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Journal of Negro Education

Education Research in the Black Liberation Tradition: Return What You Learn to the People

Author(s): Joyce Elaine King

Source: The Journal of Negro Education , Vol. 86, No. 2, 37th Annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture Education Research in the Black Liberation Tradition: Return What You Learn to the People (Spring 2017), pp. 95-114

Published by: Journal of Negro Education

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©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 95

The Journal of Negro Education, 86 (2), 95-114

The 2016 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium Presentation

Education Research in the Black Liberation Tradition: Return What You Learn to the People

Joyce Elaine King Georgia State University

The 2016 Charles H. Thompson lecture invokes the radical transformative power and possibilities of education research in the Black Liberation tradition of study, struggle and returning what we learn to the people. In this lecture Dr. Joyce Elaine King delineates the African philosophical and epistemological roots of this tradition in the works of historical Black educators and theoreticians as well as scholar activists today whose inquiries also challenge the myth of “objectivity” in social science research. This eurocratic paradigm, which admonishes us to be “objective,” often creates role conflict and alienates us from our people. Instead, the Black Liberation tradition in education as well as research favors partisan scientific inquiry and praxis in the interest of equity, racial justice and human freedom. The lecture examined these issues in Black education and research in the U.S. and the African Diaspora in keeping with the aims of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent. Keywords: Africana/Black Studies, Critical Africana Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Black Liberation pedagogy, Black Education Research

Dedicated to the memory of

Septima Clark (1898-1987), Ella J. Baker (1903-1986), Bernice V. Robinson (1914-1994), Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977),

Josina Machel (1945-1971), and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (1935-2016).

INTRODUCTION In The Art of Clear Thinking Rudolph Flesch (1951), who also wrote, Why Johnny Can’t Read, quotes the British novelist E. M. Forster: “Unless we remember, we cannot understand.” I would say, unless we “re-member” (King, Swartz et al., 2014)—reconnecting what we have been permitted to know only in fragmented and distorted ways, if at all—that is to say, unless we recover from what Cheikh Anta Diop (1991) described as our collective “historical and cultural amnesia,” we can neither understand or think for ourselves. Carter G. Woodson, who is remembered as “the Father of Black History,” understood this necessity as our responsibility to “think Black” (Hine, 1986, p. 409). Extending the thirty-seventh Annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture, this article examines the radical transformative power and possibilities of education research in the Black Liberation tradition of returning what we learn to the people. I situate this ethos, which is a fundamental tenet of Africana/Black Studies theorizing and African philosophy, within the aims of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent. The article is organized into seven sections: (a) Liberating Theory, Method and Pedagogy; (b) The UN International Decade of People of African Descent; (c) “I Know I Been Changed;” (d) Study, Struggle and Learning/s from Experience; (e) The Black Liberation Tradition; (f) From Marx, Mao, and Freire to Diop and Cabral and; (g) Toward Critical Historical/ Cultural Consciousness in Africana/Black Education Research.

Liberating Theory, Method and Pedagogy

Africana/Black Studies recognizes that eurocratic social science theory and methods are neither universal nor neutral. Rather theory and method can help or hinder intellectual independence and

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96 © The Journal of Negro Education, 2017. Vol. 86. No 296 ©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2

obscure the moral demands on education research/ers to resist, critique, and contribute to the struggle to overcome domination (King, 2016, 2017). As Jacob Carruthers (1999) noted in his book Intellectual Warfare:

[T]he “science of oppression” . . . works for the master and . . . produces a master’s mentality. . . .We have to understand where it came from, what it does and has done to us, and what it does to humanity in general . . . We must replace it with a methodology and metaphysics that restores the world and gives light to everybody. (p. 294)

Regarding the possibility of resisting this “master’s mentality,” George Lipsitz (2016) aptly observed: “It’s hard because we’ve been made into the kinds of people who fit into this society and we [academics] have a lot to unlearn” (p. 28). This experience is common among scholars of African ancestry as suggested by the similar conclusion Guyanese historian Walter Rodney (1990) reached when he reflected upon his student experience:

It was necessary to come to grips with the way in which one’s being, and the presentation of one’s being, was so hopelessly distorted in the sources to which one went for scholarship. (p. 13)

My search for liberating theory and method involved developing education research-as- pedagogy inquiries that benefit the Black community. I sought ways to overcome miseducation and the myth of objectivity in social science research since I began grappling with these concerns as an undergraduate in the Sociology Department at Stanford University (King, 1992, 1999).

This was when Black students were relatively new arrivals on predominantly White college and university campuses and we were assaulted with ideologies of Black people’s cultural deprivation and genetic deficiency masquerading as objective scientific theory. At all-Black Ravenswood High School in the Black community of East Palo Alto, California where I was teaching a Human Relations class in 1968, students were alienated from their education as well. They were constantly cutting class and hanging out across the street and the local hamburger joint and I discovered some of these students in my class could not read. For my senior honors thesis I designed a study to investigate the way these young people understood their reality. With the assistance of a school guidance counselor, I constructed a set of fictional but authentic- looking academic profiles that resembled the students I was teaching and I interviewed them about these fictional students. When I asked one student in my study to explain why she thought a kid with failing grades was missing so many classes and getting into so much trouble at school, what she said became a touchstone for my scholarship and activism. She said, “Maybe if somebody had told him what happened to his mother and father and why his parents are the way they are, he could do better.”

Nothing in my Stanford courses had prepared me to respond to her observation, not until Black students demanded the establishment of Africana/Black Studies programs on our campuses (Rogers, 2009). The Black Student Union strike nearby at San Francisco State College “marked the first serious effort by a group of black students to remold an American college” (Karagueuzian, 1971, p. 1). At Stanford we sought to integrate real community problems into our studies and this included a role for research in meeting community needs. Partnering with community elders and activists, we established the Community Development Workshop as part of the “Afro-Am” program.

