Identif(ying) the Issues of Local Oppression: Mapping the Local Character of Education for Liberation

• In Event: Accounting for the Black Radical Tradition in the Heart of Black Pedagogy

Abstract

As a site of movement education in the U.S. South during the early 1960s, freedom schools represent one of the cornerstones of Black radical pedagogy. Formed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), freedom schools sought to prepare Black children and youth for the roles and responsibilities of citizenship. For Black students who had to navigate Mississippi's separate and unequal school system, freedom schools became a critical space for leadership development within a local context that assumed their racial inferiority. However, when Fannie Theresa Rushing traveled to Chicago in 1965 to form SNCC Residential Freedom Schools, she quickly learned that the freedom school curriculum that had worked so well in the South had to be amended to meet the needs of Black youth traversing local conditions of the urban North (Rushing, 2008). Could a curriculum that used nonviolent direct action support the pedagogical and practical needs of Black teenagers who were more concerned about gangs than the KKK? These regional differences eventually ignited tensions between freedom school teachers and students. While historians of education in the Black Power movement have revealed the diversity of Black educational thought (Rickford, 2016; Murch 2010; Spencer, 2016), the ways in which local conditions shaped Black radical pedagogy remains unclear. If the African American organizing tradition is committed to “organizing in the context in which one lives and works, and working the issues found in that context," (Payne, 1995) education for liberation must be guided by a commitment to preparing ordinary people to work within the local conditions that shape their daily lives. How might Rushing’s reflections on forming the Residential Freedom School sharpen our understanding of regional articulations of Black radical pedagogy crafted in the era of Black Power? And what Black educational practices might become legible when we examine movement education as a product of local conditions?

This paper offers a comparative analysis of SNCC’s freedom schools in Mississippi and multiple movement schools established in Detroit by the Black Student United Front to illuminate how local conditions shaped the character of Black freedom pedagogy. As the student arm of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the BSUF established freedom schools and liberation schools during the latter half of the tumultuous 1960s to prepare Black students to navigate changes wrought by deindustrialization, white flight, and urban renewal. These teenage activists attended political education classes alongside radical labor organizers and auto factory workers, studying Lenin, Marx, and Cabral alongside Malcolm X and the historian John Blassingame as theoretical tools for social change (Walker, 2018). This comparative view of Black radical pedagogy also exposes the many visions of Black education that Black students constructed in movement institutions. Although calls for culturally relevant education were a hallmark of the era, so too were demands for a political education that could prepare Black youth to navigate the ever-growing bureaucracies of the urban North while seeking to disrupt and dismantle power structures that positioned them at the bottom of the urban political economy.

Author

• Dara Walker, Pennsylvania State University