Argues that since black children grow up in a distinct culture, they require 'an educational system that recognizes their strengths, their abilities, and their culture, and that incorporates them into the learning process'. -- Washington Post

Black students' bodies and minds are under attack. We're fighting back. From the north to the south, corporate curriculum lies to our students, conceals pain and injustice, masks racism, and demeans our Black students. But it¿s not only the curriculum that is traumatizing students.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018 “An important contribution to our understanding of how ordinary people found the strength to fight for equality for schoolchildren and their teachers.” —Wall Street Journal In the epic tradition of Eyes on the Prize and with the cultural significance of John Lewis's March trilogy, an ambitious and harrowing account of the devoted black educators who battled southern school segregation and inequality For two years an aging Dr. Horace Tate—a former teacher, principal, and state senator—told Emory University professor Vanessa Siddle Walker about his clandestine travels on unpaved roads under the cover of night, meeting with other educators and with Dr. King, Georgia politicians, and even U.S. presidents. Sometimes he and Walker spoke by phone, sometimes in his office, sometimes in his home; always Tate shared fascinating stories of the times leading up to and following Brown v. Board of Education. Dramatically, on his deathbed, he asked Walker to return to his office in Atlanta, in a building that was once the headquarters of another kind of southern strategy, one driven by integrity and equality. Just days after Dr. Tate's passing in 2002, Walker honored his wish. Up a dusty, rickety staircase, locked in a concealed attic, she found the collection: a massive archive documenting the underground actors and covert strategies behind the most significant era of the fight for educational justice. Thus began Walker's sixteen-year project to uncover the network of educators behind countless battles—in courtrooms, schools, and communities—for the education of black children. Until now, the courageous story of how black Americans in the South won so much and subsequently fell so far has been incomplete. The Lost Education of Horace Tate is a monumental work that offers fresh insight into the southern struggle for human rights, revealing little-known accounts of leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, as well as hidden provocateurs like Horace Tate.

During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal "manufactory of citizens,” a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century. In The Black Child Savers, the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. Ward explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. Ward’s book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals. At once an inspiring story about the shifting boundaries of race, citizenship, and democracy in America and a crucial look at the nature of racial inequality, The Black Child Savers is a stirring account of the stakes and meaning of social justice.

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

50th Anniversary Expanded 5th edition: "Back in 1971 when this booklet was first published, the principal Weapons of Mass Suppression, or WMS, of Black Caribbean children's educational and life prospects were the ESN school, ESN streams and 'Remedial' classes in regular schools. New versions of WMS appeared over the ensuing decades, as the original model, and each replacement, met with Black Caribbean resistance and even open protest. In each case, the objective of these 'new' iterations was not to concentrate more resources and more experienced and skilled teachers to meet the needs of the children designated as 'in Special Educational Need (SEN)', but rather to assign less of these resources, and less experienced teachers to their care. It was a dustbin solution, not a lifting-the-child-up operation. It was a life sentence, not a life-line to greater opportunities. The last 50 years has taught us not to rely on pleas to or the goodwill of those running the system to effect the changes our children need. Just as we did a half-century ago and since, we have to accept that future progress for our children on all fronts depends on our actions, our initiatives..." - Bernard Coard (Extract from the Preface) This Edition also includes: INTRODUCTION by Paul Mackney, Former General Secretary, University & Colleges Union (UK) FOREWORD by Jeremy Corbyn, MP, former Leader of the Opposition, Britain Parliament PART TWO: Republished article written by the Author in 2004 on "Why I Wrote the 'ESN Book' 30 Years On" - PART THREE: "50 Years On" Essay by Hubert Devonish, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, The University of The West Indies, Mona, Jamaica Bernard Coard taught at his secondary school in Grenada on leaving at 18 and at Brandeis University's 'Upward Bound' Summer Programme at 20 and 21. He studied at Brandeis University (Massachusetts, USA) and then Sussex University (UK). During the late 1960s and early '70s, Bernard ran youth clubs in Southeast London for children attending seven so-called ESN schools and taught at two others in East London. He subsequently taught at The University of The West Indies and at the Institute of Higher Studies, Netherlands Antilles. For 20 years, Coard set up and ran the Richmond Hill Prison Education Programme, Grenada (basic literacy to London University postgraduate degrees). He continues to teach at university level as a guest lecturer, in person and online.