St. Clair Drake came to Stanford as the founding Director of the African and African American Studies program (not a department). Sylvia Wynter (1992) succeeded Drake and, by the time I completed my doctorate, I had worked closely with both of them over the years. I had a long running “conversation” with “Drake,” as we fondly called him, about partisanship versus objectivity in research and he was unequivocal: “You do your activism after 5 pm.” However, the intellectual warfare that I experienced in my studies was unrelenting. For instance, my comprehensive examination in the graduate school of education at Stanford required me to write a response to Arthur Jensen’s (1969) publication proclaiming the scientific basis of Black

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It was necessary to come to grips with the way in which one’s being, and the presentation of one’s being, was so hopelessly distorted in the sources to which one went for scholarship. (p. 13)

©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 97

people’s supposed genetic inferiority (e.g., the “heritability of I.Q.”) in the Harvard Educational Review.1Such ideologically inflected knowledge production necessitated scholarly refutation not abdication.

I found support for intellectual-activism in the scholarly activism of Grace Boggs (1974) and theories, methods, and pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1978), who acknowledged that education is not neutral, and Orlando Fals Borda’s (1980) critique of the self-deceptive “mask of neutrality” and “wig of objectivity” in research. Although I succeeded in articulating a culturally affirming Black education analysis in my dissertation (Reeves/King, 1974), I had not yet fully grasped the significance for theory, method, and pedagogy of the Black Liberation tradition of marrying intellectual-activism to the everyday experiences of the people on whose behalf our education ought to serve (Wynter, 2006, 2012). Several examples follow that are intended to illustrate this tradition in Africana/Black Studies theorizing and providing methods in research and liberation pedagogy in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker.

W. E. B. Du Bois. According to Reiland Rabaka, in addition to his prodigious body of

solution providing scholarship, W. E. B. Du Bois’s dictum that “the methods which we [Diaspora Africans] have evolved for opposing slavery and fighting prejudice are not to be forgotten, but learned for our own and others’ instruction” (Du Bois, 1973, p. 144), epitomizes Africana critical theory’s contribution to the broadening of critical social theory and (Africana) critical pedagogy to include African people’s unique contributions to “civilization and humanity” and theories of social transformation (Rabaka, 2008, pp. 18-19). Du Bois’s educational philosophy emphasized a critical study of history, cultural inquiry and the “understanding of present and future vital needs” (pp. 44-45). Du Bois implemented his philosophy in 1911 by creating a theatrical pageant, “Star of Ethiopia,” to educate the masses about Black history (Du Bois, 1985). From 1920-1921 he also used his Brownies’ Books, a magazine written by Black writers for Black children, to disseminate research on the Black experience to prepare Black children for present realities and future possibilities (Lewis, 2000).2

Carter G. Woodson. After Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, he

disseminated his research in a collection of books that he arranged for Lorenzo Johnston Greene (1996) to sell door-to-door in towns and cities across the U.S. Pero D. Dagbovie (2007) details the major roles Black women also played in “popularizing” Woodson’s studies of Black history. Black clubwomen, teachers, librarians, and grassroots social activists helped to raise funds for Woodson’s programs and they “set up activities in schools, such as book displays and pageants” (p. 94). Dagbovie notes Black women:

. . . worked to advertise Negro History Week celebrations and they established branches, clubs, and study groups throughout the country. . . Black women at the grassroots level were key organizers and participants in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History’s annual meetings throughout the country. (p. 94)

Nannie Helen Burroughs required her students at the National Training School for Women and Girls, which she founded in Washington, DC, “not only to study black history using Woodson’s texts but also to pass a written and oral black history examination in order to graduate” (Dagbovie, 2007, p. 95). ______ 1Jensen continued to pursue this line of investigation. See J. Philippe Rushton & Arthur R. Jensen (2005), “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294. 2See “Star of Ethiopia” http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:star_of_ethiopia; See Brownies’ Books http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:brownies_book

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98 © The Journal of Negro Education, 2017. Vol. 86. No 298 ©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2

Septima Clark. Thirty years later in 1956 when activist-educator Septima Clark was fired from her teaching job in Charleston, South Carolina because of her membership in the NAACP, she went to work with Myles Horton at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. A presumed hotbed of communist activity, Highlander began as a center for worker education where Horton and his colleagues defied segregation laws by bringing Blacks and Whites together in workshops using a liberation pedagogy that engaged people who came to Highlander—people like Rosa Parks—in analyzing their reality to engage in social change. Septima Clark and Myles Horton accepted an invitation to help set up an adult literacy program to enable the disenfranchised people of John’s Island off the coast of South Carolina to register to vote. Drawing on her earlier experiences teaching illiterate adults on the island to read and, after systematic investigation, analysis and reflection, Septima Clark and her team established a citizenship education program (Wigginton, 1992). They returned what they learned to the people.

Working with a local leader, Esau Jenkins, and Mrs. Clark’s cousin, beauty shop owner Bernice Robinson, who taught the adult literacy classes, they developed a liberation pedagogy that respected and valorized community knowledge using the life experiences and people’s everyday needs. The curriculum and pedagogy used practical materials such as checks, postal money orders, catalogue order forms, driver’s license exams and voter registration information to teach basic literacy as well as political skills (Olsen, 2001). This program became the foundational model for literacy instruction and political education across the South during the Civil Rights Movement. By the time she retired in 1970 after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had adopted the Citizenship Schools education program, Septima Clark and her staff (including Dorothy Cotton, Bernice Robinson, and Andrew Young) had trained ten thousand citizenship school teachers and taught “more than one hundred thousand black people to read and write and demand their citizenship (Olsen, 2001, p. 224).

