Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Freedom Struggle

To examine how analyses and visions of American society shape the appeal of progressive pedagogy, this article focuses on the evolution of political and educational ideas among African-American civil rights activists who created alternative schools for Black children in the 1960s and 1970s. Activists developed, abandoned, recreated, and again abandoned open-ended, progressive approaches to the study of social and political life. The curricular shifts mirrored sea changes in the broader African-American freedom struggle. Rarely have Americans demanded with such insistence that education serve democratic purposes. The article concludes that support for progressive pedagogy depends on the expectation that students will be able to participate fully in the promise of civic life. The history of the freedom and liberation schools developed by Black activists suggests 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.