Digital Resistance in a Long Arc: HillmanTok University as Historiography of Black Educational Counterspaces

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The Battle for Higher Education and Historical Truth(s)

Abstract

This historiographical essay traces how Black education in the United States has been continually forged through resistance to institutional erasure, culminating in the emergence of HillmanTok University (HTU) in 2025. Using Community Cultural Wealth theory as a guiding lens, we present scholarship on clandestine literacy schools, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Freedom Schools, Black Studies departments, and digital pedagogies to argue that HTU is the most recent node in a longstanding genealogy of counterspaces. Drawing on secondary histories, policy texts, media coverage, and publicly available artifacts as conceptual data, we develop warranted claims about continuity and innovation. Our analysis demonstrates that suppression repeatedly generates autonomous educational infrastructures, urging scholars and policymakers to recognize and support these community-built knowledge ecologies.

Authors

• Caleb Thompson, The Ohio State University

• Kioshana LaCount Burrell, The Ohio State University

• Jason K. Segrest, The Ohio State University

• Celina K. Hairston, The Ohio State University