Ella J. Baker. Septima Clark and Ella J. Baker were friends and colleagues who shared the

same philosophy and radical pedagogical praxis as activist-community-educators. Ella Baker was a formidable (usually behind-the-scenes) organizer who had worked alongside major figures like Du Bois, A. Phillip Randolph, and others in worker education and human rights/civil rights movements. As the highest-ranking woman in the NAACP, she risked her life traveling alone throughout the South in the 1940s recruiting members, raising funds, and organizing chapters, including youth chapters. The relationships that she formed and her reputation were crucial later on in successful collective grassroots mobilizations and campaigns that she organized. In an effort to build on the successful Montgomery bus boycott, for example, Ella Baker was instrumental in launching the SCLC, the organization that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led. She mentored and facilitated the coordination of the activist leadership that emerged as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with young people like Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Julian Bond, and Diane Nash for whom she was a trusted and revered adult advisor. She was actively involved in and favored direct action for the Freedom Rides and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Critical of racism, sexism, and elitism in the movement and emphasizing mass grassroots collective leadership versus the prevailing hierarchical, charismatic, domineering male leadership style, Ella Baker said: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Describing her as a “radical humanist” and a “Freirean teacher and practitioner of a “radical democratic pedagogy” (while her work precedes Freire), biographer Barbara Ransby notes:

In Baker’s view, people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out . . . her view of teaching for liberation was based on the need to empower ordinary people to dig within themselves and their collective experiences for answers to social and political questions. (Ransby, 2003, pp. 358- 359, emphasis added).

Ransby also discusses similarities between Miss Baker’s and Paulo Freire’s pedagogical style, as well as the thought and practice of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971), who also

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Ella J. Baker. Septima Clark and Ella J. Baker were friends and colleagues who shared the

Ransby also discusses similarities between Miss Baker’s and Paulo Freire’s pedagogical style, as well as the thought and practice of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971), who also

©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 99

regarded every teacher as a student and every student as a teacher. Ella Baker’s courage was legendary and her method of participatory grassroots leadership for democratic social change profoundly valued the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of the people who are most aggrieved.

One of our tasks today is to illuminate not only how Black people (and other oppressed groups) continue to be dispossessed of our cultural heritage and denied intellectual independence but also how racism and other simultaneous oppressions (i.e., sexism, capitalism, and colonialism) that distort the professional education of teachers, school leaders, and researchers obstruct human freedom more generally as well (King, 1996; 2000; Wynter, 1992). This problem that Carter G. Woodson (1933) named “the Miseducation of the Negro” signifies the knowledge problem that continues to fuel the denial of Black people’s cultural heritage and the erasure of the community knowledge and wisdom traditions that were so critical in the liberation pedagogy in the movements discussed earlier. Erhabor Ighodaro and Greg Wiggan (2010) decry this erasure as curriculum violence and as “America’s new civil rights issue.”

A second task is to use “theory as a weapon” (Rabaka, 2003), that is, to theorize and develop forms of liberation pedagogy to enable people to analyze their lived experience and facilitate the critical learning/s needed to transform society today—which is the historical legacy of the Black Liberation tradition. This task is especially urgent for the youth. I am reminded of Mississippi rap artist David Banner’s observation: “Black kids kill Black kids for the same reason cops do. They see no value” (Memphis rap, 2014). However, we are not alone. As discussed below, in 2014 the United Nations established the International Decade of People of African Descent and the education and human rights of African people—worldwide—are center stage.

The UN International Decade of People of African Descent The main objective of the U.N. International Decade is the protection, promotion, and fulfillment of “all human rights and fundamental freedoms” for people of African descent recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The theme of the International Decade is: “Recognition, Justice and Development,” which emphasizes education, including curriculum, textbooks, and teaching for racial-social justice. “Recognition” means that member states are expected to raise awareness “by supporting research and educational initiatives” ensuring that:

. . . textbooks and other educational materials reflect historical facts accurately as they relate to past tragedies, atrocities, in particular slavery, the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, so as to avoid stereotypes and the distortion or falsification of these historic facts which may lead to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. . .3

“Development” emphasizes the right to education. Thus, U.N. member states should:

. . . ensure that public and private education systems do not discriminate against or exclude children of African descent, and that they are protected from direct or indirect discrimination, negative stereotyping, stigmatization and violence from peers or teachers; to this end, training and sensitization should be provided to teachers and measures should be taken to increase the number of teachers of African descent working in educational institutions.4

The U.N. International Decade is one outcome of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa that adopted the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. In 2002 the U.N. Commission on Human Rights established a Working Group of Experts to: study the problems of racial discrimination, to make proposals to eliminate it and to “address all the issues concerning the well-being of Africans and people of African descent.” 5 To be precise: ______ 3http://www.un.org/en/events/africandescentdecade/recognition.shtml 4http://www.un.org/en/events/africandescentdecade/development.shtml 5http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Racism/WGAfricanDescent/Pages/WGEPADIndex.aspx

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100 © The Journal of Negro Education, 2017. Vol. 86. No 2100 ©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2

Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the United Nations Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms. Special Procedures mandate-holders are independent human rights experts appointed by the Human Rights Council to address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world.6

In January 2016, “at the invitation of the government of the United States” the U.N.’s

Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, then chaired by Frantz Fanon’s daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, conducted a fact-finding mission in five U.S. cities: Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, Jackson, Mississippi, Chicago, Illinois, and New York (Oakford, 2016).7 The news media reported their findings under banner headlines such as: “U.N. Experts Seem Horrified By How American Schools Treat Black Children” and “UN Committee Urges U.S. Government to Pay Reparations for Slavery” (Klein, 2016).

