Minds stayed on freedom: politics and pedagogy in the African American freedom struggle (1).

Calls for schools to build on children's interests, promote active problem-solving, and connect learning to life are commonplace in American discussions of education. Contemporary constructivism (2) is but the most recent incarnation of a discourse that has echoed through American educational reform since the days of the common school movement and that achieved its quintessential expression in the progressive era a century ago. Anticipating whole-language theorists, common school reformer Horace Mann argued that literacy instruction which engaged students in reading meaningful texts would build upon "the life, the zest, the eagerness with which all children ... seek for real objects." By contrast, Mann argued, the "abcderian approach" of "conservative" schoolmasters who scolded or whipped students into sounding out "ba be bi bo bu" and hundreds of other "senseless particles" banished children "from this world into the realms of vacuity." (3) Echoing Mann, philosopher John Dewey celebrated the intensely active nature of children's learning and condemned those who reduced schooling to students' passive absorption of information.

The enduring appeal of progressive pedagogy owes much to the way it resonates with widely held American values, and in particular with the liberal democratic political synthesis of individual autonomy and collective self-determination. And yet, progressive education presumes as well as fosters a democratic environment, and critics have struggled to reconcile its claims with reservations about its appropriateness for poor and minority students. The liberal ideal of encouraging "children to become autonomous.... in the classroom setting without having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them," as Lisa Delpit has argued, may well serve the interests of privileged students much better than of children who have not already internalized "the culture of power." (4)

Delpit follows in a long line of African American educators and intellectuals who have charged that in imagining meaning-making as the relatively painless and unconstrained exploration of a relatively benign environment, progressive educators mistakenly generalize from white experience. Still, at times, Black intellectuals and activists have been persuaded that democratic elements in American life and/or the Black community were overcoming the brutalizing impact of racial exclusion and oppression. At those moments, Black scholars and educators have gambled that the democratic potential of progressive pedagogy outweighed the special difficulties Black children confronted as they experienced a racist environment organized to dehumanize them.

To illuminate how assessments of the nature and direction of race relations have shaped support for progressive pedagogy for disenfranchised youth, this article traces the evolution of political and educational ideas in the African American civil tights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when activists working in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party developed, abandoned, recreated, and abandoned again open-ended, progressive pedagogical approaches to the study of social and political life. A commitment to the simultaneous fostering of personal and social transformation led both groups to devote considerable attention to the creation of alternative schools for Black children; and the changing pedagogical choices that activists made reflected the evolving politics of the African American freedom struggle

SNCC AND PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY

A new politics, infused with pedagogy, emerged at the outset of the 1960s, a politics announced by civil rights activists' lunch counter sit-ins and represented organizationally by the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Like the more established civil rights organizations, SNCC sought to achieve racial integration and to win equality for African Americans. In addition to protesting racial injustice, however, the young activists centered around SNCC sought to live their beliefs. The sit-ins derived their power from this ability of protesters to reconstitute the meaning of their own humanity, while they also demanded the abolition of unjust laws. Although they "wanted to end segregation, discrimination, and white supremacy," SNCC's Charley Cobb made clear, "the core of our efforts was the belief that Black people had to make decisions about and take charge of the things controlling their lives.... Most of us organizing soon learned that our main challenge was getting Black people to ... redefine themselves." (5) This commitment to a politics of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-determination imbued SNCC's work with pedagogical concerns.

Among SNCC's core programs was the establishment of a network of "freedom schools," as part of its 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Charlie Cobb, who first proposed their creation, deemed Negro education in Mississippi the worst in the nation. He and other SNCC activists believed that Black consciousness was distorted by segregation, but they were also convinced that Blacks might draw from their experience an understanding of the nature and promise of American society. Organizers' faith in students' ability to make sense of their world--their faith that American society was not irretrievably alien to students--inspired them to embrace a student-centered curriculum. "The value of the Freedom School," volunteer teachers were reminded, "will derive from what the teachers are able to elicit from the students in terms of comprehension and expression of their experiences." (6)

The commitment to giving students opportunity to construct meaning from their experiences reflected the belief that African American students could collectively reconstruct their world. In order to "train people to be active agents in bringing about social change," teachers were instructed to begin by having students describe the schools that they attended. The freedom school curriculum included a dozen sample questions such as "What is the school made of, wood or brick?" Students were then asked to compare Black schools with white ones. Similarly; detailed questions focused on housing conditions, employment and medical care. Later, students explored social differences among whites, and considered why poor whites identified with the power structure.

