McCaskill, Lucas, and Hill

Carolyn McCaskill, attended the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf in Talladega and was in the first integrated class in 1968 at the Alabama School for the Deaf. She received her MA degree in Counseling with the Deaf, BA in Psychology and Ph.D in Administration and Supervision from Gallaudet University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the ASL & Deaf Studies Department at Gallaudet University since 1996. Carolyn has conducted numerous seminars and workshops related to Black Deaf people.

Black ASL: A Historical and Linguistic Overview

Provides an overview of a historical and linguistic project on Black ASL. The goals of the project are 1) to determine if specific linguistic features could be identified to characterize the signing of the Black Deaf community as a distinct variety of American Sign Language (ASL), and 2) to describe the socio-historical reality that would make the emergence of this variety possible. Education was not allowed for Black deaf children in the South until 1869, when the first school was opened in Raleigh, North Carolina. Sixteen other southern states and the District of Columbia established schools for Black deaf children. Most resisted the integration mandated by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, finally allowing desegregation in the mid-1960s, with Louisiana desegregating in 1978.
This socio-historical reality allowed for the emergence of a distinct variety of ASL. We filmed free conversations and interviews with a total of 96 signers in 6 of the 17 states -  North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. The signers included individuals over the age of 55 who, by definition, attended segregated schools, and individuals under the age of 35, who attended integrated and/or mainstreamed schools, such that their white classmates might have been both deaf and hearing.
The analysis identified a number of linguistic features that distinguish this variety, including 2-handed signs like WANT which can be produced one-handed, signs like KNOW produced at the forehead which can be lowered, the size of the signing space, constructed action and constructed dialogue (role shifting), the use of lexical and phrasal repetition, mouthing, the borrowing of words and phrases from spoken Black English into Black ASL, and vocabulary differences. The analysis also shows that, as a result of integration and mainstreaming, the variety is changing.