Chapter 1. Once ˆ had completed her first-year course in the Art section of the New York State Department of Education, in 1968 she was awarded a grant to study in the graduate program at the Pratt Institute in New York City. She won scholarships for two subsequent graduate courses and she continued to be awarded funding for study after graduation in 1970.
2.
1 In fact, she had decided the previous fall that she was going to apply for a position in the Department of Education in New York State's Board of Regents, as part of her plan to build a career in the public service.
2 Anita R. Jackson, Anita R. Jackson: A Portrait of Black Womanhood, (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 3.
Chapter 3
# The
Institutional
Roots of
the Black Panthers
> It is at present illegal to be a member of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and all Panthers and supporters are subject to the possibility of Federal and local police harassment and arrest.
> Panthers defend themselves against these enemies of freedom by organizing themselves to conduct armed patrols of their neighborhoods and to establish a sense of community through programs like food and clothing giveaways, children's programs and free health care for the people.
—Black Panther Party platform
> You need to be born at the right time, in the right country, to the right people, at the right period in history.
> . . . in the case of Black Americans, they are born when there is no choice.
—H. Rap Brown1
In the early 1960s, a young sociologist named Staughton Lynd began to consider how schools and classrooms were places where he could learn and teach history. The question was a way of making history into something that he might understand more easily as a white professor at Harvard, at the time he enrolled in the graduate program at Harvard University. Lynd was taught in his courses by African American teachers and mentored by African American staff members who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, especially Black Power Movement.2 Many of the activists he met in New York and Boston were members of the Communist Party, but they were also influenced by Black Power ideas and many were also members of the Black Panther Party. The radical teachers who spoke of "democratic community schools" and their "practical socialism" in classrooms and offices in the city held a different political landscape of protest and protestors, one that extended beyond the universities, beyond the nation's capitol. They described what they did and how they conducted themselves as "pushing the envelope." From this location the young sociologist found new ways to imagine how history took shape in public life, especially in schools and classrooms, through the experience of the Black Panthers. When Lynd wrote that the Panthers did not appear like any other group to him and that their practices were so unusual that he could not understand how the experience of teaching in a racially discriminatory school "can possibly be carried on in the United States in 1972" (1971, 72), he was revealing a deeper sense of how the experience of discrimination or the experience of freedom differed for his students, whose daily lives were shaped by racial segregation. He was also pointing out that the experience of the Civil Rights Movement and its success could be understood as more than a mere set of policy directives and strategies or even as a historical event that had ended, but as something that continued, and one that required a careful practice of racial awareness, self-determination, and community responsibility. In the same way, when people who were not students or faculty at the university began to organize in the streets of black neighborhoods to protest police violence and police abuse, to protest the criminal justice system and to confront the violence of drugs and crime, and in doing so formed the group, the Black Panthers, many white professors were also learning how to understand new forms of social justice education. From this moment a national conversation opened up about the nature of justice, black and white, and how the Civil Rights Movement should be considered one of the first and one of the most important instances of radical movements that fought to create new forms of social justice for the poor and Black people.3
People who organized in the post–Civil Rights Movement Black Power Movement came to know and embrace their right to demand a national attention to the social ills of poverty and the racial problems that they experienced. They were not alone in the ways that they organized to address their concerns about how to build a new nation. Their experiences with the Civil Rights Movement did not transform them into social justice workers or leaders. But they knew a good deal more about the kinds of practices that brought them into being as a political group, and they were willing to offer new forms of education that could build their communities and their futures. More importantly, they understood their claims to justice as interwoven with those who had not yet received justice.4 The black students who occupied the San Francisco State College administration building that December day in 1969 were also asking for a new way to educate themselves about the forms of oppression and violence that the university administration had been unable to consider when they refused to make a significant change to the school's policies and practices that segregated Black students and faculty from the classrooms and the campus. They had not yet learned how to speak about their own educational experiences of struggle, and they had not yet learned how to represent their educational experiences for other students who had never read or heard the stories of black people who had been denied access to their rights and freedoms in the schools, in the workplace, and in society in general. The Panthers worked to inform black youth about these forms of racial and social inequality, and to create new forms of critical consciousness that they could use in their classrooms and in their communities. As Panther organizers developed new forms of self-education, teaching that led the students to understand their own needs for a new political order, they continued to build a counter-public sphere of their own within a very segregated country. They were seeking a new language to challenge education and social injustice in the United States.
In the summer of 1969, black and white activists gathered in Berkeley, California, to launch a campaign against school segregation and the school board's practice of tracking black students for the special attention of their parents and white administrators. The Black Panther Party had called for the rally in support of the student-led Black People's Coalition, and they supported the proposal with the support of the San Francisco Chapter of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, as well as the East Bay Left.5 Members of the SDS and the local chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM) also participated. The Black Panther Party announced their intention to begin a program for "equalizing" the treatment of Black students by the Berkeley public school board, which was soon described as "tracking." When Panther leaders insisted that Berkeley's Board of Education should consider making a number of immediate improvements to the school system and to student education, the Black Panther Party leadership refused the invitation to present a formal proposal to the board. Instead, they called on the board to hold a joint meeting with members of the Black community, an invitation that was received with mixed results.6
The Panther's approach to school integration represented a sharp break with the existing structure of school systems that had been established long before the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ordered public school desegregation in 1954, but it also raised a number of questions and issues regarding how these policies were to be applied.7 It was not an easy thing to do, to insist on educational integration as a human right and as a civil rights concern, to create "new ways of knowing" and to articulate radical visions of education that were meant to advance racial equality and freedom. The Panthers in San Francisco were also interested in pursuing alternative ways to transform the schools, to create a form of education that was connected to the political struggle to end the institutionalization of racism. And while they may not have liked what they saw in Berkeley and the San Francisco area, the Black Panther Party was also experimenting with new ways to form a community of change and solidarity across racial and class lines.8 The Black Panther Party was also a very heterogeneous group and the politics of the Party were changing. It was important to pay attention to the history of the group and the Black Panther Party was a unique experiment in radical social justice education that took on new forms as it began to look forward, to look at the kinds of education that they hoped would prepare black children to become members of the "New Society."
The members of the Black Panther Party in Berkeley had begun to understand the importance of education as a form of political change, as a way to imagine what it might mean to build a new kind of society that would recognize and give freedom to all people, especially to the poor and oppressed. New education would also include a form of critical consciousness that was connected to the forms of justice and liberty that many Panthers considered to be fundamental to the new society. If a society was to be "New," then that society would have to be built upon the belief in radical forms of justice that challenged the kind of institutional racism that the Panthers insisted had a long history in the United States. In other words, it was necessary to begin to think about building a new form of education in the face of a government that had worked systematically to protect the institutions that supported white supremacy, racism, and oppression. In short, it was necessary to educate people to realize the kinds of connections that they could draw in order to learn how to be responsible citizens and to imagine a just nation. As a result of the various events that took place over the summer of 1969 in Berkeley, California, there was