   SNCC activists explained to
   freedom school volunteers,
   "we have attempted to design
   a developmental curriculum
   that begins on the level of the
   students' everyday lives and
   those things in their environment
   that they have already
   experienced or can readily perceive,
   and builds up to a more
   realistic perception of
   American society, themselves,
   the conditions of their oppression,
   and alternatives offered
   by the Freedom Movement. It
   is not our purpose to impose a
   particular set of conclusions.
   Our purpose is to encourage
   the asking of questions, and
   the hope that society can be
   improved." (7)

Freedom summer, historian Vincent Harding suggests, represented the movement's view that "human beings are meant to be developmental beings; that we find our best identity and purpose when we are developing ourselves and helping to develop our surroundings." (8) The hope that Blacks could develop fully their surroundings, that they could participate fully in American democratic life was a precondition for activists' pedagogy as for their politics.

POLITICAL SHIFTS AND PEDAGOGICAL CHANGES

In the years that followed the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the trust--in America and in students' understanding--that infused SNCC's activism and teaching began to dissipate. A pivotal moment was the 1964 Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. Much of Freedom Summer had been dedicated to organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party among Blacks excluded from the segregated, regular, state Democratic Party. MFDP representatives petitioned the national Party, seeking to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation in Atlantic City. "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated," activist Fannie Lou Hamer told the convention in a riveting speech, "I question America." "How could we not prevail?," SNCC activist John Lewis would still wonder decades later. "The law was on our side. Justice was on our side. The sentiments of the entire nation were with us." (9) President Johnson, however, was not with the delegates; and, seeking to appease southern segregationists, the Democrats refused to seat the integrated MFDP delegates. For countless activists, Atlantic City and similar betrayals undermined basic premises of the civil rights movement.

The displacement of integrationism by nationalism in the years after 1964 was embodied in the electrifying demand for "Black Power," which SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael popularized in 1966. Although Carmichael launched the politics of Black Power in the rural south, the slogan also resonated among Blacks confined in northern ghettos, for whom the goals and strategies of the non-violent, integrationist southern civil rights movement held little appeal. Activists' growing belief that America was hopelessly racist and that efforts to reshape Black humanity could not rely on the decency of whites shaped the trajectory of the civil rights movement. This ideological shift precluded pedagogies growing out of students' American experience and led to increasingly didactic approaches to teaching.

As activists confronted racism on a national scale, they were forced to conclude that Southern segregation laws were only the most visible form of American racism. The successes that the movement had achieved in dismantling Jim Crow offered little guidance in challenging the deeply rooted racial and economic oppression exemplified by conditions in northern ghettos. There, the right to vote and the absence of segregation laws appeared incapable of challenging racial inequality in schooling, the legal system, housing, or employment. Rather, government agencies, business groups, and labor unions combined to promote the growing comfort of white citizens and the growing isolation of Blacks in deindustrializing cities. The belief that America itself was hopelessly racist precluded political mobilization through a language of shared American values. A focus on self-discovery and self-expression among the voiceless was replaced by a desire to articulate a critique of society to the oppressed. Ironically, then, more radical critiques of American racism led to more traditional, banking approaches to teaching.

The years following the Freedom Summer saw SNCC retreat, step by step, from the pedagogy it developed for Mississippi. In the summer of 1965, SNCC created a Residential Freedom School in Chicago for Black youth from around the United States. Amid the oppressive, seemingly intractable conditions of the northern ghetto, students' examination of their lives offered fewer insights than had similar lessons in Mississippi. Teaching became more abstract and removed from activism and experience.

