A Brief Commentary on Black Education Past, Present, and Future: The Stakes are High in These Dangerous Times
Efforts to shape curriculum and pedagogy to anti-democratic—even fascist ends—are underway in the US and around the world. And “everywhere we look—from the dismantling of affirmative action policies to voter suppression and gerrymandering —the gains of the Civil Rights Movement are under assault. And White supremacy is resurgent” (Clair, 2022, p.373). These are dangerous times. The premises that guided the work of the American Educational Research Association’s Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) —two decades ago—remain useful in explicating the meaning and transformative role of Black education in the past, present, and future.
First, as noted in the landmark CORIBE publication, Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century (King, 2005): “truthful, equitable, and culturally appropriate education is understood to be a basic human right” and a “fundamental requirement of human freedom in a civilized world,” not only as a “condition of Black people’s individual success and collective survival” (p. xxiii). Second, the current crisis in Black education speciously attributed to deficiencies in Black life and culture “pales in comparison to the long tradition of Black educational and cultural excellence that generations of African people established in the normal course of our human experience” (King, 2005, p. xxiii). Well-documented Black educational excellence traditions extend as far back as the “Mystery Schools” of Egyptian antiquity; West Africa’s classical universities, and the manuscripts of Timbuktu, Sankoré, and Djenné; Miss Lilly Ann Granderson’s “Midnight School” in Natchez, Mississippi during the holocaust of our enslavement; W.E.B. DuBois’s “Star of Ethiopia Pageant” that educated more than 35,000 people; Carter G. Woodson’s multiple education interventions, culminating in Black History Month; as well as the discipline of Black Studies, penultimate examples of Black education as liberation.
Roane (2017) is correct: “One of the original aims of Black Studies was its pedagogical mission to inspire people to learn deeply and critically about the African Diaspora’s histories and contemporary social formations; develop an incisive critique of Western civilization; and create and sustain Black culture as an alternative source of power in a world fundamentally shaped by anti-black racism”.
To sustain humanity’s freedom in the future, Black education thought and pedagogy will need to attend both to historical consciousness and ideological literacy to overcome what DuBois decried as “the propaganda of history.”
DuBois (1935) wisely cautioned: “If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation” (p. 714).
And if we follow DuBois’s prescient example, we will not just study the past to prove we are equal to others, but also critically study the present to ensure a just future. A just future includes the recognition that Black education is about more than the education of Black people. While our survival as an ethnic family—our peoplehood—is at stake in Black education and socialization, so, too, is the survival of humanity more generally.
References
Clair, M. (2022). Black sociology in the era of Black Lives Matter. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 19(2), 373-379. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X22000170
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt (1935). Black reconstruction: An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Harcourt, Brace & Company.
King, J. E. (2005). Preface. In J.E. King (Ed.), Black education: A transformative research and Action agenda for the new century (pp. xxi-xxx). Routledge.
Roane, J. T. (2017, January 8). Pedagogy for the world: Black Studies in the classroom and beyond. Black Perspectives. https://www.aaihs.org/pedagogy-for-the-world-black-studies-in-the-classroom-and-beyond/
About the Author
Joyce E. King, Ph.D. is the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education & Human Development at Georgia State University, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and an member of the National Academy of Education. She is a member of BERC’s Advisory Board.