Cultural Memory, School Protest, and the (re)Making of the City: Detroit Educational Futures of the Past

• In Event: 29.023 - (De)Colonial Research: Space, Place, Memory, and Bodies in Un"settling" Narratives of Educational Opportunity

Abstract

From the 1940s to late 1970s disenfranchised grassroots Detroit endeavored to create a more equitable education system and by extension city. This research paper examines how racially and economically oppressed people came to understand their educational disenfranchisement and the alternative visions of education and society they created based on this analysis. Drawing on central theoretical conceptualizations that center Gramsci’s (1971, see also Hall, 1986) analysis of the interaction of the state, societal institutions, and economic foundation of society and Fanon’s (1967/2004) analysis of the colonial condition, this study uses oral history methods to analyze how cultural memory shaped the development of educational consciousness and shaped school protest. In order to situate cultural memory transmitted in a broader historical framework, I draw on critical tenets of (internal) colonial and settler colonial analysis (Barrera, 1979; Barrera, Muñoz, & Ornelas, 1972; Mignolo, 2002; Tuck & Yang, 2012; King, 2013). This framework for analysis illuminates the historical transmutations - enslavement, colonization, migration, racialized segmented urban economy, educational racial segregation - which have shaped differential racialized experiences in urban centers. In addition, the cultural milieu (Gramsci, 1970; Hall, 1986) in which actors situate their meaning making processes also is unearthed through analysis of the life history interview. Drawing on oral history and archival methods, departing from a decolonial framework (Zavala, 2013; Smith, 2012; Shopes, 2011; Leavy, 2011), this paper excavates the meaning making processes of oppressed educational actors, specifically African American and Latinx peoples (Whiteduck, 2013; Portelli, 1991). This paper draws on IRB approved oral history interviews conducted in Detroit with narrators that include former members of the student activist groups, labor activists, students, teachers and other educational actors. Archival research was conducted at the Archives of the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs and the Archives of the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Collection. Preliminary analysis suggests that cultural memory transmitted within oral history interviews emphasize cultural experience as interstitial to the meaning making process of educational life in the urban North. Data analysis demonstrates that conceptions of place pivot on historical intersectional oppressions which informed how narrators’ made sense of their educational experiences and activism. This historical consciousness rooted in cultural memory shaped narrators’ understanding of possible educational futures and came to inform their decisions to engage in school protest. Studying the development of educational consciousness in relation to cultural memory from the 1940s-1970s in Detroit allows us to see the shifts in how the oppressed came to understand and name intersectional oppressions shaping their educational disenfranchisement in the under examined urban North (Theoharis, 2003; Higginbotham, 2003).

Author

• Bianca Ayanna Suarez, University of California - Berkeley