Fugitive Slave, Literate Slave: Notes on the Interior Lives of Jim Crow Teachers

• In Event: The Future Is Black: Afro-Pessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education

Abstract

Black education was a fugitive project from its inception. Despite their exclusion from Common Schooling in the antebellum period, Black people (educators, free, enslaved, and otherwise) systematically contested prevailing notions of Black ineducability and civic denial by illegally obtaining literacy and developing ground up models of education. In this sense, Black education has always been liminally circumscribed, between liberatory dreams and the realities of anti-Black confinement. It was analogous to the fugitive slave, the runaway who phenomenologically existed in the realm of possible recapture. Thus, even while Black education developed as an activity of escape (of stealing away), violent recapture/white suppression loomed as a persistent threat and demanded Black subversion. This tension is evidenced by the historical trajectory of Black education and was particularly embodied by Black teachers, through their pedagogy and acts of subterfuge.
This chapter employs fugitivity as an analytical lens against historical literature by and about Black teachers. I analyze their well-rehearsed dance between compliance with the system of Jim Crow schooling and fierce critiques of the anti-Black discourse shaping their realities. Given their vulnerability to a range of disciplinary technologies—from job termination to physical violence—these schoolteachers taught from a liminal space of fugitivity, even as they wore the mask of respectable, compliant Black educators. The interiority of Black teachers’ professional and intellectual lives modeled a transcendent political clarity as it pertained to education: because anti-Blackness instructs a continual threat of recaputure/enclosure in all contexts of the known world, any form of purposeful Black education will require vigilance and constant acts of subversion.

Author

• Jarvis Ray Givens, Harvard University