The 1966 efforts of SNCC'S Atlanta Project represented a further erosion of the integrationist ideal. Whereas the 1964 freedom schools drafted white volunteer teachers from across the United States, the Atlanta group recruited from Atlanta's Black colleges; whereas in 1964 organizers delegated much of the curriculum planning to a wide range of Black and white activists, the 1966 group opted not to delegate such work. Declining trust in the white activists was matched by a declining interest in the study of American society and a declining sense that pedagogy should flow from students' experiences. When Washington, DC, SNCC activists planned a 1968 "liberation school," three of the four courses covered African history and culture." (10) The transmission of information had become more important than students' exploration of their own experiences.

In the late 1960s, activists maintained the commitment to self-determination for Blacks, but they no longer believed that the creation of an integrated society would allow them to achieve their goal. As they came to see racism as a permanent feature of American society, they became convinced that Black students could not draw from their American experience an understanding of their real needs, desires, or identity. A progressive pedagogy that trusted students to discover the truth gave way to one in which students were informed about politics and culture. Whatever term one uses to describe the alternative to progressive pedagogy--"teacher-centered," "traditional," and "direct instruction" are popular--its essential characteristic is that a predetermined body of information or skills which students lack is delivered to them. Such an approach won increasing support from Black activists.

BLACK POWER, REVOLUTION, AND DIRECT INSTRUCTION

By the late 1960s countless Black activists, including many from SNCC, found a model of revolutionary activism in the Black Panther Parry, and no group embodied the repudiation of assimilation and non-violence or captured and transformed the imagination of African America more fully than the Panthers. Founded in 1966, the Panthers first gained fame through public displays of weaponry and militant confrontations with the police. Advocating a synthesis of Marxism and nationalism, the Panthers proclaimed the need to replace rather than reform American institutions.

A commitment to transmitting their revolutionary analysis led the Panthers to use a banking language in their educational proposals. The group's 1966 Program demanded "education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society." (11) The main purpose of "the vanguard party," Panther founder Huey P. Newton explained, was to "awaken ... the sleeping masses" and "bombard" them "with the correct approach to the struggle." (12) "Exploited and oppressed people," argued Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, needed to be "educating ourselves and our children on the nature of the struggle and ... transferring to them the means for waging the struggle." (13)

In the summer of 1968, San Francisco State University instructor and Panther Minister of Education George Murray led efforts to develop the Panthers' political education program for members, modeled on Mao's efforts to educate Red Army troops in 1929. Political education classes became a central Party activity; recalled Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard, through which Party leaders and theoreticians could "disseminate" their ideas to the cadre. (14) In addition to classes for cadre, the Panthers promoted political education in the community through lectures about Panther ideology, and began to teach children as well as adults. Here too their goal was to transmit party ideology to Blacks living in an environment so oppressive that it precluded their discovering the truth.

Among the most prominent of the Panther educational programs was a network of "liberation schools" through which the Panthers taught children about Black history and the class struggle. First established in 1969, the Panther liberation schools are perhaps the closest counterpart from the late 1960s to the freedom schools of 1964. Both had an ephemeral existence, but both epitomized the political and pedagogical values of the most dynamic African American activism of their day. Together, the two programs therefore illuminate the evolving relationship of politics and pedagogy.

The first liberation school opened in Berkeley, California, on June 25, 1969. There, elementary and middle school students were taught to "march to songs that tell of the pigs running amuck and Panthers fighting for the people." Employing a curriculum "designed to ... guide [youth] in their search for revolutionary truths and principles," the Panthers taught the children "that they are not fighting a race struggle, but, in fact, a class struggle ... because people of all colors are being exploited by the same pigs all over the world." The children learned to work for the "destruction of the ruling class that oppresses and exploits, ... the avaricious businessman, ... and the racist pigs that are running rampant in our communities." (15)

At the Panthers' San Francisco Liberation School, "everything the children do is political. ... The children sing revolutionary songs and play revolutionary games." The entire curriculum contributed to students receiving a clear and explicit ideology. Teachers avoided lessons "about a jive president that was said to have freed the slaves, when it's as clear as water that we're still not free." Instead, students learned the origins and history of the Black Panther Party and could "explain racism, capitalism, fascism, cultural nationalism, and socialism. They can also explain the Black Panther Party Platform and Program and the ways to survive." (16) In the Panthers' judgment, their own use of direct instruction was needed to counter the brutalizing impact of American schools and society.

