"The Steep Edge of a Dark Abyss": Mohonk, White Social Architects, and the Black Radical Tradition in Education

• In Event: 63.019 - Radical Black Futurities: Ruminations and Echoes

Abstract

June 2019 will mark the 129th anniversary of the First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question. For three days, these White, northern social architects, met to devise a social strategy to tackle what they termed and understood as ‘The Negro Question’. In this paper, the author will: 1) briefly review the First Mohonk Conference on The Negro Question; 2) examine current challenges to/for Blacks in the U.S. and link to those identified by Mohonk conferees; 3) share thoughts on efforts to reframe ‘The Negro Question’ as a question of power and pedagogy. The author introduces the Black Radical Tradition in Education as an operative call for educators, students, artists, and others to invoke and claim insurrectionist stances and criticalist postures.

Author

• Lasana Kazembe, Indiana University - IUPUI