okay we're going to go ahead and get started i know we have a online zoom room and they are eagerly anticipating our arrival so good afternoon everyone um i want to thank you all so much for being with us this afternoon this evening my name is mahasan cheney i am an assistant professor of education here at brown and as part of our programming committee i want to welcome you all to our first talk of the spring semester and one that is uh particularly fitting as we wrap up the final days of black history month and uh gain a little bit more insight on carter g woodson the father of black history so i'll say a few words first about the goals that we have in building up our programmatic offerings this semester so a primary goal of this series of book talks is to of course highlight and celebrate new works that enliven and bring new ideas to the field of education but second and relatedly we want to share through these talks the strengths that come from and through interdisciplinary field of education so this interdisciplinary force is also reflected within our faculty in the education department and the interests of our deeply engaged students and concentrators and so to build off this we know that as education researchers there are indeed many ways of seeing here i'm citing a 1976 essay by famed education historian david tyack who observed that the alternative ways of seeing not only draw on different kinds of evidence but also draw our attention to different levels of social reality and in doing so aid us in gaining a wider and more accurate perception of the past and i might add to this when applied to contemporary scholarship that these varying approaches allow us to look deeper at pressing matters that contribute to our understanding the complexities the promises and the perils of public education so we are confident that this series of speakers have and will provide both a wider perception of education's promise by taking us through [Music] first these deeper dives from various approaches to understanding the world of education so we are committed to taking seriously also and looking critically in exploring various tools that shine light on pressing questions of race and the legacies of racism in education and that remain really endemic to how we think about schooling and research around schools so last fall we hosted a successful book talk with our own professor andrea flores whose book the succeeders provides an anthropological look that captures the everyday experiences of latino high school students in the college access programs the succeeders and we learned from professor flores how the students she worked with leveraged educational success towards national uh building and through the eyes of latinos latino students challenge dominant narratives of success belonging and also challenge these individual tropes of american the american dream um and so before we get to the primary reason we are here today i want to just plug in a few more events and talks that we'll be hosting so or are participating in so next friday afternoon we are really happy to be joining the center for the study of race and ethnicity um for a two for part two of a two-part series um panel discussion uh entitled critical conversations race education and inequality um and next week i will be joined by professor john diamond david rendell and no leeway rooks so please join us next friday for that conversation um and lastly we hope that you all will consider joining us in april for uh a talk with sociologists natasha waraku whose work sits alongside increasing calls for educational researchers to consider the role of race within suburban school context and she'll be presenting work from her upcoming book race at the top asian americans and whites in pursuit of the american dream in suburban schools and we also hear that there may be advanced copies available so if you're interested please come to that event as well and you'll hear more um about that coming up um and so now to wrap all this together and return for the reason why we're here um this evening we will be hearing from professor jarvis givens whose work contributes to our wide breadth of education understanding by bringing in the strength of archival and historical research and african american studies and in ways that allow us to ask questions about the traditions of of black education and black educators uh the deep care they bring to their work uh their expansive networks and their fugitive pedagogy again that may allow us to reflect on the past with new ways of seeing yet we are also as a department really proud to be training educators and educational or urban education practitioners um and so uh we are um you know really looking forward to thinking more about the ways we as a department and training teachers and education practitioners may be tasked with this very particular historical moment and one that is really not an easy moment to be living in and teaching within for any number of reasons um and so these questions that professor gibbons is going to raise these questions about sub um fugitivity um how to be subversive in our teaching practice uh we hope that uh we'll kind of shed light on our own teaching practice our own theoretical and historical insights and hopefully will help us reflect upon and raise questions that provide additional ways of envisioning our own teaching and pedagogical practice so without further ado it is with much appreciation that i'd like to um first before welcoming professor gibbons welcome our own professor tracy stephens um professor professor stephens has taken some time away from her own book project to be with us here today and so she so generously offered to do the introduction and we're so happy to have her here and so if you all will please join me in giving a round of applause to tracy stephens and we also look forward to hosting your book talk soon okay so thank you [Applause] it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker today professor jarvis givens assistant professor in the harvard graduate school of education and faculty affiliate affiliate in harvard's department of african and african american studies professor gibbons is a graduate of the university of california at berkeley where he received a bs in business administration and an m.a and phd in african-american studies his research explores the history of u.s education african-american history and the black intellectual history through the study of black education teachers and pedagogy writ large in 2018 he co-edited a book we dare say love supporting achievement and the educational life of black boys with nali nazir and christopher chademon about the african-american male achievement initiative and the oakland unified school district and he's published several peer-reviewed journal articles on black education black educators care and protection of black children he's currently at work on a number of impressive projects he's working on the black teachers archive with imani perry supported by a melon foundation grant which is creating a digital repository to preserve the century-long history of the colored teachers associations he's working on new edition edited versions of and introductions to booker t washington's up from slavery and carter g woodson's the miseducation of the negro both of which are set to come out this year as part of series with w.w norton and company and penguin random house respectively he also has a forthcoming book with beacon press called school clothes a collective memoir of black student witness which is first-hand accounts of black student experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries and he also has a book in progress and under contract with harvard university press called american grammar slavery settler colonialism and the racial life of schooling a new origin story of american education that locates it in the relationship between indigenous white and black schooling in the 19th century these are exciting new projects that flow from and build on the insights and contributions of the book that we're going to hear about today fugitive pedagogy carter g woodson and the art of black teaching which was just published by harvard university press last