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Teacher Power: Black Teachers and the Politics of Representation

Elizabeth Todd-Breland

in Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s

This chapter examines Black educators’ growth from an insurgent group of teachers in the 1960s into a powerful political base of the coalition that elected the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. ... More

This chapter examines Black educators’ growth from an insurgent group of teachers in the 1960s into a powerful political base of the coalition that elected the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. In the 1960s, Black teachers—frustrated with the inadequate conditions in schools serving Black children and their marginalized role in the schools and teachers union—protested the union and considered creating an alternative Black teachers’ union. Educators like Lillie Peoples, of Operation Breadbasket’s Teachers Division, challenged the racist policies of the union and Board of Education while embracing a self-determinist politics of Black achievement that critiqued racial liberalism. Race and gender shaped Black women educators’ professional lives and political activism, as Black women teachers were never adequately recognized for their integral leadership in these movements. By the 1980s, internal and external pressures on the union and Board of Education resulted in a significant increase in the proportion of Black employees in the school system. Black teachers served as anchors of communities, caretakers of children, and a relatively stable Black urban middle-class labor force through their employment in the public sector during a time of deindustrialization. Black educators transformed Black communities and Black political power in the city.Less

Chicago School Reform: Harold Washington and a New Era of Decentralization

Elizabeth Todd-Breland

in Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s

This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s ... More

This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s election as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 was heralded by many as the ultimate attainment of Black Power and the success of the local Black Freedom Movement. His electoral victory was grounded in years of grassroots struggle by Black organizers fighting for integration, community control, and Black empowerment. While historians have largely considered the 1980s as a product of the political triumph of conservatism and the “Reagan revolution,” in Chicago a Black-led, urban, antimachine, progressive coalitional politics led to Washington’s electoral victory. The disparate programmatic and ideological camps detailed in previous chapters (desegregation activists, community control organizers, founders of independent Black institutions, Black educators) staked claims in Mayor Washington and his political organization. The politics of Washington’s education reform summits, however, exposed the fractures within this political coalition. The interracial and intraracial struggles over school reform in Chicago during the 1980s reveal the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation and prefigure the increased privatization of public education in the decades that followed.Less

Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool

Kenneth Prewitt

in What Is "Your" Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

This chapter discusses how there were four national statistical races as of the twentieth century: European White, African Black, American Indian Red, and Asian Yellow. They were put to policy work ... More

This chapter discusses how there were four national statistical races as of the twentieth century: European White, African Black, American Indian Red, and Asian Yellow. They were put to policy work in restricting immigration in the 1920s and for racial segregation more generally until the civil rights challenge dramatically arrived in the 1960s. The chapter traces how a policy instrument used to politically, economically, and socially exclude since the nation's founding made a 180-degree turn and was used to include the racial groups historically sent to the back of the bus—both literally and figuratively. It is a story of how proactive policies of racial justice were shaped with racial statistics never intended for the policy uses to which they were put.Less

Living with the Huxtables in a State of Emergency

in Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid

This chapter considers the role of television in further breaking down the absence of Black South Africans under the States of Emergency in the mid-and late 1980s, paying particular attention to the ... More

This chapter considers the role of television in further breaking down the absence of Black South Africans under the States of Emergency in the mid-and late 1980s, paying particular attention to the third fence post: the overwhelming popularity of The Cosby Show among White South Africans. Ethnographic research shows that the SABC's version of current events during the States of Emergency was widely viewed as untrustworthy by Black and White South Africans alike. While Black South Africans lived the States of Emergency in an immediate and visceral way, White South Africans turned away from television news to make sense of their world. One of the places they turned, in extremely large numbers, was The Cosby Show. Through transnational media flows in general and particularly The Cosby Show, White South Africans were able to appropriate the language and attitude of “racial tolerance” in the United States while simultaneously conceptualizing a profound difference between Black Americans and Black South Africans. While this often led to apartheid apologetics, the shift from a biological to a cultural foundation for racial domination made formal apartheid increasingly difficult to maintain.Less

Expansion Plans: Asymmetries of Pan-African Power

Jonathan Fenderson

in Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s

This chapter recounts the international organizing efforts of Hoyt Fuller and the ways Black Arts activists understood their work as part of a larger Pan-African project. Spanning an explosive decade ... More

This chapter recounts the international organizing efforts of Hoyt Fuller and the ways Black Arts activists understood their work as part of a larger Pan-African project. Spanning an explosive decade of decolonization on the African continent, this chapter uses Fuller’s experiences across three seminal African festivals to explore the ways US-based Black Arts movement discourses engaged with discussions of art and struggle on the African continent. The chapter recovers the varied roles Fuller played in organizing and participating in the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal in 1966; the First Pan-African Cultural Festival, in Algiers, Algeria, in 1969; and the Second World Festival of Black and African Art, in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977. It argues that Fuller’s festival experiences map the ruptures, strains, collective aspirations, and points of unity that constituted the asymmetries of Pan-African power in the late 1960s and 1970s.Less

Constructive Engagements

Stéphane Robolin

in Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing

This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It ... More

This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.Less

“Black Man’s Verse”: The Black Chicago Renaissance and the Popular Front Jazz Poetics of Frank Marshall Davis

John Lowney

in Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its ... More

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its innovative adaptations of African American vernacular forms, including the blues and jazz. Situating Davis within recent scholarly reassessment of the Black Chicago Renaissance, this chapter demonstrates how Davis’s jazz writing, as a journalist, critic, and poet, exemplifies the global orientation of the Black Chicago Renaissance that is becoming increasingly recognized. Davis’s jazz writing is especially important, for the subsequent Black Arts generation as well as for his Popular Front contemporaries, not only because of his development of inventive vernacular forms, but also because of his insistence on the African roots of African American music. In articulating how African musical principles inform jazz, Davis also underscored the international and interracial importance of jazz for black and working-class social progress.Less