In 1971, the Panthers built on the liberation school pedagogy with the establishment of an elementary school in Oakland for the children of Party members. In addition to providing academic classes, the Intercommunal Youth Institute curriculum included instruction in Ideology of the Party and Field Work distributing the Black Panther newspaper, attending court sessions, and visiting prisons. The children also learned to march in Panther military uniforms.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY

The Panthers' teacher-centered classrooms and lessons in armed self-defense reflected dominant American notions of masculine assertiveness even as they challenged racial subordination. Within a few years of the party's founding, however, the Panthers' politics and approach to education began to shift. Abandoning revolutionary aspirations, activists gradually returned to community organizing and rediscovered progressive teaching methods. As historian Tracye Matthews notes, the Panthers' "militaristic style" diminished as women, many from relatively privileged backgrounds, played an increasingly prominent role in party activity. (17) (The rise of women in the Party owed a good deal to the successful government campaign to jail or kill the male leadership. Prosecutors and judges joined with local and national police agencies in anti-Panther operations that included hundreds of acts of bugging, forgery and nearly constant harassment, along with assassinations.)

The evolution of Panther politics--a declining capacity to articulate revolutionary demands and a growing capacity to foster grassroots activism--reshaped the Party's educational ideas. As grassroots organizing gained strength, the commitment to progressive pedagogy returned to activists' educational work. "All you have to do is "guide [children] in the right direction," Berkeley liberation school teacher Val Douglas explained. "The most important thing is to get the children to work with each other." (18)

For a few years, historian Craig Peck notes, the Intercommunal Youth Institute mixed "vestiges of prior Panther ideological training" with "progressive educational modes." (19) At the same time as students learned liquid and dry measures by baking brownies, they learned English by writing to political prisoners. (20) The Panthers' mix of progressive and transmissive pedagogies mirrored the ambiguity of their politics. As they swayed between revolution and reform, the Panthers were undecided as to whether the Black community had the capacity to articulate its own demands or whether it had to depend on a vanguard to reveal the truth about its situation. As Peck argues, the very opening of the IYI school reflected a profound shift away from revolutionary aspirations towards reformist electoral politics. And over its decade-long existence, the institution's mission shifted further from the training of future Panthers to the establishment of a "progressive" school" (21) that could serve as a model for poor urban youth.

IYI pedagogy shifted increasingly away from the inculcation of revolutionary political theory toward open-ended lessons reminiscent of the earlier freedom schools. IYI students, The Black Panther now told readers, receive "the greater portion of their education through direct experience." The school used field trips, including ones to the zoo, an apple orchard, Mt. Diablo, and the trial of the San Quintin Six, to "teach the children about the world by exposing them to numerous learning experiences." (22)

In 1974, the IYI was renamed the Oakland Community School, further distancing it from its revolutionary Panther roots. In the words of Erika Huggins, who replaced Brenda Bay as the school's director, the OCS offered poor Oakland youth "individual attention in reading, mathematics, writing, and really, an understanding of themselves and the world." To do so, the school relied on experience as a basis of learning. To learn what makes a tree grow, Huggins explained, students would not just read about trees, but might "go outside to see ... trees of various sizes or trees in various stages of development. We would see what makes them grow and what keeps them from growing...." (23)

In the new OCS, the educator served primarily as a resource. Teachers, the OCS Instructor Handbook stressed, "do not give opinions in passing on information; instead, facts are shared and information discussed.... Conclusions are reached by the children themselves." (24) "In contrast to public school instruction, which consists mainly of memorization and drilling," The Black Panther now maintained, the OCS "encourages the children to express themselves freely, to explore, and to question the assumptions of what they are learning, as children are naturally inclined to do." (25)

Like the Panthers' earlier liberation schools, the OCS reflected activists' egalitarian project of transforming the education and lives of poor Black youth. The Panthers' flagship school and its educational ideals continued to reflect a political mission, but that mission was now framed as the incorporation of poor Black youth into the mainstream of American life rather than the abolition of an oppressive social order.

