New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People's University

by Conor Tomas Reed

In the 1960s and ’70s―when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY―New York City’s classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women’s liberation.
Conor Tomás Reed is part of the next generation of an insurgent CUNY movement nourished by these legacies. Highlighting the decolonial feminist metamorphosis that transformed our educational landscape, New York Liberation School explores how study and movement coalesced across classrooms and neighborhoods. Reed’s immersive and wide-ranging narrative brings us into the archives and up close to the stories of its participants in order to reactivate these vibrant struggles. The result is a radiant reclamation of collective history that charts a vision for liberating education and society today.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published August 22, 2023

Reviews

[Sarah Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This exciting telling of the City University of New York's radical history inspires us to imagine its future. Despite endless givebacks by administration and pushbacks from the state, CUNY professors and students contribute to and are influenced by the larger popular movements at home and around the world. By centering such crucial professors as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Tony Cade Bambara and students like Samuel Delaney, Assatta Shakur, and many grassroots activists in movements from Puerto Rican Independence to Palestine Liberation, Conor Tomas Reed makes record of what a university for poor and working-class people can give to the world. A necessary study that enriches our understanding and imagining.

[Hailey DelValle · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read for any student organizer, and i would say any CUNY student at all. as someone who is both, this could not be more up my alley, the history is rich and the analysis expansive. will be using for my political org as a model.

[Ale Gonzalez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well researched and thorough book, but it’s written like an overzealous college first year’s notes. History can and must be fun to read! This dragged. Or maybe I’m just dumb.