The final report the Working Group of Experts submitted to the Thirty-third Session of the Human Rights Council of the U.N. General Assembly focuses on structural barriers in the areas of criminal justice, police brutality, housing discrimination, food insecurity, school closings, disparities in access to health and employment, as well as reparations for slavery. For example, “to assist the United States in its efforts to combat all forms of racism, racial discrimination, Afrophobia, xenophobia and related intolerance,” the report’s recommendations pertain to various life and death matters such as mass incarceration, police killings of unarmed African Americans with apparent state impunity and racial discrimination in the justice system. Item Number 118 of the report refers to ensuring that curricula “appropriately reflect the history of the transatlantic slave trade in Africans, enslavement and segregation” (Report of the Working Group of Experts, 2016). The report also notes:

In school curricula, the historical facts concerning the period of colonization, the transatlantic slave trade in Africans, and enslavement, which have been crucial to the contemporary organization of American society, are not sufficiently covered in all schools. The curricula in some states fail to address adequately the root causes of racial inequality and injustice. This contributes to the structural invisibility of African Americans. (Report of the Working Group of Experts, 2016, Number 46)

While rectifying “invisibility” is important, education in the Black Liberation tradition is about the restoration of African people’s critical historical and cultural consciousness; and as Asa G. Hilliard so often advised, we do not start our story with slavery (Hilliard, 1997; King, 1992, 2011).

The Report of the Working Group of Experts (2016) calls on the U.S. government to take concerted action to end racial oppression. However, in addition to a top-down approach, holding the government accountable, meaningful change also requires informed bottom-up participation in the struggle by those who are most aggrieved by the issues the report delineates. This is exactly what Septima Clark realized was necessary in order to transform illiterate Black adults into registered voters ready to reclaim their civil and human rights: grassroots popular education for critical literacy, political skills, and historical and cultural consciousness (Olsen, 2001, p. 220). The next section illustrates examples of knowledge and consciousness “born of struggle” in the 1950s and 1960s (Harris, 1983) that enabled everyday Black people to lay their lives on the line to transform this society. Of particular relevance for education research in the Black Liberation tradition is the pedagogy that emerged in sites of study and struggle that facilitated such learning/s and changed consciousness. ___________ 6See: United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights: Special Procedures. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/SP/Pages/Welcomepage.aspx 7See United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights; http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21239&LangID=E#stash.ObT 5Dyqu.dpuf

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In January 2016, “at the invitation of the government of the United States” the U.N.’s

©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 101

“I Know I Been Changed” Voter registration campaigns involved mass popular education that included literacy instruction and political organizing (Morris, 1984). Despite racial terror and deadly violence, local leaders emerged conscious of the life-transforming experiences, personal strength, and communal spiritual reserves that enabled them collectively to resist, reclaim their humanity and transcend the enforced lack of knowledge that defined the “systematic racial terrorism” of the Jim Crow regime (Payne, 1995). Consider the turning point Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer experienced during a mass meeting in a Mississippi church where “a gospel that embraced the longings and desires of a disenfranchised people” was preached and practiced—the turning point that brought her into the Black freedom struggle (Marsh, 1997, p. 13). White theologian Charles Marsh recounts what Mrs. Hamer said happened that night in 1962 when she heard a SNCC organizer speak to those present:

We hadn’t heard anything about registering to vote . . . but when they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine . . . as high as I could get it. (p. 12)

Marsh explains that Mrs. Hamer had known all along that something was wrong with the harsh life her family and community had been forced to endure, and in the next passage he offers his interpretation that the “faith of the black church had prepared her for this moment” (p. 13).

[James] Bevel’s sermon followed by SNCC member James Forman’s talk on the constitutional right to vote spoke deeply to Mrs. Hamer’s longing for justice. Her imagination was charged by new moral and spiritual energies. (Marsh, 1997, p. 12)

However, an Africana/Black Studies interpretation suggests that rather than the awakening of “new moral and spiritual energies,” the “longing for justice” inherent within Mrs. Hamer’s imagination can be understood as an expression of the continuity of African consciousness in Black life and culture that had not been totally obliterated (King & Swartz, 2016). This inherent longing resisted the nihilation (e.g., total abjection) of her humanity (King, 2015; Nobles, 2015; Rucker, 2006). Africana/Black Studies scholarship avers that although European religion has been a powerful force for African people’s “cultural negation,” this religion was “Africanized” before it was absorbed within the Black community (Semmes, 1992). Michael Gomez (1998) and Sterling Stuckey (1987), for example, demonstrate that European religion did not erase Black people’s African spirituality, which “persisted behind the oppressive veneer of European sacred, mythological, and supremacist symbol systems” (Semmes, 1992, p. 8).

The modern civil rights movement provided culturally sustaining contexts for “critical studyin’” (King, 2006) in which the leadership capacity of “local people” like Mrs. Hamer was forged (Dittmer, 1995), as they analyzed their reality with others and learned with and from each other about their common experiences with systems of oppression. These sites of “study and struggle” (Kelley, 2016a) afforded learning/s from experience that facilitated Black people’s critical historical and cultural consciousness, and bolstered their courage and their collective pride in their identity and humanity as a people. I imagine they sang old soul-stirring songs like, “I know I’ve been changed, the angels in Heaven done signed my name,” with new meaning. Study, Struggle and Learning/s from Experience Educators have little or no opportunities to study or theorize Civil Rights Movement teachings and organizing and certainly not regarding how Black educational thought and radical praxis have contributed to critical social theory, research methods, and pedagogy in the Black Liberation tradition. While the students I teach are usually familiar with Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a founding critical pedagogy text (first published in Brazil in Portuguese in

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102 © The Journal of Negro Education, 2017. Vol. 86. No 2102 ©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2

1968 and translated into English in 1970), they are uninformed about the critical liberation pedagogy and research foundation on which the Citizenship Schools Black people established before Freire was known in the U.S. My students are also unaware of the systematic research that Freire undertook in Brazil in order to develop his method of adult literacy instruction (“in 30 hours”) nor do they know anything about Freire’s literacy work with and his respect for the thought, research, and pedagogical praxis of revolutionary African leaders (Brown, 1970; Freire, 1970; Rabaka, 2008).

