"I Would Die to See My People Taught": The Abolitionist Teaching of Historical Black Women Teachers

• In Event: Give Us Free(dom): Black Abolitionist Teaching

Abstract

Acknowledging the impossibility of reform to eradicate police, punishment and anti-Blackness in schools has led to more critical engagement with the possibility and promise of abolition. However, educational stakeholders remain unaware of what this looks like as praxis. Using archival and historical methods, this paper maps the subversive herstory of what Bettina Love (2019) coins as abolitionist teaching. Abolitionist teaching is guided by the methods of historical Black women abolitionist teachers who provide critical lessons for how we, as a modern society, can subvert oppressive educational structures that persistently dispossess, marginalize, and criminalize Black students in schools. This paper illuminates this Black feminist radical pedagogical tradition, with Black women as the vanguard of the movement for educational justice.

Author

• Amber Neal, Purdue University