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A Review of: “Black ProtestThought and Education”Bruce Anthony Jones aa University of South Florida ,Published online: 05 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Bruce Anthony Jones (2007) A Review of: “Black Protest Thoughtand Education”, Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational StudiesAssociation, 42:3, 281-287, DOI: 10.1080/00131940701634692

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BOOK REVIEWS

Black Protest Thought and Education. William H. Watkins,

editor; foreword by James D. Anderson. New York : Peter Lang, 2005. XXX

pp. $28.45 (paper).

BRUCE ANTHONY JONESUniversity of South Florida

In her autobiography, Unbought and Unbossed, published in 1970, late U.S.Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm lamented about the sociopolitical, economic,and policy structures that preclude African Americans from leading, designing,and developing solutions to the perennial problems of injustice and inequality inthe United States. Regarding the antipoverty programs of the 1960s, she wrote:

The anti-poverty programs were designed by White middle class intellectuals

who had no experience of being poor, despised and discriminated against.

They looked at the condition of poor (largely African American) communities

and made their diagnosis. . . . These programs were touted as self-help in

nature but the reality was that they were “self-help without the self” (157).

Indigenous African American strategies to deal with African American needsand concerns have been thwarted, undermined, and overtly sabotaged throughoutU.S. history. Education is no exception to this historical reality. Today, morethan ever, African Americans and Latina/o Americans, who together comprise thelargest demographic in our nation’s urban school systems, hold less control overthe educational fate of their children than ever before in history. In Black ProtestThought and Education, edited by William H. Watkins, we are presented witha collection of chapters that provide an excellent explication of the bottom line.What does it means for a racial/ethnic group, in this case African Americans, tostruggle and fail to gain some semblance of control over its own destiny, witheducation in the forefront?

African American children bear the negative brunt of the failure of the AfricanAmerican community to lead, design, and develop strategies for ensuring success.Like chattel property, these children have become victims of unending cycles ofinhumane experimentation by so-called “leaders” in the education establishment.

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These leaders include university presidents, education deans, education scholars,experts, and consultants who receive lucrative monetary benefit for themselves andthe institutions that they represent in the form research grants, contracts, and privateconsulting fees from the array of government and philanthropic institutions thatpurport to be working on behalf of the best interests of African American childrenand their communities. By all accounts, the plight of African American children(particularly males1) has worsened dramatically over the past 26 years while, atthe same time, White people continue to lead the charge for what they think worksbest for the African American community (Jones and Jackson 2007). This reality isworsened by the failure of African American scholars and education practitionersto coalesce as a collective around designing and developing education solutions fortheir own community. Indeed, there are “individual” African American scholarsand education practitioners working in silos and working hard to define, design,and tackle education problems, but where is the “collective” effort? It is almostas if there remains a prevalent belief that said scholars and practitioners must first“ask permission” to gather to act in a community or collective fashion. No otherethnic group in U.S. history has been subjected, or allowed itself to be subjected,to such a longstanding absurdity. As Danns reports in chapter eight,

In the White community, White people make all of the decisions about their

schools. They determine the curriculum, the physical materials, teacher se-

lection, principal selection, teacher retention, taxation, material supplies. All

of those decisions are made by White people in the White community—

Unfortunately, all of those decisions are also made by White people for the

Black community (182).

From a philosophical and practical standpoint, Stovall (Chapter 9) advocatesfor the usage of critical race theory as a method for explicating the need forindigenous communities to play an integral role in the affairs of the educationof their own children. He places emphasis on the importance of recognizing, asopposed to denying, the ongoing persistence of racism in the United States and howracism has played an integral role in shaping the lives and histories of all citizensand institutions. Stovall speaks to the need for those who have been “negativelyaffected by the current system, to determine their own needs and responses” (199)to educational dilemma. He writes that critical race theory is not about “we arethe world,” but “we all are catching hell from racism” (198).