Freedom Schools. Other significant sites for study and struggle, critical pedagogy, morally engaged research and community organizing, are the forty-one Mississippi Summer Project Freedom Schools taught by SNCC field secretaries and other volunteers during “Freedom Summer” in 1964 (Carmichael, 1974). Freedom schools were organized in Alabama as well (House, 2012). Accounts of the development and implementation of the curriculum and question-driven pedagogy in the Freedom Schools show that lessons learned at Highlander and the Citizenship Education Schools on John’s Island were incorporated into the curriculum and education-activists like Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker were directly involved (Emory, Braselmann, & Gold, 2004). Of particular importance is that both African and local history were essential elements in the collectively constructed curriculum and pedagogy that was designed to raise the consciousness, political awareness, and civic engagement of Black youth.

Saul Alinsky’s Organizing Tradition. There are notable parallels among the critical

pedagogy, inquiry methods, and political skill-building activities implemented at Highlander Folk School, in the Citizenship Schools, and the Freedom Schools, as well as Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Saul Alinsky’s community organizing tradition (Bell, Gaventa, & Peters, 1990). (I participated in a national workshop for college students led by Saul Alinsky before I learned about Freire.) After mobilizing impoverished people in the Back of the Yards slum neighborhood adjoining Chicago’s South Side stockyards in the 1930s, Alinsky began organizing oppressed Black communities in Chicago and other cities in the 1950s (Alinsky, 1971). College students began using Alinsky’s methods in campus struggles in the1960s. It is worth noting that the first item on a list of Alinsky’s training/teaching activities is “research— both on proposed solutions to problems and on power structures” (Schutz & Miller, 2015, p. 35).

Organizing in Communities. A comprehensive analysis of pedagogy and research and the nature of critical learning/s across social contexts of organizing and struggle is needed. Although such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that a comparative inquiry would examine critical learning/s in contexts such as: Black radical labor mobilizing among auto workers in Detroit, including the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Ahmad, 2007; Boggs, J., 1968); the more recent movement to “re-spirit” Detroit, “Detroit Summer” organized by Grace and Jimmy Boggs (Boggs, G., 1998); the anti-apartheid campaigns led by Leo Robinson (2008) and the ILWU longshoremen (stevedores) in the ports of San Francisco and Oakland who refused to unload cargo ships from South Africa (Marable & Rickford, 2011) and the Revolutionary Black Workers at Polaroid in Massachusetts (“Polaroid & Apartheid,” 2013); the collective leadership and civil rights organizing tradition “in the spirit of Ella” (Moses et al., 1989; Moye, 2013; Payne, 1995) as well as union building activities among coal miners in impoverished Appalachian mountain communities that inspired Myles Horton and his collaborators to establish labor education workshops at Highlander Folk School (Horton, 1997; Wigginton, 1991)—to cite a few examples.

The Black Liberation Tradition

How and what have people learned in sites of study and struggle? Is there a demonstrated role for research in the process of everyday people learning to act as agents of their own liberation? Educator-organizers in the examples just cited engaged in systematic prior study, empirical investigation sometimes including (participant) observation, and analysis in order to construct

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Saul Alinsky’s Organizing Tradition. There are notable parallels among the critical

The Black Liberation Tradition

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pedagogical possibilities that democratize learning from experience. However, it is worth remembering what the late Black Marxist scholar Cedric Robinson said to Robin D. G. Kelley: “Experience is important, but consciousness is what matters most” (Kelley, 2017).

Preston Wilcox (1978), an educator/organizer/leader in the movement for community control of schools in New York, emphasizes consciousness in his description of how Black Studies developed as an educational paradigm for “Black humanism.” Wilcox explains:

The thrust for Black Studies programs developed not on white college campuses but at Selma, at Birmingham, at the March on Washington. It was on the civil rights battlefield that Blacks learned that an appeal to white conscience had to be replaced by an appeal to Black consciousness. . . (p. 92)

Wilcox notes this Black Studies educational paradigm was intended:

. . . to provide the framework on which new and substantive bodies of knowledge about the Black condition were to be linked. It would require that such issues as self-concept, reparations, collective and cooperative economic enterprises, psychological and political liberation, and a reordering of values be systematically addressed and understood. (p. 92)

Of course, it must also be clearly understood that Africana/Black Studies offers vital knowledge all students need as a consequence of the socially generated epistemology of ignorance that is maintained in our society (Spelman, 2007).

In the next sections I recount my search for the philosophical foundation of the instruction “return what you learn to the people”. This search resulted in my re-engaging with examples of pedagogy and research in the Black Liberation tradition that challenge the myth of objectivity in education research that also align with the aims of the U.N. International Decade. I queried several colleagues trying to identify a specific source of this instruction. Professor Sylvia Hill teaches at the University of the District of Columbia and her activist role in the anti-apartheid support movement gave her first-hand knowledge of liberation pedagogy on the African continent (Hill, 2008). She sent me related material on pedagogy in the Citizenship Education Schools (Clark, 1964) and the Freedom Schools (Cobb, 2011) and an article about a teacher who is using popular culture to adapt methods of liberation pedagogy in a bilingual ESOL program in a two-year Boston college (Lynn, n.d.; Lynn, 2013).

