Thinking About Love, Justice, and Education Through Black Protest Praxis: DuBois, Woodson, King, and Malcolm X on Education That Overcomes Assaults on the Public

• In Event: Separation of School and (Corporate) State? Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Love, Justice, and Education

Abstract

William Watkins shows that in W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others there was both an explicit and implicit spirit of loving relationships that accompanied the political protest and civil rights legal reformation. This spirit of seeking justice through what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the strength to love” grew out of African American slavery experience and stood alongside the history of struggle as evidenced in Black protest thought (Watkins, 2005). As White architects reconstructed educational curriculum for Blacks after the American Civil War (Watkins, 2001) the wherewithal for an inimical corporate assault on public education (Watkins, 2012) was forged, and along with it several pronounced Black orientations to curriculum and education (Watkins, 1993). Within this context, work emerged that stimulated a powerful basis for occupying control of education by focusing on needs and interests of learners through loving relationships toward ends of greater justice in an increasingly corporatized and militarized state that controlled schools. Again we must ask how the movements of radical Black protest thought related to, countered, evaded, and overcame dimensions of the corporate state, both with the education of voters in the Civil Rights Movement through valiant efforts of Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Charlie Cobb, Myles Horton, and others (Payne, 1995) or within the entire span of the Black struggle for freedom in America (Harding, 1981). In such historical perspective lies precedent that may be needed for the separation of school and state today, and for curricular experience that evolves from such separation.

Author

• William H. Watkins, University of Illinois at Chicago