The right to attain a comprehensive education has dissolved into an illusion for Black children in Baltimore, sparking concern amongst educators and civil rights activists who say literacy is crucial to social mobilization.
Now, with public schools in the area being grossly underfunded, this pipeline to effective organizing has been relegated to a historical still life recalled by educators today.
“We want to teach kids to be activists,” said Joseph Smith, a ninth grade English teacher at Frederick Douglass High School. “But [curricula] about how to change the world doesn’t really tell them that.”
Although the Black Panther Party’s tradition of Black empowerment through knowledge continued on through local activist groups, those resources are now evaporating.
Oppressed groups have often looked to education as a launchpad upon which to craft liberation-geared realities. The Black Power and Civil Rights Movements of the 20th century, in a bid to address shortcomings of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s, necessitated a stern command of the English language to best understand the calamities that Black people endured globally.
Black Panther Party members such as Marshall “Eddie” Conway championed community-driven political education programs and the distribution of the Black Panther Intercommunal News, a newspaper that was described as “an official organ of party opinion” in a 2002 article published in “Ethnic and Racial Studies,” a peer-reviewed social science academic journal.
Through their efforts, Black children learned to read and write and became familiar with works from liberation greats such as Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon, and Malcolm X. And although the Black Panther Party’s tradition of Black empowerment through knowledge continued on through local activist groups, those resources are now evaporating.
How did we get here?
A 2022 report from the National Assessment of…
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