As we write this paper in late 2023, Advanced Placement (AP) Black history, psychology courses and the use of diverse literature written for children and young adults is being banned by many school districts across the United States. Educators are being threatened, sanctioned, reprimanded, and fired. Despite this, some teachers stand steadfast in…

While there are many studies which examine the symbiotic relationship between schools and prisons, there are very few studies which center the voices and unique perspectives of Black women educators who teach, collaborate with, and learn alongside incarcerated youth and adults. Therefore, this article focuses on our storied lives as three Black…

This article is a conversation with Juliet King, EdD, the AMS 2022 Living Legacy. Dr. King began her career in South Florida some five decades ago, teaching in Miami-Dade County when public schools were beginning to desegregate. She transferred to an inner-city school with a Title I Montessori program; this was her first introduction to the…

Given continuing myths and misconceptions in the media and in the nation's schools about the language many African American students use, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) believes the public deserves a statement reflective of the viewpoints of language and literacy scholars on Ebonics. The variety of Ebonics spoken by…

In this essay the author addresses the struggles of teaching a special topics course, Black Freedom Movement Education, in the midst of a global pandemic and Donald Trump's proposed ban on anti-racist training and critical race theory. The educator framed the course under the conceptual lens of stealin' the meetin'--a Black Antebellum practice of…

In this interview, Shirley Wilson Logan reflects on her major roles as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. She describes her journey as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, only one of a few black women to do so. Logan is also credited with launching the study of African American women's rhetoric as a field,…

Author Jane Anna Gordon begins this commentary by saying that early in her academic career she was struck by the dual character of schools as places that can damage and waste the human potential of some on one hand, and that can and should be put in the service of liberation on the other. She writes that this point was driven home to her through…

"May you live in interesting times," goes the saying, attributed to the Chinese, although the provenance is unproven. It is widely understood to be a curse, for which a loose translation could be: "May you experience disorder and trouble in your life." In this essay Christine Woyshner raises the issue of the "interesting…

In this essay, filmmaker and educator Caroline Stephenson tells how Hurricane Irene started her on a journey to make a documentary about Rosenwald Schools in her native Hertford County, North Carolina. After many years working as an assistant director in Los Angeles on films and television shows, Stephenson moved back to the family farm to raise…

Three years before his Nobel Prize, Dr. King shared his vision of non violence in a televised interview published in this article for the first time in print. King and his father both began their lives given the name "Michael" King. During a 1934 trip to Nazi Germany to attned the Baptist World Alliance Conference, the elder R. King…

In a time of alarm about the poisoning of electoral politics, public passions inflamed by sophisticated techniques of mass polarization, and fears that the country is losing control of its collective future, higher education is called upon to take leadership in "reinventing citizenship." It needs to respond to that call on a scale unprecedented in…

Black male students "are" endangered. As a high school language arts teacher who has taught in a predominantly African American school, the author has witnessed the suspensions, expulsions, and overrepresentation of black males in special education classes for more than 30 years. In "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of…

This article argues that African Americans, especially males living in urban areas, are physically and mentally trapped on a Devil's Island. The penal colony on the coast of French Guiana is a metaphor for the boundaries and constraints that close off opportunities and constrain African American historical knowledge. The article argues that…

On Armistice Day 1932, the Southern University Bushmen football team left Baton Rouge and traveled to Monroe, Louisiana to play the Tigers of Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute for the first time. Normal was far younger than Southern. It was a two-year junior college in the northeast cotton town of Grambling, and its football team was…

In 1983, when the author began graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as the only black student in the Graduate English School, it offered no graduate-level African-American Literature course. Today an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia can major in African-American and African Studies and take courses…