"Move On Up" was recorded by Curtis Mayfield for his 1970 album, Curtis, and is considered THE hallmark of his style: inspirational racial messaging, classic soul music styling, the crooning of that iconic falsetto, and the imprinting of Gospel roots. For those unfamiliar with Mayfield, this song might still feel and sound familiar from season four of HBO's "The Wire" and/or Kanye West's “Touch the Sky.” In this theme, we look to Curtis Mayfield to remind us that Black culture is Black protest, and that Black protest is also aesthetically imbued.
Student protest has been front and center in changing schools and universities and yet young people are often written out of the equation. Black college students themselves have been the ones to pave the way for the desegregation of higher education in the United States. Any history that leaves them out is a half-truth.
Issues To Familiarize Yourself with/ Watch as Much as You Like:
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"From the Mississippi Freedom Schools to the Black Campus Movements" turns to Black college students and their history of challenging and revising every fabric of higher education and racist sociality. The title brings together two important social movements and philosophies. We start with the summer of 1964 when forty-one Freedom Schools opened in churches, on back porches, and in every hidey space of Mississippi. The organizers and teachers were volunteers, college students across the country organized by SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). With little money and few supplies, Freedom School teachers set out to help Black Mississippians pass literacy tests in order to vote and, in so doing, designed the most progressive curriculum and instruction in civics education ever seen before. The Freedom Schools were the center of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project (called Freedom Summer) that rocked Mississippi to its core as the then bastion of 20th century white supremacy. We will bookend Freedom Schools with a critical (and much too ignored) book from Ibram Kendi--- The Black Campus Movement : Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. While very few in power actually acknowledge the impact and awe of Black student organizing, they certainly expend a lot of their energy and power in repressing Black youth. Let's see, hear, and feel why!
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If you want/need a break from analog texts, watch this one-hour lecture from Kendi instead. |
What We're Reading... MANDATORY: Chapter four-- “'March That Won’t Turn Around”': Formation and Development of the Black Campus Movement" from The Black Campus Movement : Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 by Ibram Kendi ----AND ------- "60 Years Later, Freedom Schools Are Still Radical—and Necessary" by Jon Hale for TIME magazine And choose one reading from below:
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Our Black |
Coming of Age in Mississippi
by Anne Moody Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson The Making of Black Revolutionaries by James Forman Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Bob Moses |
