Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS) is a free public education series hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In connection with the online event on The Fight for Black Education and Black History, we are interviewing four of the guest speakers: Brian Jones, author of Black History Is for Everyone, Jesse Hagopian, author of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, Crystal Sanders, author of A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, and Barry Goldenberg, author of Strength through Diversity: Harlem Prep and the Rise of Multiculturalism.
This interview also marks the beginning of an on-going collaboration between The Abusable Past and CBFS. The Abusable Past will serve as a home for interviews with scholars, artists, and activists participating in the CBFS series.
Conversations in Black Freedom Studies (CBFS): What led you to write your recent books?
Brian Jones (BJ): As the backlash against Black history, diversity and inclusion measures, and “critical race theory” I started to think that this book wouldn’t just help to spread the Black history resources and ideas that I was learning from, it could also offer a firmer footing for people doing the work who are under attack and are looking for ideas about the importance and meaning of Black history. The right tries to say that we’re dividing kids by race or trapping them in identitarian categories, when actually Black history shows us how the categories are made and remade over time. Liberals understandably defend Black history as patriotic; and while Black patriotism is a prominent theme and one that is worthy of study in our classrooms, I argue that patriotism is too narrow a thematic framework for studying Black history. I take Black patriotism seriously, showing how Black people have wrestled with the question of patriotism, particularly in the United States, and, how many prominent, brilliant figures have at times embraced political projects and loyalties that far exceed US borders. Black patriotism is important to study, but so is Black internationalism.
Jesse Hagopian (JH): I wrote Teach Truth out of urgency and love—for the students, educators, and families fighting for honest education in a time of organized lies. Across the country, we’re witnessing a wave of truthcrime laws that ban teaching about systemic racism, gender identity, colonialism, and other realities that young people urgently need to understand. These attacks are part of a larger project of organized forgetting. I wanted to document the backlash, but more importantly, I wanted to highlight the resistance—the educators teaching truth anyway, the students walking out, the families demanding inclusive schools. I also wrote Teach Truth to honor my own ancestors—enslaved people who risked their lives to learn and teach. Their legacy lives in every struggle for liberatory education today. This book is my offering to that tradition.
Crystal R. Sanders (CRS): I often think about the fact that no other group of people in the United States, other than African Americans, have been denied access to education by statute. In fact, laws prohibiting Black literacy are older than the nation. And yet, we see African-descended people in this country doing whatever necessary to acquire knowledge. I wrote A Forgotten Migration because I was struck by the fact that thousands of Black southerners were compelled to leave their homes, families, and communities to reach their highest intellectual potential because of segregation. I wanted to tell this story and shine a light on the numerous obstacles they overcame simply to secure an education.
Barry Goldenberg (BG): Coincidentally, it all started with a trip to the Schomburg Center back in 2012 where I was doing research on education in Harlem during the Great Depression, where a friendly librarian offered me a DVD about a school called Harlem Prep. I was actually not researching the 1960s at that time, but as I was packing up my notes, I decided to put it into the DVD player there – and what flashed before my eyes was incredible footage about an independent school in Harlem. I figured that there had been books and articles already written about the school, but what I eventually found out was there it had virtually zero footprint in Black educational scholarship. The more I researched about this extraordinary institution, the more I was inspired by what occurred there. I share this story of happenstance more fully in the preface of my book because it is so central to my “why” of writing it: this was a beautiful and powerful but also instructive story of Black excellence and resilience in education, and I realized – after talking with alumni – that if I did not help tell this story, it might never get told. It became a decade-long calling to provide a platform for a story that, in the words of the school’s late headmaster, “deserves to be told.” I’m grateful that the world now has a chance to learn more about the exceptional institution and hopefully learn from its amazing educators, administrators, and students.
CBFS: Is there a historical moment in your research that helps us to better understand the struggle for Black Studies today?
BJ: Although my book is focused on the way Black history has unfolded in the United States, the third chapter is all about the Haitian Revolution. The more I’ve learned about it, the more I’m in awe of its power and importance in shaping world history. And the more I’m appalled at how little attention it receives in k-12 classrooms. The insurgents who destroyed the French colony of Saint Domingue won their freedom by fighting off all of the strongest European militaries, forged a new nation (restoring the name the indigenous Tainos used for the island, Ayiti), wrote the first constitution that prohibited slavery, inspired uprisings of enslaved people all over the Atlantic world, and set the globe on the path to abolition. The reaction to the Haitian Revolution is instructive. People in the African diaspora were, everywhere, inspired. People who wanted to preserve slavery were, to put it mildly, afraid. An archival document featured in the new Teaching with the Schomburg Archives website describes a meeting of citizens of Savannah, Georgia, who gathered to prevent ships from Haiti from even landing at their docks. They were afraid that the ships would bring people, and the people would bring ideas, stories, and information about the revolution, and that it would spread. Political leaders today are a lot like those citizens of Savannah more than 200 years ago — they are trying to prevent information about Black history from landing in our classrooms. They’re terrified of what it might mean for young people to learn these ideas, stories, and information.
