The modern American corporate-industrial state requires a massive ideological machine to establish social order, create political consensus, train obedient citizen-workers, and dispatch marginalized groups to their «place». Mass public education has helped to forge the modern political state that enforces social and racial inequality. Disenchanted African Americans, representing dissenting viewpoints, have vigorously protested this educational system, which is rooted in segregation, differentiated funding, falsehoods, alienation, and exclusion. This important book belongs in classrooms devoted to achieving racial equality in public education.

A wide selection of documents that provides the historical setting of today's protest thought and actions. Writings by: W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, John Brown, Tom Hayen, William Bradford Huie, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Stokely Carmichael. Revised and updated. "By far the fullest documentary history of three and one-half centuries of Negro-American protest and agitation available at the price."--New York Times

Black Intellectual Thought in Education celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues.

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.