"I want to Become a Part of History Also": Exploring the Relationship Between Movement Schooling and the Teaching of African American History

Abstract

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s a series of grassroots movements geared toward education reform for African American K-12 students emerged across the United States. Though these movements reflected disparate political ideologies, they shared a common motivational factor—the failure of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education to implement a notable change in the quality of African American public-school education. These movements relied on the contribution and involvement of local people, in combination with the efforts of various Civil Rights organisations, to provide educational opportunities for students where the state would not. During this period, Liberation Schools and Freedom Schools were established throughout the country by CORE, SNCC and the BPP. With a focus on how these schools differed in their teaching of African American history, this thesis analyses how different strands of protest traditions and political ideologies worked to inform curriculum development and pedagogy. This analysis is especially relevant given the wider implications the teaching of African American history in these schools had for the development of professional African American history more broadly. The place of an African American curriculum and pedagogy in the United States remains a current and contested issue, particularly in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. This study helps to historically contextualize many of these contemporary debates.