Strategies for the Advancement of Quality and Purposeful Education of African-American Learners and Their Applicability to 20th-Century Advocacy

• In Event: A Historical Interrogation of Inequalities in Early Childhood Programs in the United States

Abstract

This research presents a historical perspective of major avenues African-Americans used to advocate for quality early childhood education from enslavement to Head Start programs. Unsung contributions are surveyed, in order to demystify and discuss successful strategies that remain viable in advancing the education of young African American learners.
Background
Africans brought educational traditions and perspectives to America despite enslavement. Education was and is a core value in many African American families. Education is and was consistently seen as a gateway to respect, an opportunity for greater service, and greater economic reward. Strategies were used to veil literacy advancement while facilitating the advancement of communities. Emphasis was consistently placed on educating the young in order to prepare the African American community for a
more equitable society. Then, as now, it is important for advocates to understand history of educating African American learners so that faulty perspectives are dismissed, persistent challenges are addressed, and strengths are emphasized. African Americans are a people that came to America with a rich educational tradition. The four oldest universities were birthed in Africa. Through centuries of pain, they still rise through resilience to invent pathways for the youngest to become educated in order to eradicate social and economic inferiority. To that extent, key historical figures, although some unsung, are explicitly identified. Extensions are made to the strategies applicability to a twentieth century technological environment The periods reviewed are education during enslavement, reconstruction, renaissance, civil rights and beyond.
The Goal
Educational advocacy campaigns must recognize that the African-American young child’s education is part of a continuous walk to freedom. Without the historical context of advocacy, one’s efforts is reduced to a “one off” (i.e. a sole good deed), and not an interconnected, strategic freedom movement. The freedom walk requires a sustainable consciousness which different paths of education has afforded young African-American learners.
This began with a love for education that was already embedded in the hearts of Africans when the cuffs of slavery was placed on their soul, moving to the particular care for enslaved children that the grandmother figure communicated to save the Black child’s physical life while quietly passing on the culture using call and response songs with polyrhythms from Africa, and the drive to literacy that was mastered by the few and given to many through each one teaching the other. Following enslavement, the concept of schooling was reconstructed, and when the twentieth century dawned, it was inculcated in the minds of the youngest children that agency was attached to uplifting a race through developing kindergartens and mass movements that had youth divisions. The uplift of African American children has continued through independent schools, Headstart and UPK programs.
Through looking at these historical contexts, we have come to know that Uplift is only a foundation for agency. It is not agency. It is important that African- American learners educational experience explicitly facilitates agency coupled with the historical context of the resilient walk to freedom not as disconnected events but as strategic themes of possibility.

Authors

• Donna Wright, Medger Evers College

• Judith McConnell Mikkelson, Oxford International Round Table