Leading Schools in the New Jim Crow: Researching and Reclaiming Black Education and Leadership

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

“History reveals that the seeds of the new system of control were planted well before the
end of the Civil Rights Movement. A new race-neutral language was developed for
appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that
succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place.” – Michelle
Alexander, 2010
“Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well.” – Derrick Bell
In her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
Michelle Alexander masterfully described the current social and political context as one “in
which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with
economic opportunity.” This holds true not only for criminal justice reform, but also education
reform, and the neoliberal policies that work to advance one of two pathways from childhood to
adulthood – a cradle-to-college and career continuum or school-to-prison pipeline. Just as the
old Jim Crow ascribed separate and unequal access to educational resources and opportunities to
learn based on race, the New Jim Crow not only limits access and opportunity to equal
educational resources, it does so at the nexus of housing, criminal justice system, public health,
and a range of out-of-school factors that influence what happens in schools and classrooms.

Sub Unit

• Social Justice Action Committee

Chair

• Sonya Douglass Horsford, Teachers College, Columbia University

Participants

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University

• Kofi Lomotey, Western Carolina University

• Linda C. Tillman

• Rodney K. Hopson, George Mason University

• Terri Nicol Watson, City College of New York - CUNY

• M. Christopher Brown, Alcorn State University