THE ABANDONMENT OF ACTIVISM AND THE ECLIPSE OF PROGRESSIVISM

The Panthers' local organizing led to some influence in Oakland's local politics, but these limited successes could not compensate for the atrophied aspirations they embodied. Activists' embrace of mainstream progressivism therefore proved to be as tenuous as their effort to construct a revolutionary curriculum had been. By the end of the 1970s, Craig Peck notes, OCS "instructor handbooks reveal a minimal attention to Black and ethnic studies and, importantly, contain no references to the Black Panthers." Moreover, rote education in basic skills continued to supplant progressive methods of instruction. Whereas IYI Language Arts classes had once focused on the works of Black authors, teachers were now directed to stress "phonics ... handwriting ... and language mechanics." "In this country," the handbook argued, "the ability to speak and read Standard English is essential." The OCS justified its focus on "Standard English" with the observation that "language barriers have systematically been used to oppress Black and other poor people in the country." (26)

A social sciences unit on California's government suggests how much Panther hopes for political transformation had narrowed. The unit-plan objectives called for students to state who "the current governor of California is and what his job entails." Whereas in an earlier era, the Panthers would have articulated the state's role in policing the oppressed, the OCS instructor now evaluated students' ability to state, "[t]he governor's job is to carry out the laws of the state and make life better for people living in the state." (27)

The conventionalism of the OCS curriculum reflected the Panthers' diminished sense of the capacity of Blacks to determine their individual or collective destinies. Instead of "trying to build a model school, provide a real education to Black kids," Panther chief Elaine Brown lamented, "right now, I think, we're mostly saving a bunch of lives." (28) Educators did employ peer tutoring, individualized instruction and other progressive techniques. Moreover, the school served a community-building function in Oakland no matter what its pedagogy. Still, as the radical hopes of the late 1960s faded, the school abandoned the idea that students could either make meaning of their world or be instructed to understand their oppression.

CONCLUSION

American interest in progressive pedagogy has peaked in moments when the expanding reach of the market economy has heightened tensions between individual autonomy and social bonds, moments that have exposed both the democratic possibilities of modern life and its pernicious inequalities. At times of such uncertainty, movements for social change have flourished, and progressive educators have tested the possibilities and limits of educational reform.

In the decades following World War II, the classic dilemmas of liberal democracy reemerged and placed Blacks at the center of struggles to determine the direction of American life. In the civil rights movement, as in the common school movement of the 1840s and the Progressive Era, social reformers and political activists were drawn to progressive pedagogy in the ever-fragile project of enhancing freedom and equality in American life.

As in those earlier eras, too, elements of activists' educational program were absorbed at least partially by the public school system. A number of public schools inspired by freedom schools have demonstrated that progressive approaches to education can structure classrooms in which disenfranchised students are encouraged to do serious work. (29) The expanded, multicultural history and literature curricula commonly found in schools today are directly traceable to civil rights movement lessons about the role of Blacks in the forming of American society. The movement also encouraged the development of cooperative learning and other progressive techniques as tools in promoting equality in schooling.

And yet, the ideas, ideals and activities of the African American freedom struggle signal that meaningful change in education is not reducible to any new policy, program, or technique. The movement and its schools also serve as a reminder that no curricular project can fundamentally transform knowledge and its distribution if it is not part of a process of transforming social relations as well. Any discussion of educational methods for disenfranchised students that omits the centrality of social change--or opposition to it--omits an essential element of the educational process.

Black activists' support for progressive approaches to the education of Black children required the utopian hope--reflected in and sustained by the African American freedom struggle--that the United States would fulfill its democratic promise so that Blacks too would be in a position individually and collectively to define and shape their situation. When white America made that hope implausible, pedagogical aspirations shifted along with political ones.