Introduction

Elizabeth Todd-Breland

in Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban ... More

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban political and educational landscape from mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles through the recent corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Black women’s political and intellectual labor powered movements for racial justice and is centered in this discussion of Black politics, social movements, and education reform. The introduction explains how the book presents a different account of Black politics and urban communities in the period after the 1960s by challenging interpretations of urban decline and “urban crisis.” It also explains the historical and contemporary importance of education as a site of struggle that reveals the boundaries of U.S. democracy and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. The introduction outlines how historical considerations of racial liberalism, the Great Migration, the New Deal, labor, Black protest, machine politics, deindustrialization, the politics of Black achievement, desegregation, self-determination, equity, and education reform inform subsequent chapters.Less

Introduction: Imagining a Transnational Ground

Stéphane Robolin

in Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the literary relationships between black South Africans and African Americans during the years of South ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the literary relationships between black South Africans and African Americans during the years of South African apartheid (formally, 1948–1994). It offers a literary history informed by spatial and cultural theory. On the one hand, it advances a mode of cultural analysis that foregrounds the geographic in black lives and cultural imaginaries and, in doing so, models a way of reading black South African and African American writing attuned to the relevance of race, space, and place. On the other hand, this study interprets the two literary traditions in relation to one another. Bringing attention to underaccounted-for cultural traffic that has shaped both traditions in the latter half of the twentieth century, it develops a literary history based on defining moments of cross-cultural engagement.Less

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: An Introduction

Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck

in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology

This chapter discusses the book's main themes. This book is organized around the central but critically neglected theme of the role of knowledge and epistemic formations within the context of social ... More

This chapter discusses the book's main themes. This book is organized around the central but critically neglected theme of the role of knowledge and epistemic formations within the context of social movements for human emancipation. It specifically explores this thematic structure within the context of the localized and/or global struggles — both contemporary and historic — of the peoples of Black African and Afro-mixed descent against their forcibly and systemically-imposed subjugated and condemned status over the past five centuries within trans-Atlantic societies of the West. It argues that it is no coincidence that the self-assertions and emancipatory mobilizations by members of this population against their imposed subjugation/condemnation and dehumanization, logically also carried with them critiques of, challenges to, and/or counter-formulations against and beyond the same epistemic formations that coincided with and legitimized Black peoples' imposed abject-status within the various socio-human formations of Western modernity. These critiques, challenges, and/or counter-formulations point towards new ways of ‘knowing’, new ways of ‘being’ human, and/or new conceptions of ‘freedom’ and visions for human emancipation.Less

Imaginary Black Topographies: What are Monuments For?

Lubaina Himid

in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology

This chapter seeks to reinvent the genre of contemporary travelogue through a satirical juxtaposition of travel guide material against collaged images representing Black diasporic undercurrents ... More

This chapter seeks to reinvent the genre of contemporary travelogue through a satirical juxtaposition of travel guide material against collaged images representing Black diasporic undercurrents within European metropolitan histories. The reinvention of this genre effects the symbolic re-programming of the genre-specific ‘inner eyes’ of secular Western Man, whose code of ‘race’ rendered invisible the history of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples from a metropolitan secular Western memory. The chapter takes the reader through a tour of Paris and London, whereby images of monuments, stately buildings, well-known places, urban parks, and a range of other familiar sites are reinvested, literally painted over, with figurations of Black iconographic artists, political leaders, sports heroes, and intellectuals, as well as visual allusions to silenced and ignored moments of colonial and enslavist violence and Black counter-assertion. This visual re-investment shifts the issue of cognition to the realm of art as a form of epistemic intervention, doing so in this specific case as a challenge to the systemic invisibilization and/or negation of Black lives within a modern Western memory.Less

The Discovery of Africa

BERNARD LEWIS

in Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry

The chapter focuses on what Muslim historians said about the various people beyond the frontiers of the Islamic ecumene. In the earliest Arabic references, black Africans were either Habash or Sudan. ... More

The chapter focuses on what Muslim historians said about the various people beyond the frontiers of the Islamic ecumene. In the earliest Arabic references, black Africans were either Habash or Sudan. Habash refers to Ethiopians and their immediate neighbors in the Horn of Africa. Sudan refers to all blacks in general. Some authors distinguish carefully between the different groups of black Africans. The Zanj were the least respected and the Ethiopians were the most respected. The attitude to black Africans was negative. As Muslim power and Islamic religion advanced farther into black Africa, extravagant accounts of African manners and customs became less frequent. A unique letter vividly illustrates how black African Muslims must have felt. The letter was sent by the black king of Bornu to the sultan of Egypt.Less

“We Are a Power Bloc”: The Congressional Black Caucus and Africa

Alvin B. Tillery

in Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America

This chapter focuses on the role that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has played in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa since the 1960s. The pivotal role of the CBC in passing ... More

This chapter focuses on the role that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has played in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa since the 1960s. The pivotal role of the CBC in passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986 in particular places the discussion in this chapter into context. Previous studies tend to view the activism of the CBC on this issue as a function of its deep commitments to striking down the last vestiges of settler colonialism in Africa and to forging ties with the ancestral homeland. The chapter shows that affective ties to black South Africans living under apartheid were an important force motivating the CBC during its long campaign to pass a sanctions bill, and also that strategic calculations about what was expedient on the home front played an even larger role in pushing the CBC to initiate sanctions legislation.Less