We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

Abstract

In the late 1960s and 1970s, scores of black nationalist and Pan Africanist private schools, from preschools to postsecondary institutions, appeared in urban centers across the United States. Such institutions constituted a vibrant if overlooked submovement of Black Power. Founded by civil rights veterans who believed that forming parallel institutions in inner cities was an essential strategy for achieving black self-determination, "Pan African nationalist" schools were part of a quest to revolutionize African-American life and to fashion a new peoplehood through a transformation of consciousness. They demonstrated the centrality of black nationalism and Pan Africanism to African-American educational struggles and to grassroots organizing during and after the heyday of Black Power. An array of activist-intellectuals saw the schools, known as "independent black institutions," as alternatives to substandard, inner-city public schools and as initial steps of a crusade to build an autonomous black nation. This book analyzes the matrix of ideas behind this campaign. It traces the evolution of Black Power ideologies, from radical concepts like anti-imperialism to conservative ideals like racial essentialism. It demonstrates how these outlooks were invigorated by campus struggles, black studies battles, and community control movements during the 1960s, and codified in independent institutions during the 1970s. This book reframes the post–civil rights era as a period of innovative o…