Urban South Grassroots Research Collective: How a New Orleans Coalition Advanced Community Agency Amid Takeover

• In Event: (Re)Building Democracy in the Wake of State Takeover: Community-Led Research and Resistance as Repair

Abstract

Urban South Grassroots Research Collective for Public Education (USGRC) is a New Orleans-based coalition melding research and grassroots organizing for racial-economic equity (Author, 2021). USGRC formed in the wake of state takeover, which disenfranchised the city’s Black communities through mass termination of Black teachers, closure of neighborhood public schools, and incubation of privately managed charter schools without community input (Author, 2011, 2015, 2025; Dixson et al., 2015; Sanders, 2018). Drawing on critical race analysis, counternarratives, and two decades of research, a scholar-activist chronicles USGRC’s efforts to register and affirm community concerns over privatization, demand community control, and resist the racialized assault on historic educational institutions and local governance (Author et al., 2010; Author et al., 2013; USGRC, 2015; Author et al., 2025). Special attention will be given to detailing possibilities for democratic collaboration and agency, and elevation of community knowledge, amid state takeover and its aftermath.
Specifically, this scholar-activist utilizes fieldnotes, a robust record of community-based research, and firsthand knowledge of select grassroots efforts to chronicle the work of USGRC as an instantiation of antiracist praxis aimed at foregrounding the experiential knowledge of Black communities targeted by state takeover. The presentation will highlight collaborative writings projects that centered student and veteran teacher experiences as public schools were closed or chartered; a national convening in New Orleans that foregrounded community counterstories on privatization; specific actions to defend neighborhood public schools in New Orleans by USGRC and member organizations; and projects involving popular media, including newspaper, radio, and film, which disseminated community views more broadly to challenge existing reforms.
Such work, it is argued, is critical as accountability and democratic governance at every level have eroded, only deepening historic forms of disenfranchisement suffered by Black and Brown communities (Ewing, 2018; Lipman, 2020; Sanders, Stovall, & White, 2018). From privatized charter schools with self-appointed boards, state authorities over local school governance, erosion of power of locally elected school boards, and the vast influence of pro-market philanthropies over education policy, avenues to register community input and concerns—and act upon these—have been drastically curtailed (Au & Ferrare, 2015; deMarrais et al., 2020; Scott, 2015).
The politics of dispossession—what Cheryl Harris (1995) has referred to as “whiteness as property” and David Harvey (2006) as “accumulation by dispossession”—require racially oppressed communities, and researchers working in solidarity, to create avenues for public voice, criticism, dissent, agency, and the articulation of visionary alternatives that challenge neoliberal governance. We are living in a moment of radical retrenchment of education and civil rights (African American Policy Forum, 2024; Omi & Winant, 2015;), and thus the work of ground-level coalitions like USGRC represents a critical front in the battle to remedy and repair longstanding power inequities. In the spirit of Janelle Scott’s (2024) charge to examine “how research can identify historical harms…and imagine remedies that include…community-held forms of knowledge and practice,” the New Orleans experience offers consequential lessons from twenty years of protracted struggle against racism, privatization, and anti-democratic forces that threaten the self-determination of communities.

Authors

• Kristen L. Buras, Urban South Grassroots Research Collective

• Raynard Sanders, New Orleans Imperative