Title: We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination
Author: Russell Rickford
Year of Publication: 2016
Thesis:
Argues that Black Power and the movement toward Pan African nationalist schools had a profound symbiotic relationship. With its roots in the failures of integrated education and local autonomy over schools, Rickford follows SNCC, RNA, the BPP, and NOI as they worked to build parallel institutions that would develop survival tactics as well as prepare for a future of total freedom. (9, 14). Showing how these schools developed pushes back on a narrative that focuses solely on the Black Power Movement and all related to it as a failure.
Time: 1960s-1970s
Geography: Primarily U.S.
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Partial List and Locations of Independent Black Nationalist Schools
Introduction: Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination
1. Community Control and the Struggle for Black Education in the 1960s
- Segregation framed as the problem in the way of equitable education
Failed desegregation work gave way to shifting efforts toward community control
- Intermediate School 201 in Harlem is a case study
- Initial design had no windows, and 50/50 Puerto Rican & Black was the "integration" plan (26-27)
- State subsidizes mass exodus of whites from city centers
- School populations segregated by race actually rose from '54-65 (33)
- "Most educational justice movements since the 1950s had sought the training and resources necessary for black children to join mainstream society as fashioned by the white majority. After the mid-1960s, the orientation of black activism shifted decisively toward preparing those chil- dren to enter society on terms that they might dictate, and to enter in a manner that honored rather than degraded or denied their innermost selves." (35)
- Oceanhill-Brownsville battle over control of schooling
- Black survival ties in literal survival along with future economic, social, and political power (38)
2. Black Studies and the Politics of "Relevance"
3. The Evolution of Movement Schools
4. African Restoration and the Promise and Pitfalls of Cultural Politics
5. The Maturation of Pan African Nationalism
6. The Black University and the "Total Community"
7. The Black Institution Depression
Epilogue: Afrocentrism and the Neoliberal Ethos
Notes
Archival Sources
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
dual power
"The practice of dual power suggested that black people could design viable prototypes of the societies they wished to inhabit. The postcolonial process of establishing a political culture based on the aims of the revolution could thus begin immediately, even amid the throes of struggle." (16)
critiques on p 19 - intellectual/political elites & inability to anticipate "capitalist restructuring"
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
"The small, independent enterprises were often accused of teaching hate and were routinely harassed by authorities. Yet these institutions served as vital mechanisms of “black consciousness”—a sense of pride and aware- ness defined against the self-abnegation of “Negro” mentality." (2)
"The growth of these institutions signaled a strategic and philosophical shift from the pursuit of reform within a liberal democracy to the attempt to build the prospective infrastructure for an independent black nation, an entity that many activists imagined as a political and spiritual extension of the Third World." (3)
At their best, Pan African nationalist schools honored the activist tradition of addressing pragmatic, everyday needs while “preparing the field” of struggle for tomorrow." (6)
"Nor did 'multiethnic' studies and 'integrated' textbooks end the chronic alienation of African-American students. Organizers of Milwaukee’s Clifford McKissick Community School, an independent black institution, noted in 1970 that inclusion of African-American history and culture in public school curricula had created little more than 'a black patchwork on a snow-white blan- ket of white nationalist education.'" (7)
"Though some of these efforts yielded substantial concessions, the thrust for reform never fulfilled overarching goals of social mobility, collective advancement, and open opportu- nity, and thus failed to produce the democratic revolution in school and society envisioned by many African-American parents." (7)
"While innovative, free schools were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Their organizers shared black radicals’ disdain for the materialism and individualism of bourgeois culture. Yet free schoolers hoped to humanize a decadent and “overdeveloped” society, while black radicals wished to cultivate communities that a racist power structure had willfully “underdeveloped." (8)
"Rather than attempt a taxonomy of black private schools, We Are an African People examines a cluster of secular institutions expressly devoted to fostering black national and transnational consciousness as a primary pedagogical and social mission." (8)
"Contemporary black nationalism was inextricable from Pan Africanism, because black nation-states were viewed as key indexes of the freedom and power of African-descended people across the globe." (10)
Schools would have to be dramatically reimagined if they were to be engines of the new society rather than bulwarks of the status quo. They would need to become “liberated zones” that could function as self-contained communities and embryos of the coming nation." (12)
"The rise of a generation of black independent schools under- scores the need to rethink the decade. Dismissing even seemingly quixotic Black Power institutions as symbols of hubris and fantasy conceals the liminal moment in which they flourished and leads to truncated and reductionist accounts of the liberation struggle." (18)
"As this study demonstrates, a host of theoretical and practical weaknesses plagued the quest for independent black institutions. Patriarchy was an especially severe deficiency. Many Pan African nationalist schools were founded and operated by women, including Atlanta’s Learning House (Lonnetta Gaines and Victoria Skaggs); St. Paul, Minnesota’s Institute of African Learning (Sylvia Hill); Philadelphia’s ARD Self-Help Center (Alice Walker); and Durham, North Carolina’s Pan African Early Education Center (Mary McDonald). Overall, however, independent black institutions reproduced the pronounced male supremacy inherent in the majority culture" (18)
Notes:
Check out: Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXn-Fm6cn9s
Rickford's talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ka5qtHT7g8