[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE STRUGGLE FOR BLACK EDUCATION  
[[link removed]]


 

Randal Maurice Jelks
September 12, 2021
Los Angeles Review of Books
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ An outstanding contribution to the history of Black education that
focuses on the career of Carter G. Woodson. _

,

 

Fugitive Pedagogy
Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching
Jarvis R. Givens
Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674278752

IN 1970, I ATTENDED summer school at Carter G. Woodson Junior High on
Third Street across from the Magnolia Projects
[[link removed]] in the city of New
Orleans. Architecturally, Woodson was a modernist structure
[[link removed]],
dedicated on October 11, 1954, six months after the Supreme Court
decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_. Between 1940 and 1960, high
schools and junior highs were built with the intent of keeping the
regime of separate but equal intact. These schools were named after
prominent Black New Orleanians and noted national figures such as
Woodson. Despite the malicious intent of Louisiana and New Orleans
officialdom, schools named after Black Americans were viewed with
considerable pride by their initial students.

The first principal of Woodson Junior High was Charles B. Rousseve, a
historian
[[link removed]]
whose _The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His
Literature _was published in 1937. Black schoolteachers like Rousseve,
like city students, revered Woodson. In 1934, Woodson visited New
Orleans to lead a discussion
[[link removed]]
on his _Negro Makers of History_, a textbook first published in 1928,
at the Pythian Temple, an architectural site of considerable Black
self-determination [[link removed]].
Woodson’s visit flew under the radar, to protect the meeting from
the fearful gatekeepers of national and Southern education. Sometimes
openly, sometimes furtively, schoolteachers emboldened and empowered
students in the city of my youth through the encouragement imparted to
us by books, lesson plans, and the creative marketing
[[link removed]]
of Negro History Week. We were reminded that we were also history
makers. Little did I know at the time that I, too, was being
proselytized in the Gospel According to Woodson.

Woodson’s influence would further stamp me. I took my first Black
history class during my senior year of high school. The assistant
principal of my Chicago high school was Dr. Clementine Skinner
[[link removed]], a
lifetime member and benefactor of the Association for the Study of
African American Life and History [[link removed]] (ASALH), the
organization that Woodson and his colleagues founded in Chicago in
1915. Skinner, a World War II veteran, was also engaged in the
educational revolt in Chicago chronicled by historian Dionne Danns in
her 2003 book, _Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in
Chicago Public Schools, 1963–1971_. She, along with the other
faculty, thought it was vital that all students in our high school
have a sense of Black Americans’ historical and cultural agency.
This was all before President Gerald R. Ford promoted the national
observance of Black History Month in 1975 as he sought reelection.
When I attended my first ASALH meeting, I heard a familiar voice
calling my name. It was Dr. Skinner, then an octogenarian. Vigorously,
she grabbed my hands and gleefully proclaimed, “Randal Jelks,
you’ve finally made something of yourself!”

I offer these personal vignettes because they lend credence to the
argument that Jarvis R. Givens makes when analyzing Woodson’s legacy
in his new book, _Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of
Black Teaching_. Through meticulous research, Givens has reconstructed
the radical historical methods, teaching ethic, and writings of Carter
G. Woodson; his book is a long-overdue labor of love and analysis.

Woodson, the second African American to earn a Harvard PhD in 1912,
was, as Jarvis elucidates, one of this country’s greatest teachers
and theoreticians of education. While philosopher John Dewey is
usually seen as more significant to the development of mainstream
education (i.e., that available to the white middle classes), Givens
tells another story about those who were not politically ascendant.
This story focuses on how Woodson, as a mentor of teachers, slowly
transformed the organizational self-awareness of Black folk as a
historical people, inspiring them to find significance in their own
history.

Givens points out that Woodson was a schoolteacher long before he
became a noted scholar. Born in 1875 toward the end of Reconstruction,
Woodson was fully cognizant of the dangers, daring, and difficulties
involved in organizing schools and teaching Black youngsters to think
critically for themselves. Every step of the way, Southern state
governments impeded Black educational development, their foremost
political objective being to maintain a barely educated subservient
workforce to tend the cotton and tobacco fields. Meanwhile, in the
industrial North, the goal was to keep Black laborers in the least
mobile positions and to stoke ethnic divisions, in order to stave any
possibility of mass unionization. These material conditions made
teaching in Black communities a fraught process that often required
subterfuge.