JH: The period of Reconstruction is absolutely foundational to understanding the struggle for Black Studies. W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote that public education in the South was “a Negro idea,” and that’s not just a rhetorical flourish—it’s a historical fact. After emancipation, Black communities across the South organized one of the greatest literacy campaigns the world has ever seen. They pooled money, built schools, and hired teachers, often before the government would lift a finger.
Despite the violent backlash—over 600 Black schools were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan—Black people rebuilt, resisted, and refused to be denied education. Understanding that legacy reframes today’s attacks on Black Studies and honest education. These truthcrime laws are part of a long effort to erase Black agency and intellectual tradition. But we’ve seen this before—and history tells us that Black communities have never stopped fighting to teach and learn the truth.
CRS: In the introduction to a special issue of Souls commemorating the 50th anniversary of Black Studies, Jarvis Givens and Joshua Bennett wrote, “Black studies were not unprecedented in 1968. While Black Studies as a disciplinary formation was novel to the American academy, ‘its content and aim were not infant.’ This new meta-discipline, in and of itself, was built on the inheritance of a textual universe and repertoire of research protocols that were over one hundred years old. It was built on recovery and remembrance; getting right about the past in order to have some solid ground on which to stand for a future.” In my book, I show that segregation scholarship recipients literally remade the academy. Scholars such as Drs. Helen G. Edmonds and John Hope Franklin used the historians’ craft to not only vindicate the race, but to bear witness to the experiences and contributions of African-descended people. Dr. Jewel Prestage’s work made pollsters and political scientists take seriously African American women in politics. I mention these scholars because their work was pioneering in laying the groundwork for the kinds of work that Black Studies is known for today—modes of study and interrogation that resist anti-blackness.
BG: In the last chapter of my book, I document the reticence of what was then the New York City Board of Education (NYCBOE) to provide financial support for Harlem Prep to keep its doors open in the early 1970s. After nearly seven years of successfully sending over 750 students to college – youth had been pushed out of the public school system – Harlem Prep administrators, who had been wanting to merge with NYCBOE for years, desperately needed their financial help. Although the city’s education leaders eventually took Harlem Prep into the system, they only did so after being pressured by the Harlem community, prominent Black activists, and local political leaders. Yet, after NYCBOE integration, the school ceased to be the same institution it was when it was community-led by Ed and Ann Carpenter, schools’ husband-and-wife administrative team: the inflexible bureaucratic rules, negligence to address administrators’ concerns, and an overall lack of trust in allowing the Harlem community to continue leading the school, are lessons we can learn to not repeat today. City leaders have to trust community leaders, put aside their own preconceptions of what education should look like, and most of all, recognize that they have a responsibility to support the city’s marginalized youth, particularly Black youth in Harlem, who have experienced a century of disenfranchisement.
CBFS: Is there a campaign, event, or organization in the fight for Black education that gives you hope and that you’d like to uplift?
BJ: I see a connection between the educational activism of Black people and their allies during the radical phase of Reconstruction, and the educational activism of the Black Power movement. In both cases, we have to kind of wade through a morass of lies and misrepresentations to see what were, fundamentally, moments of self-determination and radical democratic experimentation. The young people who tried to build a Black Panther Party in Harlem in the summer of 1966 focused their efforts on education — calling for Black Studies and the hiring of more Black principals. Why? Because that’s what people in Harlem were already organizing for! The issue of education runs like a red thread throughout Black history — it’s everywhere you look. Pointing the leadership of Black people during Reconstruction in building and sustaining the first public schools in the South (and, arguably, given northern discrimination, the first truly public schools in the nation) the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois wrote that “Public education for all, at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea.” Recovering these moments of revolutionary change, when Black people aspired to, and in some cases wielded real power and used it to create new and expansively democratic projects, reveals a more accurate record of the past, and is helpful for broadening our sense of what’s possible in the future.
JH: The Black Lives Matter at School movement gives me deep hope. It began with a powerful day of action in Seattle, spread to Philadelphia where it became a week of action, and quickly grew into a national campaign involving thousands of educators organizing for racial justice in schools.
What makes BLM at School so powerful is how it connects the struggle for Black education to broader movements—for abolition, labor rights, gender justice, and Palestinian liberation—while offering concrete demands: end zero-tolerance discipline, mandate Black history, hire more Black educators, and fund counselors, not cops.
It’s a grassroots, educator-led movement grounded in love, resistance, and a vision of transformation. And it reminds us of a crucial truth: Black education has never just been about access to schools—it has always been about liberation.
CRS: I am hopeful that my work furthers present conversations about the real and great financial debt owed to public HBCUs. Not only have these institutions never been funded at levels equal to state flagship institutions, but also, border and southern state governments knowingly and willfully took badly needed resources from these schools. As I show in the book, many southern and border states paid for their segregation scholarship programs by taking money out of their already underfunded public Black colleges. Said another way, these states robbed Peter to pay Paul and in doing so, legislators placed the burden of financing segregation on already cash-strapped public Black colleges. Today, many of these historically Black public universities find themselves in financial crises not of their own making. In 2023, the Biden Administration confirmed this when it found that states had underfunded their Black land-grant institutions by billions of dollars! When we add the segregation scholarship money taken from these universities from the 1930s until the 1960s, the debt is much larger. It is past time for southern and border state governments to correct the financial harm inflicted on public HBCUs and I hope that conversations continue about ways to recoup the debts owed.
