“We Demand Total Control of Our Schools!”: 1960s Community Control Movement as Black Abolitionist World-Building

• In Event: Writing, Righting, and Rioting Against Colonial-Carceral Machineries: School Abolition in Real Life, Time, and Context

Abstract

This paper examines Black abolitionist praxis within the 1960s community control movement in New York City. Specifically, I explore how Black parents, educators, and youth in Harlem and Ocean Hill-Brownsville envisioned and organized self-governed approaches to education (Lewis, 2013) as alternatives to the carcerality and anti-Blackness that shaped their schooling experiences. By exploring their efforts to rupture the anti-Black logics, practices, and structures of schooling, I uncover key lessons, provocations, and tensions that deepen our understanding of abolitionist world-building within contexts of school abolition (Stovall, 2018). These lessons inform how we organize to build liberatory education governed by and through the people.

I draw on Black study, abolition, and Black Critical Theory in education to explore how and why Black families organized to take control of their schools. With antiblackness being endemic to, and still largely underscored as, a core function of the schooling apparatus (Dumas & ross, 2016), these frameworks offer lenses for understanding and learning from the fugitive planning and world-building (Harney & Moten, 2013; Gilmore, 2022) that emerged in the community control movement. The intellectual and organizing strategies of these frameworks are integral to our collective orientation toward the question central to Black study: How do we get free?

This paper utilizes historical analysis and archival research methods under the tradition that archives are living, unfinished, open-ended, and significant moments on which we must reflect with care (Hall, 2001). I re-envision the utility of archives as socio-political tools that enable the public’s right to know and act (Opotow & Belmonte, 2016). I employ Hartman’s (2008) notion of critical fabulation to engage the silences, absences, and fragmented narratives within the community control movement archives. I analyze sources such as newspapers, visual media, correspondence, school policies, and organizing tactics to situate Black communities’ demands within the larger social, political, and historical fabric of the 1960s. Critical fabulation facilitates a deeper exploration and articulation of Black freedom projects erased from dominant historical and socio-political narratives.

Overall, I highlight that school abolition must confront the deeper ontological and epistemological antiblack violence embedded within U.S. public schools. While the schooling of Black children has historically operated as a site of control, erasure, and enclosure (Dumas & ross, 2016; Sojoyner, 2016), the community control movement offers provocations we must take up in the practice of getting free. I argue that in the praxis of abolitionist world-building, we must thoroughly consider not only the material implications of school abolition but also the epistemologies and social relations at the foundation of people-governed educational structures. A serious commitment to school abolition demands that we interrogate how we organize power and build liberatory education, recognizing governance structures and social relations as critical terrains where the logics of anti-Black violence can be either re-legitimized or actively disrupted. Even so, we must collectively contend with the reactionary—and often alluring—trap of school policy “reformist reform” (Gilmore, 2022), which the State frequently deploys to fragment movements and stifle the impact of Black-governed educational institutions (Dumas, 2016; Walker, 1996).

Author

• Imani C. Wilson, New York University