As his career developed, Woodson taught in a variety of school
settings. These ranged from the one-room school where he began his own
education to the famed Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. The
breadth of Woodson’s experience prior to and after his graduate
education was extraordinary. He knew firsthand that to be a Black
schoolteacher was a perilous vocation, and his experiences taught him
the curricular needs of Black youth. They needed the kind of
instruction that would allow them to critically assess and interact
with the societal racism they constantly faced. During his years of
dealing with the blindly racist faculty of Harvard’s history
department, he learned that Black history had to be researched by
Black people themselves. This is what drove Woodson and his cohorts to
establish the ASALH in 1915 — the same year that _The Birth of a
Nation_, D. W. Griffith’s cinematic ode to the Lost Cause, was shown
in theaters across the country.

By 1916, Woodson had launched _The_ _Journal of Negro History_ to
counter the willful deceit of the American Historical Association and
its membership. By 1926, Woodson and his cadre of schoolteachers had
begun implementing Negro History Week. As Givens observes, Woodson
“built on the social infrastructure of black communities to drive
forward his vision of an educational model that centered black
cultural life.” This was grassroots marketing at its most ingenious.
Woodson and his collaborators were what historian Carol Anderson would
call “bourgeois radicals
[[link removed]].”
His Black community-building allowed Woodson, in Given’s words,
“to serve as a surrogate mentor to educators, scholars, and
community leaders around the country.” His “abroad mentorship,”
as Givens calls it, was essential for Black teachers who furtively
read his books, whether in Southern rural settings or in major
metropolitan areas, and who openly promoted Negro History Week in
their school districts. His mentorship, in essence, made him the
“Schoolmaster to his Race,” undergirding an “insurgent
intellectual network” that collectively fought to build Black social
capital in a racist democracy. That network included a who’s who of
the Black intelligentsia, from schoolmasters like Mary McLeod Bethune,
founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and Benjamin Mays, who
became the president of Morehouse College, to academic historians like
Lorenzo Green, John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Charles H.
Wesley — not to mention the many unsung women schoolteachers who
dedicated their lives to teaching “the race,” such as Fanny
Jackson Coppin [[link removed]].

Between 1880 and 1965, during the Jim Crow era, the majority of Black
schoolteachers taught in the Deep South. They were forced via the
constraints of the law and extrajudicial violence to heed white
political dominance and were placed under constant surveillance. Black
educational leaders in these settings often dissembled, genially
cajoled, and patiently negotiated to expand the curriculum on behalf
of their students. And they covertly used their own networks to teach
their students that their history extended beyond the borders of the
United States to embrace Africa and the Caribbean.

Givens builds upon the rich historiography of scholars such as James
Anderson, Ronald Butchart, Pero Dagbovie, Stephen G. Hall, and Heather
Williams. In addition, he demonstrates how Woodson’s critical
pedagogy benefited from the efforts of Black teachers who wrote a bevy
of Black history textbooks even before the publication of his _Negro
Makers of History_. Givens further makes a vital linkage to
Négritude, the diasporic anticolonial cultural movement that began
among the Francophone African and Caribbean intelligentsia during the
1930s. Aimé Césaire, for example, was the high school teacher of the
Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Givens quilts this tradition
together with the philosophical reflections of West Indian novelist
Sylvia Wynter, who challenged the hegemony of Anglo-European thought
by offering an aesthetics of Black humanity,
[[link removed]] and Kenyan
writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who saw school curricula as a way to
control the mindset of the colonized. Woodson’s corpus is given
broader significance through the comparative lens Givens brings to
bear on it. These various diasporic thinkers all affirmed that the
work of social change begins with what we teach, and this is precisely
why, in the United States at this moment, there is so much political
consternation over critical race theory and the history of slavery.
The historical revisions begun with the work of Woodson and his band
of schoolteachers have come to fruition in a potent challenge to the
whiteness of the educational-political order of the country.

By reading Woodson and other Black educators in tandem with noted
thinkers of the Black Diaspora, Givens develops an important theory of
“fugitive pedagogy.” This approach, he argues, “accounts for the
physical and intellectual acts of subversion engaged in by black
people over the course of their educational strivings.” Fugitive
pedagogy serves as the metanarrative of black education, a new frame
for seeing this history. These acts were ordered by an overarching set
of political commitments sustained by black institutions and shared
visions of freedom and societal transformation. They were not
sporadic. They were the occasion, the main event. Fugitive pedagogy is
the plot at the heart of the matter — the story and the scheme.
[…]

Fugitive pedagogy in its ancient and modern historical meaning
generally refers to the enslaved fleeing from the dominant protocols
of teaching and learning and the narrative scripts that structure
these experiences. […] As such, the entire apparatus of schooling is
called into question when the enslaved think and plot their own course
of action, when their response is flight, when they steal possession
of their own life.