Finally, the evolution of movement schooling demonstrates that no single pedagogical approach inherently serves the cause of social justice. The Black Panthers' most significant achievement in transforming the consciousness of African America, that is, their most significant achievement as an educational agency, occurred in years when their work was least informed by progressive techniques.

The hopes that gave rise to the movement schools have faded, and unlike periods in the past when the claims of progressive educators received validation from the broad movements for social and political justice of which educational reform was a part, contemporary interest in constructivism is unaccompanied by significant movements for democratic social change, and the claims of constructivism thus stand as an empty promise for many dispossessed children. The ability of progressive approaches to serve all children depends still on the realization of the political ideals and activism that animated the Civil Rights movements' schools.

NOTES:

(1) For a fuller version of this essay and for many additional references, see Daniel Perlstein, "Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics, Pedagogy; and the African American Freedom Struggle," American Educational Research Journal 39 (2002), 249-277. Copyright 2002 by the American Educational Research Association. Adapted with permission of the publisher.

(2) Within education, constructivism generally refers to a set of theories which hold that knowledge is not a body of facts, skills and interpretations to be transmitted to students but is actively constructed by learners as they interact with their environment.

(3) Horace Mann, Reply to the "Remarks" of Thirty-One Boston Schoolmasters on the Seventyth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (Boston: W. B. Fowle and N. Capen, 1844), 100-107.

(4) Lisa Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children," Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988), 285.

(5) Charlie Cobb, "Organizing Freedom Schools," in Susie Erenrich, ed., Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1999), 134.

(6) "Part I: Academic Curriculum," reprinted in Radical Teacher 40 (Fall 1991), 7.

(7) "Part II: Citizenship Curriculum," Radical Teacher 40 (Fall 1991), 9.

(8) Rachel E. Harding, "Biography, Democracy And Spirit: An Interview with Vincent Harding," Callaloo (1998), 685.

(9) John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 286-88, 291

(10) Reports on Washington, DC, Liberation Schools, file 74, series I, Subgroup C, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for the Study of Non-violence, Atlanta, GA.

(11) Huey Newton, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 121.

(12) Huey P. Newton, "The Correct Handling of a Revolution," in Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Vintage, 1972), 15-16.

(13) Eldridge Cleaver, Education and Revolution (Washington: Center for Educational Reform, 1970), 1, 6, in Joy Ann Williamson, "Educate to Liberate! SNCC, Panthers, and Emancipatory Education," American Educational Research Association, Apr. 2000, 9-10, 13.

(14) David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 143, 161.

(15) Val Douglas, "The Youth Make the Revolution," Black Panther, 2 Aug. 1969.

(16) "San Francisco Liberation School," Black Panther, 2 Aug. 1969, 14.

(17) Tracye Matthews, "'No One Ever Asks, What a Man's Place in the Revolution Is': Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971," in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 277-78.

(18) Douglas, "The Youth Make the Revolution."

(19) Craig Peck, "From Guns to Grammar: Education and Change in the Black Panther Party," History of Education Society, 2000, 19.

(20) "'I Love Freedom, I Love Community,'" Black Panther, 20 Apr. 1974, 9.

(21) "Oakland Community School: A History of Serving the Youth, Body and Soul," Black Panther 16 Oct. 1976, 4.

(22) "Youth Institute's Environmental Studies Project an Educational Experience," Black Panther, 5 Jan. 1974, 5.

(23) "Youth Institute Succeeding Where Public Schools Failed: Interview with School's Director Erika Huggins," Black Panther, 2 Feb. 1974, 4. Black Panther now referred to the OCS as a "progressive" school ("Youth Institute Teachers Have 'Great Love and Understanding": Interview with Erika Huggins, Director of Model School" Black Panther, 9 Feb. 1974, 4).

(24) Williamson, "Educate to Liberate!" 11-12.

(25) Jim Hoffman, "Reading, Writing and Fighting in the Oakland Ghetto," Black Belt, August 1975, reprinted in Black Panther, 30 June 1975.

(26) Peck, "Guns to Grammar," 28.

(27) Peck, "Guns to Grammar," 25.

(28) Brown, A Taste of Power, 392-94.

(29) See especially Robert Moses, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).