The Education That Is Their Due

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-86
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Black Populations

Chapter 2 identifies a distinct uptick in northern Black support for separate schools. The rise of scientific racism fueled anti-Black discrimination that accelerated alongside the first Great Migration and the Great Depression. Hostile whites segregated classrooms and buildings in defiance of state law as Black populations increased. At the same time, there is compelling evidence from New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan that Black families either passively accepted or actively requested separate classrooms and schools in order to access Black teachers. Many Black northerners believed separate schools would offer a higher quality education and more of the teaching and administrative jobs that sustained the Black middle class. Still, this position was far from universal, and many northern Black communities energetically resisted school segregation. A growing number of Black intellectuals and civil rights activists vehemently objected to any form of state-sponsored segregation and campaigned actively for school integration.

scholarly journals Teachers at the Center: Place and Education Displacement in Southwest Atlanta

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thais Council ◽  
Shaeroya Earls ◽  
Shakale George ◽  
Rebecca Graham
Keyword(s):  
Urban Education ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Urban Education Reform ◽  
Personal Experiences

In Southwest Atlanta, urban education reform and gentrification have intersected to create the perfect collision of housing and educational displacement of Black students, Black families, and Black teachers. While Black communities are dealing with the impacts of gentrification, Black schools are simultaneously witnessing shifts that uproot students and their teachers. As a teacher participatory action research (PAR) collective, we share our personal experiences of housing displacement and how it has impacted our students, our communities, and our ability to maintain our positions as community-centered teachers. In this article, we acclimate readers to Atlanta, Georgia, and the Southwest Atlanta region in which we serve. We also illustrate how we have confronted the displacement of our students and ourselves. Finally, we highlight the significance of community-centered teachers operating within a Critical Studyin’ for Human Freedom praxis in the struggle against systemic inequities that persistently plague our students and communities.

Quest for Jobs and Housing

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-40
Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
World War ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
National Headquarters

The fight for much needed social services for Pittsburgh's poor and working-class black families had deep roots in the prewar years. But this struggle intensified during and after World War I with the formation and development of the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP). Following the lead of national headquarters in New York City, the Steel City's small “ban of reformers” placed the provision of migration, work, housing, and health services at the core of its mission to Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania. After a brief moment of extraordinary success, the agency's programs dissipated during the economic downturn after the war but rebounded before the onset of the Great Depression.

Teacher Power, Black Power, and the fracturing of Labor Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Shelton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Teacher Strikes ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
American Federation Of Teachers ◽  
Black Populations

This chapter chronicles the growing conflict between the Black Power movement—an extension of the civil rights movement seeking the formation of black political and community institutions—and unionized public employees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with the United Federation of Teachers strike in 1968 over community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York City), the chapter also shows how two teacher strikes in Newark (1970, 1971) drove apart the Black community and a majority white teacher union. A close examination of letters to the imprisoned President of the American Federation of Teachers shows that critics of both urban black populations and unionized teachers had begun to link the two groups together as “unproductive” threats to law and order and economic prosperity.

“Crucial to the Survival of Black People”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Rowena Ianthe Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black People ◽  
Community Organization ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Postindustrial City ◽  
Black Paper ◽  
Urban Issues

“This is a Black Paper,” declared BUILD’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to black children in Buffalo, New York. Written in 1967 by the community organization, BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was a call for change. Like other black communities in late 1960s America, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A “Rust Belt” city, Buffalo was hit hard by deindustrialization, which, coupled with unemployment, segregated housing and unequal education, adversely affected its black community. In 1967, a riot exploded in Buffalo’s predominantly black East Side. This article analyzes statements made by black Buffalonians and argues that Black Power thrived in Buffalo in the late 1960s, through community organizations which attempted to address urban issues that negatively affected African Americans in a postindustrial city.

Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Siegel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society.

From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin D. G. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Transnational Solidarity

This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander's op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Israeli policies, CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's initial decision to deny Angela Davis its highest honor—this paper suggests that their controversial positions must be traced back to the post-1967 moment. The convergence of Black urban rebellions and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity; at the same time, solidarities rooted in anti-imperialism and Left internationalism rivaled the “Black-Jewish alliance,” founded on analogy of oppression rather than shared principles of liberation. Third World insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements, not just events in the United States and Palestine, created the conditions for radically reordering political alliances: rather than adopting a politics of analogy or identity, the Black and Palestinian Left embraced a vision of “worldmaking” that was a catalyst for imagining revolution as opposed to plotting coalition.

For All My Bravado, Deeply Engrained Notions of Respectability Filled Me with Distress, 1926–1940

Pauli Murray ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 39-93
Author(s):  
Troy R. Saxby
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Undergraduate Study ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
The University

This chapter examines Pauli Murray’s early adult years. Murray relocated to New York City to complete high school and undergraduate study at Hunter College. The Great Depression severely disrupted her education, but also facilitated her tramping across the country, often passing as a teenage boy. Gender identity concerns and the social stigma around homosexuality led Murray to seek gender reassignment and contributed to mental health problems, which were also exacerbated by a fear of hereditary insanity. Work on New Deal projects led to immersion in the labor movement and an interest in communism. These influences, and Gandhian civil disobedience, inspired Murray’s groundbreaking contributions to nonviolent direct-action civil rights protests, which included challenging segregated education by applying to the University of North Carolina and being arrested for violating segregated bus seating.

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