Education

A host of grassroots black educational struggles unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s. Schools and other sites of learning provided the critical terrain for battles over black studies, community control, and African-American identity. Black Americans looked to education as a vehicle for social and political transformation, and as a means of redefining themselves and reconstructing their lives.

An insistence on black autonomy and internal development of African-American communities reshaped black educational outlooks. Many African-American educational struggles sought radical reform rather than incremental change, group progress rather than individual freedom, humanism rather than materialism, and political engagement rather than mere social mobility. They were guided not by technocratic ideals, but by expansive visions of democratic transformation. They included cosmopolitan and internationalist perspectives, a reflection of revived interest in African cultural heritage and Third World movements.

Black campus dissidents attempted to reconstruct the American university. Student rebellions erupted on scores of high school campuses. Small, creative institutions played crucial roles in the intellectual and cultural development of people of color, especially as public programs in urban centers fell victim to cutbacks. Often created and run by neighborhood residents, these alternative models rooted their curricula in the lives and experiences of black people while giving programmatic structure to Black Power ideals.

Russell Rickford, Cornell University