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.
#595685 in Books Fought Leigh 2017-05-15Original language:English 6.50 x 1.50 x 9.20l; #File Name: 0199782377424 pagesWomen in the World of Frederick Douglass
Review
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy Customer Exfair Beexexcellent book0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A welcome addition to the books about DouglassBy J. MitchellClear writing; well-researched. I totally enjoyed this book. I have read others about Frederick Douglass but there has been very little written about the women in his life. He kept his private life private. I especially liked having more information about Helen; his seond wife; and Rosetta; his oldest child. There was perhaps too much speculation about what Anna; his first wife; was thinking and feeling; Anna left no records of her own because she was illiterate.