I called upon Professors Kofi Lomotey (Western Carolina University) and Mwalimu Shujaa (Southern University), both leading intellectual-activists who have expertise in Africana/ Black education in the U.S. and Africa, in my search for the source of “return what you learn to the people” (Milner & Lomotey, 2014; Shujaa & Shujaa, 2015). Professor Lomotey referred me to Tanzanian President Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere’s philosophy of education for self-reliance expressed in the parable below. I recall that this educational philosophy made a deep impression on Black students in the 1960s:

Those who receive this privilege (of education) therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice, which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he might have strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. If he takes this food and does not bring help to his brothers, he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given an education by the people of this republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our union. (Nyerere, 2007)

Professor Shujaa suggested the relevance of this passage in Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s (1979) The Healers:

Healing is . . . the work of inspiration, not manipulation. If we the healers are to do the work of helping to bring our people together again, we need to know such work is the work of a community . . . It should not depend on any single person, however heroic he may be. And it can’t depend on people who don’t understand the healing vocation—no matter how good such people may be as individuals. . . . The work of healers is work for inspirers working long and steadily, in a group . . . able to bring us together again. (p. 308)

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Professor Shujaa also suggested that I look at Carruthers’s discussion of Diop’s “massive project to restore African culture to us,” and “cure the amnesia of African peoples.” Carruthers states that for Diop, “such a project must be the work of a group of leaders and intellectuals who commit themselves to the vocation of the restoration of African historical and cultural consciousness” (Carruthers, 1999, pp. 221-221). Diop called on African intellectuals to use rigorous scientific methods in this project of African rehabilitation—to correct the false doctrine of White superiority. As Carruthers explains: “Diop’s devotion to science was not for the sake of science” but for the benefit of African people:

Much more important is the practice of taking the scientifically supported arguments into the arenas of politics, education, and scholarly debate in defense of our people and for the advancement of our people. (p. 227)

According to Carruthers, the real intellectual battle is the war between the champions of African- centered thought and the defenders of Western civilization. Carruthers and other Nile Valley Scholars, including Asa G. Hilliard, embraced and used Diop’s Afrocentric argument to assert the African identity of ancient Egyptians and the cultural and linguistic unity (within the diversity) of African people. For many years Hilliard presented a slide show that depicted stunning images of the visual evidence of Diop’s argument titled: “Free Your Mind: Return to the Source,” our African heritage in ancient Egypt (Kemet).8

From Marx, Mao, and Freire to Diop and Cabral

I located a reference for the instruction “return what you learn to the people” in the letters Paulo Freire exchanged with Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary theoretician and leader of the Guinea- Bissau-Cape Verde Islands national liberation movement for independence from Portuguese colonialism. The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers includes this description of Cabral:

In the early 1960s Amilcar Cabral emerged from the national liberation struggle of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde as one of the foremost Third World revolutionary theorists and activists of the century. His work on revolutionary organization and ideology, on imperialist exploitation and on African peasantry and national liberation placed him at the forefront of black intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba. (Benewick & Green, 1992, p. 46)

Indeed, Cabral remains a revered political figure in the pantheon of assassinated African/Black leaders and the PAIGC motto, “A luta continua” (“the struggle continues” in Portuguese) and his speeches (“Tell no lies . . . claim no easy victories”) were watchwords among Black activist- intellectuals (Minter, Hovey, & Cobb, 2008). Black Americans followed the struggles and thinking of African revolutionary leaders and thinkers including Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Eduardo Mondlane (Lumumba and Mondlane were both assassinated), and Josina Machel, a courageous FRELIMO leader in Mozambique who also gave her life to free her people.

Freire visited Guinea and worked with Amilcar Cabral to develop an adult literacy program in the liberated zones in the countryside. The World Council of Churches (WCC) sponsored this collaboration during Freire’s exile when the military dictatorship ruled in Brazil. Freire documented his correspondence with Cabral and other leaders of the Partido africano de independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde—PAIGC) in Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (Freire, 1978). In the book’s introduction Freire explained his literacy approach for the benefit of the reader: ______ 8See: Dr. Asa G. Hilliard, “Free your mind: Return to the source: The African origin of civilization”; https://youtu.be/XwE#6t7L92E.

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From Marx, Mao, and Freire to Diop and Cabral

©The Journal of Negro Education, 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 105

The act of learning to read and write . . . is a creative act that involves a critical comprehension of reality. . . What is implied is not the transmission to the people of a knowledge previously elaborated, a process that ignores what they already know, but the act of returning to them, in an organized form, what they have themselves offered in a disorganized form. (pp. 24-25)

In a footnote Freire explains a source of these ideas:

“We must teach the masses with precision what we receive from them with confusion,” said Mao in an interview with André Malraus (Antimémoires [Paris 1967], p. 531).

At last! This is the source I had been seeking. Then, when I retrieved my copy of Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung from my bookshelf, I found the following statement— “from the masses to the masses”—this was Mao’s instruction to his Chinese Communist party comrades on the correct method of revolutionary leadership during the Chinese revolution in 1943:

This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to these ideas and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. (Tsetung, 1971, p. 290)

Applying Marxist-Leninist theory to the conditions of the Chinese peasant masses, Mao exhorted Communist party leaders to gather the peasants’ ideas, learn from them and engage in struggle for social change with them. This method, which came to be known as the “mass line,” influenced U.S. social movement organizing and leadership tactics (Nimtz, 2000).

