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theses

This dissertation investigates the role of black high school youth in the development of the Black Power movement in Detroit. Specifically, it examines their efforts to institutionalize their vision of education as a means to achieving liberation. As white flight took shape in Detroit during the postwar period, the Detroit Public Schools’ majority black student population encountered a majority white teaching force that resisted their very presence. Through walkouts, building takeovers, and the development of student organizations, black high school youth demanded Black Studies and political education seminars to carve out physical and intellectual space in the Detroit school system. And yet, historians know very little about these youths and their contributions to the long history of African American educational movements from slavery to freedom. This dissertation shows that in the courses they demanded, in the freedom and liberation schools they developed, and in their evaluation of the reformed curriculum, these young activists were architects of the Black Power movement’s educational politics, which emphasized community control of schools. Using archival research and oral interviews, this dissertation places Black Power studies in conversation with the History of Black Education to make two important arguments about the role of high school youth in social justice movements. First, it argues that black high school youth marshalled their experiences with racial segregation in the North and their engagement with the black radical intellectual tradition to produce the intellectual labor that made possible the institutionalization of culturally relevant and political education. Second, it shows that the pedagogical approaches of movement organizations contributed to young people’s view of education as instrumental to multiple sites of struggle, including local movements around labor, welfare, and policing.

ETD_8835

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Dara Walker

doi:10.7282/T3DR2ZZ9

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.