Dream Keepers (EDUC 390T): Exploring the Legacy of Mitchell and White

Before Mary Mitchell Harris and Nathaniel White ever set foot on Duke's campus, they were Durhamites. They grew up in the city's neighborhoods, attended Hillside High School — where Mitchell graduated as valedictorian and White as salutatorian — and were shaped by Durham's churches, communities, and rhythms long before they became two of the "First Five" Black students to integrate Duke's undergraduate program in 1963.

That distinction matters deeply to Dr. Kisha Daniels, the faculty advisor for the Mitchell-White House, a Living Learning Community (LLC) at Duke, and the driving force behind Dream Keepers: Exploring the Legacy of Mitchell and White — a service-learning course that insists on telling a fuller story.

"It didn't start with Duke," Daniels explains. "It started with Durham."

The course grew from a convergence of ideas: a teaching and learning initiative encouraging collaborative, project-based learning; a friendship between Daniels and Dr. Yolanda Dunston, a professor at North Carolina Central University; and Daniels's appointment as faculty advisor for the Mitchell-White House, Duke's Living and Learning Community dedicated to exploring the history and cultures of the African diaspora. Students living in the LLC are required to take a house course, and rather than offering something lightweight, Daniels and her collaborators asked a bigger question: what if this could be a rigorous, department-rooted course that genuinely expanded how students understand Duke, Durham, and themselves?

The result is a class that unfolds like a journey outward. Students start by mapping Durham itself — its neighborhoods, its history, its many communities beyond the campus walls. Many arrive at Duke having never considered what lies beyond East or West Campus. "Oh, North Durham. What's North Durham? There's an East Durham?" Daniels laughs, describing the students' early surprises. From there, the course digs into the history of education in Durham, the legacy of Hillside High School, the role of housing and Black-owned businesses, and finally into the archives — where students spend days alongside Duke Libraries' archival team, piecing together the lives of Mitchell, White, and the other members of the First Five.

The archival work tends to be a turning point. Students quickly notice that the official record feels thin — the same photographs repeated, the same brief acknowledgment of the "First Five," the same institutional shorthand. Determined to go deeper, they reach outward: to Hillside alumni, to churches the families still attend, to oral histories and community connections that live far outside university walls. The name Dream Keepers captures this spirit. For Mitchell, White, and their families and communities, enrolling at Duke wasn't just personal ambition — it was a collective dream, hard-won against a backdrop of exclusion. The course commits to keeping that dream alive, in full, beyond the soundbite.

Each semester, students design a new collaborative project rooted in their own interests and research. The first cohort imagined what the Carolina Times — Durham's historic Black newspaper — might have published the week the First Five arrived at Duke. The second created a short documentary comparing the Black student experience then and now, drawing on interviews and archival sources. This year's class has taken on developing a coloring book for elementary school students, tracing the African American experience in Durham and at Duke.

But the real magic comes in the collaboration. Working with Turquoise Parker, a Media Coordinator at Lakewood Elementary School (and one of Daniels's former students from her time at NC Central), the Duke students will bring their draft pages to the kids — not to present, but to be reviewed. The elementary students will rank pages, suggest changes, help name characters, and ultimately decide what stays and what goes. Parker has designed a "reverse Shark Tank" where her students become the investors, and the Duke students have to earn their approval.

"I told them," Daniels says with a laugh, "these kids are going to be brutal. You're probably not ready for what they're going to say."

That's exactly the point. Dream Keepers is, at its heart, a course about reciprocity — about who gets to tell a story, who holds knowledge, and what it means to really listen. Two students from Durham who attended Hillside High School told Daniels this was the first class at Duke that taught them about their own city.

The coloring book, whenever it's finished, will find its way into Durham classrooms. And somewhere in those pages, the dream that Mitchell and White carried onto campus in 1963 will keep moving forward.

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Dream Keepers is required for Mitchell-White House residents and open to all Duke students by permission. It is offered both semesters.