However, revolutionary African leaders like Cabral and Nyerere were skeptical of the idea that European historical development (and theory of revolution) should be mistaken as universal, that is to say, that European Marxism’s theory of class warfare could serve as the guide for African liberation. Accordingly, for Mwalimu (President) Julius Nyerere in Tanzania:

African socialism or Ujamaa (familyhood/brotherhood) is rooted . . . within African pre-colonial practices . . . [Nyerere’s] prescription . . . is that Africans must look to their own past and accept the inspiration found there. (Benewick & Green, 1992, p. 241)

Cabral’s thought was grounded in Marxism but he felt free to develop his own analysis of revolution in his society (Chabal, 1983, p. 186). Rather than mechanistically privilege Marxism’s economic determinism, for Cabral “return to the source” meant returning to indigenous (peasant) culture, to “the ‘memory’ of historical development,” which contains “the seeds of opposition” (Cabral, 1973). Therefore, Cabral understood the culture of the masses as a sociological reality to be studied and analyzed (not romanticized) as the source of the ideology of the liberation struggle, which the colonizers necessarily sought to usurp and suppress (Benewick & Green, 1992). The tool for colonial domination therefore required suppressing the people’s cultural identity and cultivating in its place alienated, de-Africanized, (mis)educated, assimilated “petty bourgeoisie” (middle class) individuals in the colonizers’ image. “Returning to the source(s)” meant joining with the masses in the national liberation struggle. To do so, however, these “educated” individuals would have to commit “class suicide” to achieve a “nationalist consciousness” and identify with and respect the local culture not the colonizers’ foreign culture, which is represented as superior in every respect (Cabral, 1973; Chabal, 1983).

Ramon Grosfoguel (2013) poses a set of challenging questions for those educated in the intellectual tradition of Western universities that merits consideration in this regard:

How is it possible that the canon of thought in all the disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the Westernized University . . . is based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, England, Germany and the USA)? How is it possible that

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men from these five countries achieved such an epistemic privilege to the point that their knowledge today is considered superior over the knowledge of the rest of the world? . . . Why is it that what we know today as social, historical, philosophical, or Critical Theory is based on the socio-historical experience and world views of men from these five countries? (p. 74, emphasis in the original)

Similarly, in a discussion of the dialectics of Harold Cruse (1967) in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Black Studies scholar Clovis Semmes asked: “Where is the social philosophy, the social, political and economic [or critical educational] theory that could change the condition of African Americans?” (Semmes, 1992, p. 72). This article concludes in the next section with seven examples of education research that illustrate the social uses of theory, method, and pedagogy needed to restore the critical historical and cultural consciousness of people of African ancestry. Toward Critical Historical /Cultural Consciousness in Africana/Black Education Research There is striking congruence in the way Civil Rights Movement community-educators-activists, African revolutionary educators-leaders, and radicals like Myles Horton, Mao, and Freire valued the knowledge, cultural heritage and wisdom of ordinary people. Like Afrocentric educators today, Du Bois, Woodson, Clark, Baker, Diop, Carruthers, Hilliard, and Cabral (and others) all valued the cultural heritage and lived experience of African people. The Black Liberation tradition recognizes and defends the unique contribution that people of African ancestry have to make to civilization and humanity—including as Du Bois insisted, the “methods we evolved for opposing slavery and fighting prejudice that are not to be forgotten. . .” (Du Bois, 1973, p. 144). Africana/Black education research in this tradition recognizes that theory, methods of inquiry and pedagogy in the interest of racial-social justice and human freedom can be both partisan and scientific, that is, on the side of the oppressed and rigorous, both “answerable” to our community and based in evidence (Asante, 2015; Patel, 2014). This stance toward knowledge production for critical historical and cultural consciousness centered in the lived experience of people of African ancestry is the antidote to what I have described as epistemological nihilation—“the imposition of an ideological conception of blackness that involves the inherent denial or total abjection of one’s identity and beingness and falsely elevates whiteness” (King, 2015). It is a stance that accords with W. E. B. Du Bois’s commitment to social advocacy through activist scholarship and his rejection of the eurocratic paradigm’s racialized use of the false standard of objectivity (Byrd, 2016; Marable & Rickford, 2011; Morris, 2015). According to Manning Marable (2000), the Black intellectual (liberation) tradition has always been prescriptive, and while the study of history has been central, as Du Bois also recognized, history has often been nothing more than an “ideological ruse” (Rabaka, 2008). This applies to research across the disciplines (Semmes, 1981). Seven examples of contemporary education research and intellectual-activism illustrate the problem-solving possibilities for research in this Black Liberation tradition:

1. Morally Engaged, Culturally Informed Research. Vernon Polite’s (2000) study of predominantly Black Catholic schools with a tradition of student success identified four categories of effective curriculum for African American students. Some schools taught “basic knowledge of African American history and culture” (Category 1); others made an effort to center instruction around African American culture (Category 2), and still fewer schools offered an Afrocentric curriculum centering instruction for all students’ cognitive and affective development in African American history and culture (Category 3). Polite found no evidence of curriculum in the 4th category that he deemed is most needed for African American students’ development. He nevertheless included this missing Category 4 in the study’s published findings to point prescriptively toward an educational ideal based on Black cultural values: the type of education needed to prepare Black students, particularly Black Catholics in the U.S., as “agents of social change for the betterment of the African American people” (p. 149).

2. Public Scholarship for Advocacy. Publishing commentaries in Education Week and The Boston Globe, for instance, Leslie T. Fenwick has waged a vigorous public scholarship campaign on behalf of Black educators and saving public schools to serve Black children (Fenwick, 2006).

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Demonstrating the uses of empirical research in advocacy, Fenwick’s forthcoming book titled, Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: Public Policy and the Near Decimation of Black Educational Leadership, investigates the dearth of Black teachers and principals in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision (Chimurenga, 2016; Garcia, 2016; McIntyre, 2016; Strauss, 2013).

3. The Education Cartel Exposed. Walter C. Farrell’s policy analysis of the “Education Cartel,” published in the online magazine Black commentator.com, is a hard-hitting empirical, political, and partisan exposé. This investigative research series documents and disseminates evidence of organized attacks to dismantle and privatize public education by “conservative corporate, intellectual and political reformers” (Farrell, 2015).

