Black Intellectual Thought in Education

The Missing Traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke

Carl A. Grant, Keffrelyn D. Brown, Anthony L. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136172830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Black Intellectual Thought in Education celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke's history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues.

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BLACK INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT

A Cacophony of Experiences, Movements, and Ideas

… as Black men (and women) of learning emerged among the victims of slave systems and systems of colonial imperialism, they would feel impelled to use whatever intellectual tools they had to fight back against derogatory stereotypes and to assemble data for the elaborations of counter-ideologies to racism and anti-Negroism.

(Drake & Cayton, 1970[1945], p. 2)

Ideas for academic books are born out of the belief that the text will contribute to a genre of knowledge and understanding and hopefully influence the way readers read the world (Freire, 1987). The purpose of Black Intellectual Thought in Education is to contribute to the African American scholarly movement toward personal and collective liberation, to put to rest the eighteenth- to twentieth-century legacy of the racist appraisals that “Blacks have no traditions, are bearers of an inferior culture” (Gates, 1987, p. 25) and are still struggling to prove their worth. Black Intellectual Thought in Education informs the education of American students, especially those who are Black and of color and it joins other works dedicated to the scholarly examination and transmission of accurate knowledge of the history, culture, and experiences of African American people. In addition, it joins and continues the struggle engraved on the British abolitionists’ anti-slavery emblem: Am I Not a Man and a Brother [Am I Not a Women and a Sister]. Written in the tradition of “racial vindication” (Drake & Cayton, 1970[1945], p. 3), this volume is a counternarrative employing intellectual models that challenge the kinds of discourses that insisted on making African Americans sub-human and continues today to portray Blacks as less than Whites. Additionally, Black Intellectual Thought in Education argues that Blacks from the day they first arrived in colonial America were seeking physical and mental freedom as they continuously rebelled against enslavement initiating a legacy of active resistance that continues today. Over time, the persistent agency of African Americans took shape to develop into a body of knowledge concerned with the existential and material reality of being Black in America, as well as challenging ideas that consistently marginalized, silenced, and distorted the context of Black life. Arthur Schomburg’s (1992[1925], p. 1) thoughts in The Negro Digs up His Past reflects this sentiment:

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset.

Black Intellectual Thought in Education supports Schomburg’s thesis that African American history must be restored so it “digs up” that history. Schomburg (1992[1925]) argued that there are many incidents and milestones in Black people’s lives, as well as movements that need to be “dug up” to illuminate African Americans’ intellectual and cultural contributions to humankind. Schomburg’s thesis also contends that U.S. history must address the wholeness of Black people’s humanity, documenting their ongoing efforts of resistance and transformation in a world imbued in White supremacy. Out of the Black histories of resistance, scholars, activists, and theorists have developed what we refer to as “Black intellectual thought” concerning the condition of being Black in America. We define “Black intellectual thought” as timeless ideas, philosophies, and pedagogies that questioned, theorized, and addressed the long-standing issues of Black life (e.g., culture, experiences) in schools and society.

This chapter provides a brief history of Black intellectual thought; and while scholars typically outline Black ideological thought as a typology or approaches, we maintain that Black thought took form in two prominent ways. First, Black intellectual thought emerged out the individual agency of courageous and thoughtful individuals who used different genres to express the context of Black oppression and resistance. Second, we argue that Black intellectual thought evolved into distinct bodies of knowledge through various social, cultural, and political movements and Black people’s reading of those movements. We further argue that the multitude of Black voices located in different spaces by choice, force, or condition also shaped what we now call Black intellectual thought.

In the section that follows, we discuss how different individuals expressed the context of racial oppression and resistance through memoirs, poems, textbook writing, and other means of recording history and public protest. Next we follow with how the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago Realism, and Civil Rights Movements informed the political discourse of Black social change. In the remainder of the chapter we address how Black intellectual thought in education evolved over time and led to the production of distinct bodies of thought that expressed the purpose and function of Black education.

Individuals: Speaking and Expressing Truth to Power

As we noted before, foundational to Black intellectual thought are the candid discourses and personal accounts of the conditions of race in America. We argue that out of experience African Americans within different times and spaces were able to provide a cogent analysis of the conditions of oppression and resistance. It was through the experiences of bondage, freedom, resistance, and racial terror that African American thought has taken form. It is through the documentation and presentation of experience that powerfully highlights the contexts that informed the individual and collective social realities of African Americans. In the following section, we briefly provide four accounts of different African Americans: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Mamie Carthan Till and James Pennington, that expressed the conditions of race.

Phillis Wheatley (1773), often recorded as the first African American to publish a book of poetry in the eighteenth century, exhibited Schomburg’s thesis of “digging up one’s past,” when she fought back against the flawed statement about the intelligence of Blacks in her poem On Being brought from Africa to America, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, Black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.” Wheatley’s poems identify enslavement, not (lack of) intelligence as the cause affecting the learning conditions of Blacks. Additionally, Wheatley confronted the social damage that was cast on Blacks’ skin color by publicly calling-out how Whites viewed the skin color of other humans. She wrote, “Their colour is a diabolic die” (p. 42).

Frederick Douglass’ life was also a model of Schomburg’s request: a commitment to group tradition that supplies compensation for the absence of Black history that has been denied, distorted or made inaccurate, racial pride, and the push back from racist damage. In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and the three revisions (1845, 1855, 1881, and 1892) Douglass is among the first Black people to establish the African American group tradition of constant activism to obtain liberty and establish one’s personhood. Douglass’ report on the horrors of enslavement called into question the mental and dispositional humanness of those who contend that Black people were not totally human and Narrative is one of America’s early literary contributions that tells a universal story of a human being’s never-ending desire and fight to be free of oppression. It also speaks to the peaceful and militant genres of protest literature. Douglass was not one to always turn the other cheek; he had fist-fights with the Whites who enslaved him. Douglass exclaimed before one of his fistfights: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (pp. 65–66).

