Educational Justice, Protest Songs, and Mass Incarceration: A Survey and Critique of the African American Struggle for Justice

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Research focusing on series of unpunished acts of racial oppression, murder and other forms of injustice from colonial times to the present continue to demand intellectual attention. The recent police shooting and killing of a South Carolina African American father and son an additional need to explore other forms of injustice from a domestic and global perspective through the prism of African American Studies scholarship. While African Americans indeed have not been the only group of victims of racial injustice, they have been by far been the largest and most active domestic group to fight against injustice in 20th and 21st century U.S. history An appropriate venue to foster discussions on topics surrounding both victims and perpetrators of injustice is through a panel discussion about on the history of race, class, education, and the penal and legal system. This panel raises questions on topics of educational justice and the efforts of African American institutional leaders, the role of protest songs as tools to dismantle governmental systems of injustice, and the abolition of the prison industrial complex and prison privation movement, that warrants intellectual attention and conversation.

Sub Unit

• ASALH Centennial Annual Meeting and Conference

Chair

• Ronald Jemal Stephens, Purdue University

Individual Presentations

• Unlocking the Golden Door of Freedom: Booker T. Washington as a Pioneer of Educational Justice - Keturah Nix, Purdue University

• African American Artists in the Global Fight for Justice:Black Music and the Framing of Protest Songs during the Anti-Apartheid Struggle - Jonathan Richard Freeman, Purdue University

• Prison nation: Lies, corporate ties, and the pursuit of pursuit of Profit: Re-Imaging the Privatization of Prisons and the 21st Century Mass Incarceration Crisis - Na’eemah Webb, Purdue University

Commentator

• Rondee Gaines, Miami University Oxford