4. The People’s Research Agenda Report. “Street ethnographer” and Black Studies professor Yasser Payne has trained fifteen formerly incarcerated people to research their experiences with community violence, unemployment, and racialized educational disparities using “sites of resilience theory.” This participatory action research (PAR) project is an ethnographic community needs assessment of two of the oldest, most violent neighborhoods in Wilmington, Delaware (Nardone, 2013). A documentary film, “The People’s Report,” makes the findings of this assessment broadly accessible in addition to Payne’s scholarly publications and more than 100 presentations the research team has made (See www.thepeoplesreport.com/media.html; Hitchens & Payne, 2017; Payne & Brown, 2016).

5. The Youth Bucket Brigade. A non-profit grassroots group originally formed in Gainesville, Georgia by Black women in 1956 to provide funeral wreaths (Spears, 1998), the Newtown Florist Club was established under the leadership of Mrs. Ruby Wilkins by club members “who felt a civic responsibility to their community . . . to fill a void of activism” (Newtown Florist Club Facebook page). After discovering an alarming pattern, their neighbors were succumbing to illnesses apparently related toxic contamination, they asked state environmental agencies to investigate industrial pollution from several nearby plants (Christ, 2010). However, the community’s needs were not addressed, as the club’s Facebook page recounts:

• As acts occurred related to racist violence, police brutality, insensitive and intolerant public officials, voting rights, and environmental racism, and deplorable living conditions, the group was lead to shift its focus. (Newtown Florist Club Facebook page)

In keeping with their focus on youth leadership training, in 2005 the club sent their “Youth Bucket Brigade,” children ages 8–18, to investigate candy manufactured in Mexico contaminated with lead that was being sold in Hispanic groceries in Gainesville, Georgia. Unable to prevent its sale, the African American children in the Youth Brigade, who had also consumed this candy, emphasized using their findings to educate their peers (Gilbert, 2005).

6. Songhoy (African) Language for Cultural Recovery. In Mali, West Africa, Hassimi Maiga’s (2010, 2015) intellectual-activism serves an African community that is in danger of losing its connections with its history and heritage. He led a team that translated the Holy Qur’an into Songhoy-Senni (the language of the Songhoy people), which can correct distortions in the religious instruction people in this community are receiving, especially regarding the treatment of women and girls.

7. Archaeological Research in Kemet. Funded by the ASA Restoration project, Anthony T. Browder (2011) is the only African American leading an archaeological excavation in Kemet (Egypt). He explained that 25th Dynasty rulers were instrumental in engaging in “Retroactive Remembrances” to rehabilitate Kemet and were responsible for introducing the first renaissance in recorded history. Browder and his team recently discovered Sankofa symbols painted on the ceilings of two 25th Dynasty tombs near the temple of Hatshepsut “during a conference that was organized to commemorate the opening of the restored 2nd pillared hall in the tomb of Karakhamun.” (A. T. Browder, personal communication, October 23, 2016).

Across these varying contexts these examples demonstrate researchers who are returning what they learn to the people in various ways—from policy analysis and cultural restoration to youth action research. As Beverly Gordon (1990) suggested, education [research] can assist people of color (and their teachers) in challenging the societal structures that maintain and reproduce inequality. Noting that its epistemology is one of the strengths its scholarship, Gordon stressed that African American scholarship takes the actual experience of the African American community as its starting point.

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CONCLUSION In this article I have attempted to demonstrate the radical transformative power and possibilities of education research in the Black Liberation tradition that obligates us to return what we learn to the people to restore our collective historical and cultural amnesia (King, 2017). Calling upon us to use “theory as a weapon,” Rabaka (2003) argues:

There is simply no substitute for contemporary critical theorists practicing conceptual generation; no problem-solving proxy for our solemn development of new theory geared towards not only gauging but changing contemporary societies, bringing into being a new humanity. . . (p. 122)

It would be of tremendous assistance if Africana people had a curriculum in multiple languages to fill the gaps in our knowledge and interrogate teaching and learning for liberation and “victorious consciousness” in the various movement contexts and research discussed here (Mazama, 2001). Veteran activists Bob Moses, Gloria House, Ruby Sales, Gloria Wade Gayles among others are using their movement learning(s) in culturally affirming community-oriented educational programs they have built “under the radar” (King & Parker, 2005; Moses et al., 1989). Neither Du Bois’s and Woodson’s monumental efforts, the civil rights and African liberation movements nor fifty years of Africana/Black Studies and struggle to transform higher education have enabled the vast majority of educators to grasp the real nature of oppression and education’s role in it—from a world-systemic perspective (King, 2005a). A challenge is to deepen our critical knowledge of African peoples’ contributions to humanity’s capacity to understand, resist, and overcome injustice and inequality. This requires that we use the authority of our African cultural heritage to examine how theory and research, including the eurocratic myth of objectivity, have been used to obfuscate our moral reasoning and to legitimize oppression (King, 1995; 1996). A precept of African epistemology, that is, “the specificity of African rationality” is that the African person “thinks not only with the head but with also with the heart” (Nkulu-N’Sengha, 2005, p. 42). And as African people—we bring this essentially spiritual rationality to the intellectual battle, our struggle for education and our commitments to use our knowledge (and knowledge production) for the benefit of our people and humanity (King, 2005b). It is my belief that research in the Black Liberation tradition to catalyze African people’s agency is necessary to generate more accurate and truthful knowledge needed to fulfill the aims of the UN International Decade. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley put it:

We must go to the root—the historical, political, social, cultural, ideological, material, economic root—of oppression in order to understand its negation, the prospect of our liberation. Going to the root illuminates what is hidden from us, largely because most structures of oppression and all of their various entanglements are simply not visible or felt. (Kelley, 2016b, n.p.)

CODA

African resurgence will never take place until Africans champion a renaissance grounded in a new paradigm of dramatic narratives of victory. (Asante, 2015, p. 1)

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