Abstract
Recent freedom studies have portrayed civil rights and Black Power as equally significant and interrelated stages of struggle. This view, central to the “long civil rights movement” outlook, helped correct an earlier tendency to artificially segment black protest outlooks and strategies. Overemphasis on continuity, however, may obscure the extent to which the “new black nationalism” —the renaissance that provided Black Power’s intellectual and cultural impetuses—represented genuine political innovation.1 One solution to this interpretive dilemma lies in our willingness to transcend distorted readings of the role of black nationalism in African American life.2 We must resist the myth of nationalism as the creed of the disaffected fringe while rejecting the fantasy of nationalism as subterranean religion. When we accept integrationism and nationalism as more dualistic than dichotomous, acknowledging that neither is more intrinsic to African American realities than the other, and recognizing the powerful currents of consciousness that flow from creative tension between the two, we will better understand black political culture and the evolution of black insurgency.3
The greatest Negro revolution is that mothers are now determined that their children are to get an education.
—Inner City Parents Council (Detroit), 1967
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Notes
See Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233–63.
For example, see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
see Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (2007): 265–88.
See Charles Valentine, “Deficit Difference and Bicultural Models of Afro-American Behavior,” Harvard Educational Review 44 (May 1971): 173.
See Wilson, “Notes Toward a Process of Afro-American Education,” Harvard Educational Review 42 (August 1972): 376.
For a more balanced treatment of the transition from integrationism to black nationalism, see Dionne Danns, Something Better for Our Children: Black Organizing in the Chicago Public Schools, 1963–1971 (New York: Routledge, 2003).
For a broader discussion of “transformation” as a third political path beyond the traditional African American strategic alternatives of integration and separation or black nationalism, see chapters 17 and 18 of Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (New York: Verso, 1995).
See Kevin Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 205.
Daryl Lembke, “Long Battle Seen Over S. F. School Integration,” New York Times, March 17, 1969, 3.
See in general Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
see Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).
David N. Plank and Marcia Turner, “Changing Patterns in Black School Politics: Atlanta, 1872–973,” American Journal of Education 95 (August 1987): 584–608
George M. Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.
See Theodore Draper, “The Fantasy of Black Nationalism,” Commentary 48 (September 1969): 29.
For an early example of this concept, see William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951)
also see “We Charge Genocide,” Harlem News, March 1970, 1–11.
also see Preston Wilcox, “The Kids Will Decide—And More Power to Them,” Ebony, August 1970, 134.
“Ferment of change” quote from page 275 of Ruth M. Batson, The Black Educational Movement in Boston: A Sequence of Historical Events (1638–1975), manuscript, Box 1.
Price Cobbs, “The Black Revolution and Education,” NASSP Bulletin, May 1969, 15.
Mann quoted in Clarence J. Karier, ed., The Individual Society, and Education: A History of American Educational Ideas (Champaign, IL: Illini Books, 1986), 61
Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 12–13
Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The Ghetto School Struggles in Historical Perspective,” Science and Society 33 (1969): 146.
Albert Vann, “The State of Education for Black People—1973,” New York Amsterdam News, September 1, 1975.
Eldridge Cleaver, “Education and Revolution,” The Black Scholar, November 1969, 47
Vincent Harding, “Fighting the ‘Mainstream’ Seen for ‘Black Decade,’” New York Times, January 12, 1970.
For a description of important developments in this changing political economy, see Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (New York: Macmillan, 1984).
Maude White Katz, “End Racism in Education: A Concerned Parent Speaks,” Freedomways 8 (1969): 347.
See, in general, Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittell, eds., Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York: Praeger, 1969)
also see description of Ocean Hill-Brownville struggle in Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of New York Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
See, for example, Jennifer de Forest, “The 1958 Harlem School Boycott: Parental Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity in New York City,” Urban Review 40 (2008): 21–41.
For an account of the bleak performance of Harlem schools, see HARYOU, Youth in the Ghetto: A Study of the Consequences ofPowerlessness and a Blueprint for Change (New York: HARYOU, 1964).
See, for example, Adina Back, “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, eds. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65–92.
Jason Epstein, “The Politics of School Decentralization,” New York Review of Books 10 (June 6, 1968)
Gene Currivan, “Board Sets Talks in School Dispute,” New York Times, September 11, 1966, 79.
Marlene Nadle, “Ghetto Fight: Quality, Segregated Education,” Village Voice, September 29, 1966, 11.
Andrew Kopkind, “Down the Down Staircase: Parents, Teachers, and Public Authorities,” New Republic, October 22, 1966, 12
Dorothy S. Jones, “The Issues at IS 201: A View from the Parent’s Committee,” Integrated Education 4 (October–November 1966): 23
See, for example, Christopher Jencks, “Private Schools for Black Children,” New York Times Magazine, November 3, 1968.
Spencer quoted in Jeremy Larner, “IS 201: Disaster in the Schools,” Dissent 14 (January–February 1967): 29.