BG: One new non-profit organization – started by a lifelong educator and Harlemite, Veronica Holly, who has graciously dedicated her life to supporting young people – that I would like to uplift and gives me hope is The Urban Bloom Project, Inc. This organization has four main pillars: one, to increase awareness of the importance of early childhood education, special education, and parent education; two, to support youth and young adults transitioning from foster care to independent living with wraparound services, including academic coaching and life skills development; three, to provide a national network of resources for college-bound students, academic tutoring, and career readiness support for those not attending college; and four, to promote adult health awareness and emotional well-being, especially during times of crisis. The Urban Bloom Project, Inc., seeks to reach Black parents in particular, and at a time of misinformation and disinvestment, this project wants to make sure that every child individual has the resources to thrive and blossom throughout all the stages of their life. What I love about this organization is that it is led by someone who has spent a career in education, working mostly with Black youth, and approaches this mission from an educator’s point of view and an educator’s passion.
AUTHOR BIOS
Brian P. Jones is an American educator, scholar, activist, and actor. He is the inaugural director of the Center for Educators and Schools of The New York Public Library, and formerly the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he was also a scholar in residence. Jones earned a PhD in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center and has contributed to several books on issues of racism, inequality, and Black education history, most recently to Black Lives Matter At School: An Uprising for Educational Justice. He is the author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History (NYU Press Black Power Series) and Black History Is for Everyone(Haymarket Books).
Jesse Hagopian is a high school teacher in Seattle and has taught for over a decade at Garfield High School–the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test in 2013. Jesse is an editor for the social justice periodical Rethinking Schools, is the co-editor of the books, Black Lives Matter at School and Teaching for Black Lives, and is the editor of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. Jesse serves as the Director of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award, is an organizer with the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and is founding member of Social Equity Educators (SEE).
Jesse is an activist, public speaker, and a contributing author to 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History, Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Haymarket Books), and Why We Teach Now (Teachers College Press). Jesse’s essay on the MAP test boycott and the ensuing national uprising against high-stakes testing was published in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s 10th anniversary edition of Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Jesse’s commentary has been featured on many local and national news programs including, HBO’s “Problem Areas” with Wyatt Cenac, NBC’s “Education Nation,” and The PBS News Hour with Gwen Ifill. Jesse’s writings on education, the Black Lives Matter movement, Haiti, Palestine, and US politics, have been published at the Black Agenda Report, The Progressive, Alternet, and the National Education Association’s Education Votes blog.
Jesse is the recipient of the 2019 “Racial Justice Teacher of the Year” from the NAACP Youth Coalition and the “Social Justice Teacher of the Year” award from Seattle Public School’s Department of Racial Equity. In 2015, Jesse received the Seattle/King County NAACP Service Award, was named as an Education Fellow to The Progressive magazine, as well as a “Cultural Freedom Fellow” for the Lannan Foundation for his nationally recognized work in promoting critical thinking and opposing high-stakes testing.
Jesse is a graduate of Seattle’s Garfield High School and Macalester College, and obtained his Master’s degree in teaching at the University of Washington.
Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Black Women’s History, Civil Rights History, and the History of Black Education. Professor Sanders is the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle and A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs. A Chance for Change won the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association and the 2017 New Scholar’s Book Award from Division F of the American Educational Research Association. Professor Sanders’ work can also be found in many of the leading history journals, including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History.
Professor Sanders is the recipient of a host of fellowships and prizes and currently serves on the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and as the Assistant Editor of the Journal of African American History.
Barry Goldenberg is currently a Lecturer of Education Sciences at the University of California, Irvine and Faculty Affiliate at the Gordon Institute for Advanced Study at Teachers College, Columbia University. As a historian of education by training, Goldenberg’s research explores the history of multicultural education, community schools, and alternative education during the civil rights era. These interests comprise the source of his book, Strength through Diversity: Harlem Prep and the Rise of Multiculturalism, published by Rutgers University Press.
Barry also has experience working in K-12 schools exploring the teaching of history and broader contemporary pedagogical frameworks in secondary social studies classrooms. His work is deeply intertwined with the belief that scholars should work to bridge the gap between the academy and the communities we research. Goldenberg’s previousYouth Historians in Harlem (YHH) project explored these boundaries. He believes firmly in the brilliance of our youth — and always center his research around the idea that we underestimate their enormous, untapped potential.
Digging deeper, however, Barry hopes to be more than these academic confines, shaped by his varied life experiences living and learning in St. Louis, South Africa, New York City, and in Los Angeles. He is a proud first-generation scholar who is the first in his family to receive a 4-year degree, and care deeply about similarly helping his students access — and succeed in — higher education.
Lucien Baskin is a doctoral student in Urban Education at the Grad Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. Their dissertation focuses on histories of solidarity and organizing at CUNY. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, are an inaugural Freedom and Justice Institute fellow at Scholars for Social Justice, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. They organize with Graduate Center for Palestine and are a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.