Minds Stayed on Freedom

• In Event: Roots, Realities, Refusals, Reinventions: Critical Reflections on the Histories and Futures of Liberation Education

Abstract

In this paper, Joyce King asks: What we can learn from the recovery of both the practice of Black liberation education as well as from a theoretical interpretation of Black thought, “minds stayed on freedom," in liberation education traditions? Ella Baker’s biographer, historian Barbara Ransby (2003, p. 359), explains that Baker’s view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for the answers to social and political questions. Likewise, Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney also expressed this theory of social transformation in his confidence in the capacity of ordinary working people to create change. African revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau) also influenced Black liberation education and thought. Though grounded in Marxism, Cabral developed his own analysis of revolution in his society (Chabal, 1983). “Return to the source” meant returning to indigenous (peasant) culture, to “the ‘memory’ of historical development” that contains “the seeds of opposition” (Cabral, 1973). Cabral understood the culture of the masses as a sociological reality to be studied and analyzed (not romanticized) as the source of the ideology of the liberation struggle, which the colonizers sought to usurp and suppress.

As such, King calls for "historical recovery" of Black education for liberation, also emphasizing the need for theoretical interpretation of the praxis of past educators and activists. From the global Garvey Movement (UNIA) to the Citizenship Education Schools and Miles Horton and Highlander Folk School, and the legacy of SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project Freedom Schools underpinned by the radical teachings of Ella Baker during the Civil Rights Movement to the Institute of the Black World and the Oakland Community School organized by Black Panther Party activists, as well as the Black independent schools and home schooling movements, King illuminates the epistemic, pedagogic and curricular praxis informed by visions of freedom in liberation movements of the period. Forms of Black creative cultural expression (e.g., music and language) and spirituality that have also engendered/reflected Black consciousness and enhanced/reflected Black people’s capacity for critical thought and resistance to the material and discursive structures of racial oppression will be discussed as well (Woods, 1989). Put another way, the under-conceptualized “enduring Africanity” (Semmes, 1992, p. 7) in historical and contemporary Black liberation education and thought, in the U.S. and other national contexts, is central to this commentary.

Author

• Joyce E. King, Georgia State University