Lillian S. Calhoun, “New York: Schools and Power—Whose?,” Integrated Education 7 (January–February 1969): 33
David K. Cohen, “The Price of Community Control,” Commentary 48 (July 1969): 29.
Jeremy Larner, “IS 201: Disaster in the Schools,” Dissent 14 (January–February 1967): 33, 39
Alexander M. Bickel, “Desegregation: Where Do We Go From Here?” The New Republic, February 7, 1970
Eric Mann, “The Newark Community School,” liberation, August 1967, 26.
Preston R. Wilcox, “The Community-Centered School,” in Radical School Reform, ed. Beatrice and Ronald Gross (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 129
Preston Wilcox, “The Kids Will Decide—And More Power to Them,” Ebony, August 1970, 136
Martin Buskin, “What Else is New at Ocean Hill?,” Newsday, November 3, 1968, 6W
See Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Journal of Negro Education 4 (July 1935): 334–35.
Oscar Handlin, “The Goals of Integration,” Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966): 268–86
David Spencer, “A Harlem Parent Speaks,” Foresight, November 1968, 21–22.
Preston Wilcox, “The Controversy over IS 201,” The Urban Review 1 (July 1966): 13.
Malcolm X quoted in Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, and Garry Peller, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995), 128
Alex Poinsett, “The Dixie Schools Charade,” Ebony, August 1972, 145.
Alvin F Poussaint, “The Negro American: His Self-Image and Integration,” Journal of the National Medical Association 58 (November, 1966): 421
For an account of the hemorrhage of black teachers occasioned by desegregation, see Adam Fairclough, “The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2004): 43–55
Michael K. Drapkin, “An Elusive Goal: Pittsburgh’s Try Shows that School Integration in North Will Be Hard,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1971
Ken Ringle and Paul G. Edwards, “Richmond’s New School Merger Spawns a New Melting Pot,” Washington Post, June 17, 1972.
see Benjamin S. Bloom, Alison Davis, and Robert Hess, eds., Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation (Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965)
see Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 33 (February 1969): 1–123.
see preface by Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (New York: Associated Publishers, 1933)
Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Phoenix, AZ: Secretarius MEMPs Publications, 1973), 39
See Charles S. Johnson, The Negro College Graduate (Beloit, KS: McGrath, 1969).
Wilcox Papers (also see Preston Wilcox, “Integration or Separatism in Education: K-12,”) in Integration and Separatism in Education, ed. Peter L. Clark (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1970), 28.
Ernest W Chambers, “We Have Marched, We Have Cried, We Have Prayed,” Ebony, April 1968, 29–32.
Stokely Carmichael “Toward Black Liberation” in Black and White American Culture: An Anthology from the Massachusetts Review, ed. Jules Chametzky and Sidney Kaplan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), 76.
See, for example, George O. Cureton, “Using a Black Learning Style,” Reading Teacher 31 (1978): 751–56.
Norm Freelain, “Black Teacher Establishes: Unique School for the Exceptional Child,” Muhammad Speaks, January 3, 1969, 38.
Albert B. Cleage Jr., “Inner City Parents’ Program for Quality Education in Detroit Inner City Schools,” Integrated Education 5 (August–September 1967): 44.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 53
Gertrude Elise Ayer, “Notes on My Native Sons—Education in Harlem,” Freedomways 3 (Summer 1963): 376–77.
see Jerald E. Podair, “‘White’ Values, ‘Black’ Values: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Controversy and New York City Culture, 1965–1975,” Radical History Review, Spring 1994, 36–59.
Connie Woodruff, “Blacks, Puerto Ricans Show How It’s Done; Pick Slate,” New York Amsterdam News, November 22, 1969
see Jorge Noriega, “American Indian Education in the United States: Indoctrination for Subordination to Colonialism,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009 [1944]), 901.
David B. Kent, ed., Proceedings of the First National Association of Afro-American Educators Conference held June 6, 7, 8, 1968 in Chicago, Illinois (NAAAE, 1968), 32.
Jack L. Daniel and Curtis E. Porter, “Black Paper for Black Studies,” New Pittsburgh Courier, July 19, 1969, 13
Miriam Wasserman, “The IS 201 Story,” Urban Review 3 (June 1969): 4.
See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 316
Eugene Perkins, “The Need for a Pan-Africanist Alternative to the Street Institution,” Black Books Bulletin 2 (Winter 1974): 10.
See Sheila Rule, “Locally Run Schools Disappoint Minority Educators and Parents,” New York Times, June 27, 1980
see Daniel H. Perlstein, Justice, Justice: School Politics and the Eclipse of Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)
see Manning Marable, “Black Nationalism in the 1970s: Through the Prism of Race and Class,” Socialist Review 50–51 (March-June 1980): 57–108.
See Susan Walton, “Local Independent Schools Offer Minorities ‘Educational Option,’” Education Week, November 16, 1983.
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Rickford, R. (2011). Integration, Black Nationalism, and Radical Democratic Transformation in African American Philosophies of Education, 1965–74. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_17
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