Mamie Carthan Till, the mother of Emmett Till, uniquely contributed to group tradition when she decided that the casket of her son, Emmett, should be open at his funeral. Mamie Till wanted the world to be able to view Emmett’s body and see the viciousness of his murder and the legacy of enslavement active in the 1950s. The open casket showed America the brutality fostered on Black people that U.S. history claimed were stories from long ago. Mamie Till’s actions were also those of racial pride. Her actions showed that the brutality committed against her son could not negate the beauty of the humanity of the Black man.

James Pennington, who escaped from enslavement, was called the “fugitive blacksmith.” Pennington became the author of the first African American history book, A Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People and other writings. Pennington’s narratives include the trials and tribulations of an enslaved Black man escaping to freedom. In one story, Pennington described one of the early forms of protest used by African Americans: disinformation.

If you ask me if I expected when I left home to gain my liberty by fabrication and untruths? I answer, no! my parents, slaves as they were, had always taught me, when they could, that “truth may be blamed but cannot be shamed”; so far as their example was concerned, I had no habits of untruth. I was arrested, and the demand made upon me, “Who do you belong to?” knowing the fatal use these men would make of my truth, I at once concluded that they had no right to it than a highwayman has to a traveler’s purse.… Whatever my readers may think, therefore, of the history of events of the day, do not admire in it the fabrications; but see in it the impediments that often fall into the pathway of the flying bondman. See how the human bloodhounds gratuitously chase, catch, and tempt him to shed blood, and lie; how, when he would do good, evil is thrust upon him.

(1849, p. 87)

An account of an individual, as an agent against racism probably was Black people’s earliest form of resistance, which developed into another form of resistance that must be “dug-up” in order to give further political, social, and historical context to the scholars we discuss.

In keeping with Schomburg’s analogy of “digging up our past,” each of the personal accounts illustrate a vantage point or standpoint with which to interpret the realities of African Americans. In each of the cases above, African American accounts of oppression highlight the individual and collective experience of Black life. Through Wheatley’s and Douglass’ accounts of race they set in place an oppositional discourse to the conditions of racism during their time. Whereas, Mamie Till’s decision for an open casket powerfully demonstrated the context of race in America. The casket served as a pedagogical device to make real the graphic nature of racism in the South. Additionally, Pennington, like Woodson, used the genre of textbook writing to demonstrate the varied ways in which “digging up” African American histories was in large part a documentation of experience and a counter narrative to the ideologies of White racism that enveloped Black life. In each case however, experience helped to contextualize racial oppression at the level of everydayness (Holt, 1995). These personal accounts highlight the inclinations of courageous individuals to use different ways to give meaning to the climate of race and racism in the US.

Movements: Moving Toward a Collective Imagination

Social movements also shaped the discourse and philosophies of Black intellectual thought in the US. Whether political, social, or cultural, movements collectively spoke to the realities of African Americans. Through a variety of genres, different social and political movements provided a space to express the conditions of being Black in the US. In some cases, such expressions provided a space to describe Black life beyond the White gaze. Movements also allowed African Americans to deliberate over their social realities, while defining a course of action for social change. Consistent across African American social and cultural movements is the development of a discourse to define the constraints and possibilities of social change. Through social science, history, humanities, arts, and political discourse, movements helped instill new ways of imagining Blackness.

For example, the Harlem Renaissance—The New Negro Movement from the 1920s to the mid-1930s—moved forward by numerous Black men and women, including Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson was a literary, artistic, and intellectual campaign that demonstrated the African American group tradition of agency against racial oppression and Black pride through the development of a new Black cultural identity. In addition, the Movement was in part designed to turn the beauty of art and letters loved by both Blacks and Whites into a bridge of understanding between races (Katz, 1997); and to demonstrate that Black people had the knowledge, skills and disposition in every aspect and phase of life and human development equal to any other humans. David Levering Lewis (1995) also contends that the Harlem Renaissance was “a cultural nationalism of the parlor” (p. xvii) directed by Civil Rights leaders to improve race relations because of the backlash African Americans were receiving due to the economic gains they achieved working to support World War I. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance is a term that finds its way into formal and informal discussions, it is too often reduced or characterized as the “Cotton Club or a good time in Harlem” instead of as the literary, artistic, and intellectual movement it was.

Harlem, New York, was only one of the places where African Americans fought for their manhood and womanhood and to be acknowledged and accepted as human beings capable of doing all that any people of any race can do. In Philadelphia, in 1787, free Blacks established the Free African Society, the first independent Black organization and mutual society and in 1794 African Americans, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen, respectively established the first independent Black churches to protest against segregated seating and the right to preach in a church they had helped to construct. The Chicago Urban Realism Project (late 1930s–early 1950s), led by Richard Wright and others, created a respected place (i.e., Bronzville) within a red line community in Chicago to demonstrate their agency against the White power structure that controlled the political, social, and economic life in the city and daily practiced White privilege. In addition, Wright and others pointed out that group tradition, racial pride, and pushback on the social damages done to Blacks would not be a copy of what took place during the New Negro Movement. Instead, through literature, novels, plays, and individual and group action, they would give a “faithful representation of reality” (Campbell, 2008) of Black people’s struggle against horrendous odds to achieve mental and physical liberation.

In 12 Million Black Voices, a book also about Black life in Chicago, Richard Wright (1941, p. xix) explained the “who”—everyday Black people—of the Chicago Urban Realism Project:

This text, while purporting to render a broad picture of the process of Negro life in the United States, intentionally does not include in its consideration those areas of Negro life which comprise the so-called “talent tenth” […] This...