We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

by Russell J. Rickford

During the height of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, dozens of Pan African nationalist private schools, from preschools to post-secondary ventures, appeared in urban settings across the United States. The small, independent enterprises were often accused of teaching hate and were routinely harassed by authorities. Yet these institutions served as critical mechanisms for transmitting black consciousness. Founded by activist-intellectuals and other radicalized veterans of the civil rights movement, the schools strove not simply to bolster the academic skills and self-esteem of inner-city African-American youth but also to decolonize minds and foster a vigorous and regenerative sense of African identity.

In We Are An African People , historian Russell Rickford traces the intellectual lives of these autonomous black institutions, established dedicated to pursuing the self-determination that the integrationist civil rights movement had failed to provide. Influenced by Third World theorists and anticolonial campaigns, organizers of the schools saw formal education as a means of creating a vanguard of young activists devoted to the struggle for black political sovereignty throughout the world. Most of the institutions were short-lived, and they offered only modest numbers of children a genuine alternative to substandard, inner-city public schools. Yet their stories reveal much about Pan Africanism as a social and intellectual movement and as a key part of an indigenous black nationalism.

Rickford uses this largely forgotten movement to explore a particularly fertile period of political, cultural, and social revitalization that strove to revolutionize African American life and envision an alternate society. Reframing the post-civil rights era as a period of innovative organizing, he depicts the prelude to the modern Afrocentric movement and contributes to the ongoing conversation about urban educational reform, race, and identity.

Genres: Education, History, Race, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[Virginia Downing · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars because it aligns with my future work but almost a 3.5 for its pain in my butt to finish (aka dense)

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is dense. It's offers as much information as you could want, but because it requires that you're thinking and taking in a lot of information, it is not always an easy read. This is a book meant for people who go into it with a high level of interest in its topic. As someone studying to be an educator, I viewed this information as important for me to know and take in.

The one thing I struggled with while reading was keeping track of the dates. The various chapters sometimes jump around in time, and as someone who struggles to remember dates, I did struggle with keeping track of when things were happening, particularly in comparison to each other. However, that was by far my own failing rather than the book's.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about independent black schools in America over time and who isn't afraid of the time commitment that comes from reading this book. It's a nice resource and full of information.

I received this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

http://hmweasley-blog.blogspot.com/20...

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because this book does an excellent job of cataloguing and documenting a lesser known part of our history. in terms of readability, it's closer to 3 stars for me because it was so many names, dates, times, and I just couldn't keep it all in my head!