Henry presents a Black feminist perspective in Chapter 4, as she discusses thesignificance of school curriculum and instruction and the role of legitimacy. Shenotes that school curriculum and instruction lack relevancy and legitimacy because“students from the oppressed and marginalized social groups are denied the rightto learn about their own cultures from critical, informed perspectives” (93). Incritiquing colleges of education, Henry posits that the training and placement of

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 283

Blacks in the teaching profession does little to diminish the lack of credibility thatour educational enterprise holds. The fact that colleges of education operate underthe auspices of state licensing/certification and accreditation requirements simplyreinforces the status quo. In quoting the Black feminist work of Omolade (1994),Henry laments,

These programs [colleges of education] offer Black female students access to

a college education while teaching them to become even more ignorant of the

significance of their own histories and experiences . . . They have produced

the same old technically skilled bureaucrats and teachers who lack intellectual

breadth and imagination as their White female counterparts. Only this time,

they are Black women (94).

Curriculum studies, according to Henry, remain “White male studies privilegingEurocentrism and patriarchy” (97). Significant numbers of African Americanstudents, particularly those in urban centers, do not and will not ever connect tothis reality; hence, disengagement occurs.

Several of the authors speak to the insidious nature of testing and knowledgeproduction in our school systems as this concerns a Eurocentric pathological focuson testing, instructional technique, procedure, and bureaucracy that is systemati-cally destroying African American children. Watkins discusses this pathology inChapter 5, reminding us that, “Intelligence (and intelligence quotient (IQ)) cameto be associated (at the turn of the century) with leadership, property, owner-ship, and worth . . . . (the notion of the intelligent quotient) was widely supportedby American eugenicists (who advocated the extermination of inferior races),racists and Aryan theorists” (114). The genocidal focus on testing today has itsroots in this history. This reality is exacerbated by the multibillion dollar world-wide profits that the testing industry generates for the megacorporations, such asHarcourt Brace Industries, Houghton Mifflin Corporation, and Pearson Educa-tion Company, which design, develop, produce, disseminate, and grade these tests(Leistyna 2007). Schools in the Black community, according to Richards andLemelle (Chapter 1), Henry (Chapter 4),Watkins (Chapter 5) and Stovall (Chapter9), are viewed as technical entities devoid of any formal and informal learningopportunities for Black children to understand and critically analyze sociopoliti-cal phenomenon in society despite the fact that, according to Stovall, “Education,like any human interaction, is a set of relationships between groups (which) callsfor critical analysis of such relationships to reveal how power structures impedethe ability of specific groups to address their needs and concerns” (203). Froma cultural standpoint, human relationships are primary to African American cul-ture. All learning must be grounded in sound, functional relationships betweenchildren and adults—the content of the curriculum is secondary to this grounding.Yet schools that are designed for Black children from a Eurocentric standpoint are

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devoid of a primacy on the value of human relationships. Such schools are devoidof a focus on the affective dimensional needs of Black children, which is essentialfor their development.

Richards and Lemelle (Chapter 1) provide an excellent overview of protestmovements that attempted to overcome the structural inadequacies of theEurocentric design of Black schools in Black communities that were viewedas inhumane, lacking in relevance and lacking in a primary focus on the valueof human relationships in the curriculum and production of knowledge. The au-thors focus their overview on Marcus Garvey, Julius Nyerere, and Audre Lorder,who advanced an education agenda that was relevant to the African Americancommunity in the United States and African communities from an internationalstandpoint. With respect to the Marcus Garvey movement, the authors report “noprogress could be made in political and social arenas without first advancing eco-nomic initiatives and engendering a commitment and loyalty to Black businessventures” (10). Nyerere was elected the first president of Tanganyika in 1961following British colonial rule. In contrast to colonial education, his educationalbeliefs were guided by the notion that, “education was both formal and informaland highly integrated into a ‘community’ model for the common good” (17). Asa result, illiteracy in the country, between 1967 and 1986 fell from 67 to 9.6%.Lourde used poetry as a chief communication tool for Black protest thought andaction. She recognized the significance of language and power relations in societythat needed to be exposed as a means of understanding oppression, calling for theformation of a “global communion” dedicated to the “destruction of interlockingsystems of oppression” (23).

Consistent with a focus on knowledge production, Perlstein (Chapter 2) dis-cusses the roles of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) andthe Black Panthers in advancing the Black protest movements of the 1960s. TheBlack Panthers actually emerged out of the SNCC movement because of the beliefthat more radical approaches to addressing the needs of the Black communitywere needed. These approaches included the establishment of Black Panther-sponsored schools across the United States, which developed the knowledge baseand assessment that was viewed as relevant to the Black community. One of the keydistinctions between SNCC and Black Panther approaches to education, accordingto the chapter, centered on pedagogical technique. The earlier SNCC approaches,such as the “freedom schools,” tended to emphasize more open-ended instruction,with a focus on allowing students to develop and draw their own analysis aboutsociopolitical and economic phenomenon. The Black Panther “liberation schools,”on the other hand, advocated and implemented a more prescribed curriculum thatcalled for students knowing who their oppressors were and why the communitywas in the state that it was in. This latter approach emerged because of the grow-ing distrust of Whites and the realization that “there were continuous activitiesby the White community to shut them [Blacks] out of the major society” (40).

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 285

The SNCC movement, which attempted to accommodate the system and teachkids that if they work hard, they too can succeed, gave way to the Black Panthermovement, which advocated a more separatist agenda because of the hostile andoften deadly reaction to integration from the White community (47). The rolesof Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, CharlesCobb, Jimmy Garrett, Fannie Lou Hamer, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, GeorgeMurray, and Eldridge Cleaver, to name a few, are discussed at length with regardto their roles in these movements.

The knowledge production efforts by SNCC and the Black Panthers stand instark contrast to the knowledge production actions by White Americans in thefield of philanthropy, who successfully sought to design, control, and disseminatethrough grant making what they viewed as being important to the educationof the African American community. According Gordon (Chapter 7), “in thefield of education there has been (and continues to be) the historical struggle ofAfrican Americans against intellectual hegemony, and the imposition of appointedleadership, both Black and White, by White philanthropists in Black educationalinstitutions since the late 19th century” (162). These philanthropists believed thatAfrican Americans had a role to play in society, but this role had nothing todo with advancing the intellectual capital of African Americans. This role hadnothing to do with paying tribute to the past contributions of African Americans,because these philanthropists held the racist view that African Americans hadno culture that was worthy of understanding and contributed nothing to worldhistory or U.S. economic, political or social development. Therefore, accordingto Watkins (Chapter 6), education was to serve only as a sorting function thatensured African Americans would remain “in their place” as domestics, laborers,and sharecroppers. From a U.S. and international standpoint,

Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic

society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentra-

tions of power and wealth. . . . They help maintain an economic and political

order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests—a sys-

tem which has worked against the interests of minorities, the working class,

and Third World peoples (117).

The efforts at Black empowerment promulgated by the activists who are hon-ored in this book are revealing. In the end, the racist structures, which are deeplyingrained in the sociopolitical, economic, and policy fabric of the U.S. system,destroyed these empowerment efforts. As indicated at the beginning of this review,schools in Black communities today are more driven by a Eurocentric for-profitagenda than ever before. According to the National Clearinghouse on EducationReform there are approximately 29 nonprofit-run school reform packages that areadvanced in predominantly African American urban school settings across the

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286 BOOK REVIEWS

United States. To name a few, these reform packages include America’s Choice,Accelerated Learning, Direct Instruction, Open Court, Talent Development, andSuccess for All. The founders of these packages are the recipients of millionsof dollars in school reform government and philanthropic investments. These re-form packages drive school curriculum and instruction and determine the typesof professional development to be conducted in each school. These reform pack-ages also impact personnel decisions with respect to who gets hired and who getsfired. Yet White males designed and developed all but two of the nonprofit reformpackages with huge investments from the government (largely Title I monies) andphilanthropic sectors (Jones 2007). The same holds true for Education Manage-ment Organizations (EMOs), which are for-profit institutions dedicated to securinguntold numbers of contracts to operate and manage public schools in urban set-tings. Edison Schools is the most popularly-known EMO. As with the nonprofitreform packages, these for-profit EMOs are led, designed and developed by Whitemales—not a single EMO in the United States has been designed by a member ofthe African American community, yet these EMOs receive the lion’s share of theircontracts from African American urban school districts with the forceful proddingof philanthropy and business.

Black Protest Thought and Education clearly shows that a critical foundationhas been laid for the empowerment of African Americans in the field of education,even though many of the gains in empowerment have been lost, sabotaged, andundermined. In this respect, the book provides an invaluable collection of readingsthat are vital from a historical perspective but also from a policy perspective, as newgenerations of African Americans attempt to regain some semblance of controlover the education of their own children.

Note

1. African American males begin disengaging from the nation’s public schools as earlyas the 2nd and 3rd grades. There is a direct correlation between this disengagement andincarceration rates. As of June 2002, 12% of all African American men aged 20 to 39 werein prison or jail—the largest amount ever measured. In contrast, only 4% of Latino and1.6% of European American males in this age group were incarcerated (Cashin 2004, 248).

References

Cashin, Sheryll. 2004. The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Underminingthe American Dream. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

Chisholm, Shirley. 1970. Unbought and Unbossed. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Com-pany.

Jones, Bruce Anthony, and Nate Jackson. 2007. “Student Resiliency, Institutional Struc-tures and Arts Education: Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild as a Model.” In ResiliencyReconsidered: Policy Implications of the Resiliency Movement, edited by D. Davis,Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 287

Jones, Bruce Anthony. 2007. “‘Table Top Theory’ as a Policy Framework for Gauging theConfluence of Teaching and Private Sector Interests.” Teacher Education Quarterly 34:185–204.

Leistyna, Pepi. 2007. “Corporate Testing: Standards, Profits, and the Demise of the PublicSphere.” Teacher Education Quarterly 34: 59–84.

Omolade, Barbara. 1994. The Rising Song of African American Women. New York, NY:Routledge.

Urban Schools Public Will: Making Education Work forAll Our Children. Norm Fruchter. New York, NY: Teachers College

Press, 2007. 177 pp. $21.95 (paper).

LOYCE CARUTHERSUniversity of Missouri—Kansas City

The K–12 student population in urban, suburban, and rural schools across thenation is more diverse than ever before (Berman et al. 1997; Darling-Hammond1997; Nieto 2002). Yet paradoxically, although there is more diversity in ourschools there is also more sameness: a “paradigm of sameness” continues to per-petuate the status quo and to promote reform without difference in most Americanschools. In Urban Schools Public Will: Making Education Work for All Children,Norm Fruchter (2007) raises challenging questions about the paradigm of same-ness through connections between race/ethnicity and education with two principalarguments, that: (a) the nations’ urban public schools can be transformed to ef-fectively educate poor students of color, and (b) urban public schools are thekey agents for this transformation. Useful for policy makers, educators, and com-munity members, Fruchter vividly incorporates vignettes from his experienceswith schools to illustrate the issues in each chapter. He has been a public schoolteacher, parent organizer, PTA president, school board member, foundation edu-cation grant-maker, evaluator, and researcher. The patterns his career has takenare described here:

I have been engaged in a long march through public education in an effort to

understand how that institution, so critical to the formation of consciousness

and the reproduction of our society, might be transformed to reduce its prevail-

ing inequities. Those “savage inequities,” in Jonathan Kozol’s phrase, so limit

the provision of schooling, particularly to poor students of color, that they

have warped the capacity of education to produce what Amy Guttman calls

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