A Place Where Souls Can Rest: Black Girl Freedom, Liberation, and Emancipation

• In Event: Divine Love in Me: Black Girl Love as Resistance Against Oppressive Schooling

Abstract

This presentation emphasizes Divine Love, showcasing how educators might allow Black girls to rest and embrace all aspects of themselves through the practice of (re)membering (Dillard, 2012). Specifically, we draw from a case study that engages Black girls in practices of ancestry through personal narratives, storytelling, and poetry. By learning from the past as well as stories from teachers, families, and communities, and their own stories, Black girls in the study paved futures rooted in discovery, self-love, freedom, liberation, and toward emancipation, in which they began to recognize the Divine within themselves. We showcase the ways in which we worked to collectively write poetry and stories to freedom dream together. This study is important to the overall work of constructing educational possibilities for dismantling racial injustice, as it has implications for Black girls engaging Divine love to construct their futures both within and beyond schools.

Author

• Marcelle Mentor, University of Massachusetts - Boston