 
Woodson’s historical research and organizational activities served
as a forerunner to academic Black Studies. As Givens documents, early
Black educators found themselves in a vulnerable situation in the
immediate post-emancipation decades and during the early 20th century,
and Black Studies departments are facing similar challenges today in
the ruthless political opposition that threatens their funding and
curricula. As we are only too aware, the empire always tries to strike
back.

While this is an outstanding book, there are a few notable omissions.
First, it is curious that Givens does not take up Paulo Freire’s
critical pedagogy, developed during the Brazilian dictatorship of the
1960s, nor does he address anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, who
died in a South Africa prison in 1977 due to his work affirming Black
consciousness. Second, there is no mention of Noliwe Rooks, a
brilliant Black Studies scholar whose groundbreaking _Cutting School:
The Segrenomics of American Education_ (2017) confronts the current
state of US education. Read against Rooks, Givens’s discussion does
not really address the contemporary problems of Black education,
economics, or pedagogy in a fully satisfactory way. While a creative
piece of theorization, fugitive pedagogy tends to look back, it seems,
and not forward.

Third, Givens’s approach is decidedly secular: there is no analysis
of the role of Black churches, mosques, or temples. Yet such religious
organizations have long practiced fugitive pedagogy; indeed, as
historian Judith Weisenfeld has shown in her 2016 book, _New World
A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great
Migration_, they were its original source. Often standing next to or
nearby the one-room schoolhouse that Black children initially attended
were Black Protestant congregations. As legendary religious historian
Albert Raboteau noted many years ago, Black preachers also preached
the ABCs. Givens makes little mention of Woodson’s lifelong devotion
to the Baptist church or how religion influenced his thoughts and
vocation; in fact, Woodson initially wanted to write his dissertation
on the subject of Black churches. As historian Eric Gardner chronicles
in his underappreciated 2015 book, _Black Print Unbound_, Black
churches often formed schools, including HBCUs, and published journals
and newspapers, such as _The Christian Recorder_. As Woodson himself
noted in his 1921 study _The History of the Negro Church_, Black
Protestant study of the Bible hastened Black self-education. Black
religiosity was also a primary source for Woodson’s 1933 magnus
opus, _The Mis-Education of the Negro_. Self-understanding,
self-regard, and the freedom of the self are the ultimate aims of
Black education, just as they are of Black religion. Baptist
preachment fueled Woodson’s single-minded devotion to teaching his
people.

Fourth, Givens does not appear to ask the question of class
consciousness versus race consciousness. Even the promotion of Black
histories — what Givens calls “vindicationism” — was framed by
bourgeois understandings of what was respectable and what was not. The
poet and writer Langston Hughes, who once worked for Woodson, was
berated as the poet “low-rate” by middle-class tastemakers. The
point being that Woodson and Black schoolteachers reflect a bourgeois
class position that at times conflicted with the perspectives and
attitudes of their students. Using “fugitive pedagogy” as an
analytical lens hides the class conflict that Black teachers are
inevitably confronted with when teaching cynical working-class and
poor agrarian Black children.

I offer these various criticisms not because I think that Givens’s
tremendous effort is deficient or poorly formulated. Rather, the book
is so stellar that it opens doors to many underanalyzed subjects still
to be researched and written about by Black Studies scholars. I have
nothing but admiration for this outstanding contribution to the
history and theory of Black education. I cannot wait to discuss it
with fellow educators, scholars, friends, and graduate students. After
reading Givens’s book, I thought of how Woodson’s ideas in _The
Mis-Education of the Negro_ resonated with those of the poet and
writer Audre Lorde, in her evocative 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not a
Luxury”:

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the
honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and
spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house
of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any
meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would
have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening,
except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy,
but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train
ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them
into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And
where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps
to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton
architecture of our lives.

This book is a tremendous offering and one that would make Woodson,
the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.

_Randal Maurice Jelks_
[[link removed]]_ is
professor of African and African American Studies and American Studies
at the University of Kansas. His latest book is _Faith and Struggle in
the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams,
Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali
[[link removed]]_.
His forthcoming book, _Letters to Martin: Meditations on Democracy in
Black America
[[link removed]]_,
will be published in January. His website is
__https://randalmauricejelks.com/_
[[link removed]]_._

 

* African American education
[[link removed]]
* Racial segregation
[[link removed]]
* US Public Schools
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]