Spiriting Urban Educational Justice: The Leadership of African American Mothers Organizing for Increased Equity and Local Control

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Power, and Parental Involvement: Naming the Limits and Drafting the Future of Contemporary Discourse and Practice

Abstract

Authors draw on our three-year, case study of community organizers who mobilize to increase school access, equity, and local control in Detroit, MI. They have done so as members of a multiracial and intergenerational community-based organization (CBO). In-depth interview and observations suggest the leadership of African American mother organizers has been instrumental to the CBO’s citywide influence. These women assumed key roles in galvanizing momentum; recruiting, socializing, and sustaining members; guiding effective campaigns, and cultivating social capital and critical hope in a divisive educational arena largely influenced by neoliberalism and privatization agendas. The mothers worked in schools and communities in Southeastern Michigan to combat the systemic racism and class oppression that undermine the education provided to Black and Latinx children. They have contributed historical and experiential knowledge, and drawn upon their sense of being spiritually called to provide practical labor through a process we call “spiriting” urban educational justice. Spiriting captures the hope and spirituality that motivates the mothers’ belief in the power of parents, students, and community members to lead and influence justice-oriented educational change.
Authors offer three, individual cases of African-American mother-organizers’ efforts and analyze the collective effects of their work given their social identities, border crossing and boundary spanning activities, navigation of placed-based politics, and liberatory aims for Detroit schools and communities. As organizers, these mothers voiced the import of race and power in both shaping the troubled state of Detroit schools and in spurring parents’ engagement in education changemaking efforts. Indeed, data show the mother-organizers’ commitment to defying traditional norms of deferential parental involvement to, instead, seek transformation and enact political resistance (Author, 2009; Nygreen, 2016; Welton & Freelon, 2018). They have done so while mobilizing their communities to oppose school closure, increase local school governance, protect the rights of students with disabilities, and more. Their voice and perspective will be represented in the session by one of these mother-organizers who assumed leadership in the CBO.
The presenting author will draw upon Black feminist theory to link the organizers’ efforts to Black activist mothering traditions. Such traditions are steeped in transformative, communal work done for emancipatory purposes given the intersecting racial, gendered, and class-based consciousness of many Black mothers (Author, 2007; Collins, 1990; Sakho, 2017). Together the presenting author and the presenting community organizer will pinpoint how school and district leaders can collaborate with African American parent organizers and activists to systemically improve urban schools through recognizing and leveraging their joint interest in—and dedication to— protecting and improving public education. Additionally, they will explain how better understanding the racialized plight of such parents, and validating their experiences of schools as sites of cultural domination and political struggle, is key to forging constructive relationships.

Authors

• Camille M. Wilson, University of Michigan

• Dana Gabrielle Nickson, University of Washington - Seattle

• Kimberly Charis Ransom, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor