Liberation and Education brings together a collection of essays about Black educators’ and organizations’ quests to cultivate and employ educational strategies for the liberation of Black people. The contributions examine the enduring nature of Black people’s thinking about education prior to and through enslavement to the present. It documents a variety of critical accounts of how Black people have developed ways to free themselves mentally from the legacies of slavery, the view of Black inferiority, and white supremacy.

Ronald Chennault is an associate professor and former associate dean of the College of Education of DePaul University. He is a co-editor of White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and is the author of Hollywood Films about Schools: Where Race, Politics, and Education Intersect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and of Anti-Public: How Elite Discourse Harms Public Education (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).

Derrick P. Alridge is the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (Teachers College Press, 2008) and a co-editor of The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2021) and Message in the Music: Hip-Hop History and Pedagogy (ASALH, 2010). Alridge has also served as president of the History of Education Society. 
 

Introduction: Liberation and Education: Toward a History of Black Educational Thought
Ronald E. Chennault and Derrick P. Alridge
Chapter 1: African American Living Memory, Pedagogy, and the Slave Past: A Phenomenological Exploration of Remembrance 
Stephen Haymes
Chapter 2: “At the Table”: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the Early Rise of Womanism 
Traki Taylor 
Chapter 3: The Sacred Mission: Mapping the Intellectual Genealogy of Carter Godwin Woodson 
Lasana D. Kazembe 
Chapter 4: Anna Julia Cooper and Septima Poinsette Clark: Adult Education for Freedom, Racial Advancement, and Political Activism 
Karen A. Johnson 
Chapter 5: Black Women and White Philanthropy: The Impact of White Funding in the Development of the First Generation of Black Women Scholars and Artists
Linda Perkins 
Chapter 6: Black Higher Educational Thought, 1932-1944 
Alexis Johnson 
Chapter 7: “Mind Stayed on Freedom”: The History and Legacy of the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools Program 
Kristal Moore Clemons and Lauren Lefty 
Chapter 8: Education for Self-Determination: New Concept Development Center and Black Power Education in Chicago 
Worth Kamili Hayes 
Chapter 9: Critical Race Theory and Black Educational Thought: A Conversation 
Adrienne Dixson and Gloria Ladson-Billings
Chapter 10: Slow Moving Tides: Black Women Leaders and the Politics of Representation 
Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Talia R. Esnard, and Maria Migueliz Valcarlos
Chapter 11: Theories about Blackness in Education: Amplifying the Black Radical Tradition as a Path Toward Black Educational Futures
Wintre Foxworth Johnson and Samiha Rahman
 Chapter 12: “I Got a Lot to Be Mad About”: The Anti-Blackness of Social Emotional Learning and Paths to Liberation
Johari Harris and Leoandra Onnie Rogers
Chapter 13: Fulfilling Education’s Promise of Freedom: Advancing Black Identity and Subjectivity for Commensurate Citizenship 
Sheron Fraser-Burgess 
Chapter 14: Beyond Ressentiment: Notes Toward a Critical Moral Theory of African American Education 
Corey D. B. Walker 
Chapter 15: Reclaiming Communally Bonded Educators (CBE): A New, but Old Vision for the Field and Function of Black Educators
Jerome E. Morris and Luimil M. Negrón-Pérez
Chapter 16: Education for Liberation in Black/Africana Studies and African-centered Education
James B. Stewart 
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index