We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black by Russell Rickford

By Russell Rickford

Through the top of the Black strength flow of the past due Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, dozens of Pan African nationalist deepest colleges, from preschools to post-secondary ventures, seemed in city settings around the usa. The small, self sufficient organizations have been usually accused of educating hate and have been repeatedly confused by means of experts. but those associations served as serious mechanisms for transmitting black attention. based by means of activist-intellectuals and different radicalized veterans of the civil rights stream, the universities strove no longer just to bolster the tutorial talents and conceit of inner-city African-American formative years but in addition to decolonize minds and foster a lively and regenerative feel of African id.

In We Are An African People, historian Russell Rickford lines the highbrow lives of those self sustaining black associations, demonstrated devoted to pursuing the self-determination that the integrationist civil rights circulation had didn't offer. stimulated through 3rd global theorists and anticolonial campaigns, organizers of the colleges observed formal schooling as a way of making a forefront of younger activists dedicated to the fight for black political sovereignty during the global. many of the associations have been short-lived, they usually provided simply modest numbers of kids a real substitute to substandard, inner-city public faculties. but their tales demonstrate a lot approximately Pan Africanism as a social and highbrow flow and as a key a part of an indigenous black nationalism.

Rickford makes use of this principally forgotten move to discover a very fertile interval of political, cultural, and social revitalization that strove to revolutionize African American existence and envision an alternative society. Reframing the post-civil rights period as a interval of leading edge organizing, he depicts the prelude to the trendy Afrocentric move and contributes to the continued dialog approximately city academic reform, race, and identity.

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Extra resources for We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

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Why the Rabbit make a nest they makes they nest with grass In a way, the essay was poignant. Almost poetic. It was also depressingly typical—another testament, it seemed, to the effects of the community’s public schools. ” What lay ahead for the essay’s author if not the indignity of menial employment, and perhaps even the frontlines of the Vietnam War or the narcotics trade? Harlem children performed two to four years behind national and citywide academic norms. The longer they remained in school, the further behind they fell.

By then, judicial decrees, federal policy, and grassroots pressure had desegregated public education in parts of the South, despite virulent white opposition. However, desegregation forces also met bitter resistance in the North. “White backlash” conjures images of peaceable citizens pushed to the wall by black rioters and busing ordinances and pressed into action to preserve “neighborhood schools” and ethnic enclaves. The phrase hardly captures the fury with which many white northerners combated desegregation in the 1960s and ’70s.

By presenting credible alternatives that fulfilled human needs, such ventures could win the loyalty of the people, exposing the failings of the existing social apparatus and serving as tools for mass politicization. 41 Though it was rarely invoked explicitly, the concept of “dual power,” or the formation of alternative institutions as a means of supplanting corrupt state authority, captures the aims and exuberance of Black Power’s autonomous establishments. A mainstay of leftist practice since the formation of workers’ “soviets” during the Russian Revolution of 1917, the approach appealed to African-American organizers who wished to formalize elements of intellectual independence from a majority culture they viewed as rapidly decaying.

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