called a “loss of confidence” would become a defining moment in his pursuit of education, and notable works, namely the Black Intelligence, Test of Cultural Homogeneity or BITCH-100.
Robert Williams earned a Bachelor's degree from Philander Smith University in 1953, he then earned a M.Ed. from Wayne State University in educational psychology in 1995 and a Ph.D in 1961 from Washington University in St Louis, in clinical psychology. Williams earned accolades all at a time when almost every single graduate program in the South remained segregated.
Williams worked as a staff psychologist at Arkansas State Hospital starting 1955, and was the first Black American psychologist to be hired at a mental facility in Arkansas. After earning his doctorate in 1961, he served as an associate chief psychologist at the Jefferson Barracks Veterans Affairs Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri from 1961 to 1966 and then as a director of a hospital improvement project in Spokane, Washington, and a consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health.
Following the assassination of King, Williams experienced a growing consciousness of the Black experience and his own Blackness. After briefly serving as the chief of psychology at the Jefferson Barracks Veterans Hospital in St. Louis, Williams took a position with his alma mater, Washington University. From 1970 to 1992, he was professor of psychology there, where he also developed the African and Black American Studies program, serving as its first director.
In a paper presented to the American Psychological Association in 1972, Williams described the results of a 100-question intelligence test he had created, the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, or the BITCH-100. Questions employed a cultural context more familiar to Black Americans, and, consequently, white takers of the test scored lower than their Black counterparts. This work has become part of a larger body of evidence showing how standardized IQ tests exhibit racial and cultural biases that result in lower scores for Black students.
Williams’s most well-known work is his study of Black linguistic practices. In 1973, he coined the term “Ebonics” to encompass the vernacular English often spoken by Black Americans, and two years later, he published the edited volume Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks. His work on Ebonics remained relatively obscure in mainstream circles until 1996, when the Oakland School Board in California resolved to recognize Ebonics as a language employed by its students. This was done to access funding for bilingual education. The subsequent uproar from politicians and linguists resulted in Williams making numerous appearances on national television to explain Ebonics.
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I'm her mother and I want to tell the truth. Yes she did fall 9-10 ft down & her foot came off and only hung on by a baby finger length of skin. She literally loss approx. 3.1pints of blood. Presbyterian Dr's came & give her blood before they could move her.She's her own hero, she crawled to her phone & called EMS and made the call no mother wants to get, "Mom my foot came off. She said mom I'm cold and it's dark; I think I'm dying. I just want you and dad to know I love yaw."