year in 2021 this new soul authored monograph just won the book prize from the association for the study of african-american life in history which is undoubtedly the first of many awards to come fugitive pedagogy offers a new assessment of carter woodson's influences work and legacy while also using him as a lens to into what professor gibbons calls the expansive but veiled networked black education world it builds on a rich body of scholarship on southern black education reform during slavery reconstruction and the jim crow eras that has explored these eras as that has explored black education as a site of political resistance of striving for freedom of protracted conflicts over southern economy and politics and of white supremacy and domination givens draws from this work and pushes it in new directions offering what he calls both a new meta-narrative and new analytic for understanding the history of black education during this period and beyond and the idea of fugitive pedagogy fugitive pedagogy draws from double meanings of fugitivity within the african-american intellectual tradition to represent both confinement and the fight against confinement to center both the constraints and oppression of anti-black domination while also charting efforts to resist and subvert it professor gibbons emphasizes the ways that the very act of education itself of asserting the educability of black people amidst the criminalization of literacy under slavery and the surveilled school settings and aggressive structural neglect after it as a political subversive act and he explores how black teachers engaged in calculated acts of resistance to counter the oppressive conditions and messages of white supremacy and racial capitalism using a toolkit of practices to advance learning experiences of joy and empowerment consequently professor gibbons offers several provocations to the field of the history of education ideas that i think are going to generate really important and productive conversations in the field and which are already pushing me to rethink how i teach and think about this history first his work shows the importance of the experiences and continuities and black education strategies under slavery and in its afterlife and the importance of framing this as something more robust and more political than a striving for freedom although that's certainly part of the story second the frame of fugitivity is an analytical frame and a narrative to replace resistance and or domination by combining and focusing on the critical dynamic between them third his work recovers some of the subversive educational acts tools and ideas and centers the black education experience while doing so and it pushes us to do the same which is going to require continued creativity and piecing together this story from fragmentary suppressed and deliberately hidden set of sources and finally his work raises really productive and important questions about the ways and extent to which the subversive education strategies of fugitive pedagogy survived adapted and shaped black education after the legal end of jim crow professor gibbons points to the creation of black studies as one legacy but i suspect there are additional productive ways to think about and trace in more recent history and contemporary impact of the story that he tells here so i look forward to seeing how this terrific book is going to reshape the conversations in my field of history of education and i really look forward to hearing professor gibbons talk about it right now so without further ado please help me in welcoming professor jarvis gibbons [Applause] all right uh well thank you so much for the very kind uh generous introduction um uh maha and tracy i'm super excited to be here today to share a bit about my work with you all um and i must say before i get started though that it feels really good to be able to be here and to share this work in this room with you all but also because my really good friend mahasan cheney who's a professor here has been a kind of a part of the process as i was working and developing this uh book from the time we were undergrads both at uc berkeley studying for finals getting trapped in elevators at the library cramming the right papers but then you know applying the graduate school together and then also being friends and colleagues and thought partners during the graduate school process so it feels good to be here for those reasons but i also have to say um because you know uh professor leeway rooks uh who i haven't had the opportunity to talk and get to know a lot personally but actually my first year of graduate school i didn't go to school to graduate school to study education but one of the books that was really important for me was white money black power as a as a student in african american studies and reading that text um and the kind of beginning of me thinking about the kind of structural context that black education whether it be african-american studies or this longer history was situated in but that book was very important and transformative for me so it looked it feels good to see you in the audience as well um so i'm excited to get to this talk the fugitive life of black teaching a history of pedagogy and power um but before i get to the specifics of the talk and about the book i want to tell you a little bit about the process of me getting uh to that point so i encountered a problem as a uc berkeley doctoral student that will forever alter the trajectory of my research on education power and black life a footnote about carter g woodson's textbooks published between 1922 and 1950 and their wide circulation among black teachers posed a narrative problem it challenged the impoverished framing of a history told and retold about african american schooling before brown v board of education in 1954 and the rolling out of desegregation the idea of african-american school schoolteachers writing textbooks about black life and culture went against the grain of the dominant narratives in public memory and to be honest a large part of the academic scholarship on the subject as well where i'm sure many of us are familiar with the iconic stories of separate and unequal images of dilapidated negro school buildings and thorough documentation of white educational authorities aggressive neglect of black teachers and students now to be clear this history of violent educational inequity is an immutable fact however such institutional and ideological histories reveal only part of the story they document much about anti-black persecution in american schooling but very little to remember the role education played in black spiritual strivings they fail to remember the art of black teaching a legacy represented by those very textbooks published by carter g woodson and then subversively taken up and put into practice by black educators and what's more the counter narratives found in textbooks written by black teachers were only one piece of a more expansive plot against anti-black protocols in the american school so now that i've said a little bit to talk about this kind of narratives in the kind of scholarship that i was interested in kind of writing against or or speaking back to or expanding uh the lens on i want to turn to the opening scenario of my book to then begin unpacking more about what i'm offering in this text tessie mcgee read to her class in a steady measured tone quietly engaging in a calculated act of subversion she was black 28 years old and taught history in 1933 at the only black secondary school in webster parish louisiana the all-white department of education and local school board gave clear instructions teachers were to keep the pre-approved outline openly displayed on their desks which they were to follow closely to acquaint their students with the targeted learning objectives black educators and families in webster parish had little formal control over curriculum yet on many occasions miss mcgee made what she deemed to be necessary revisions to the mandatory curriculum based on her own judgment and perhaps at the recommendation of fellow black teachers she often read passages from carter g woodson's book on the negro which rested comfortably in her lap she kept the textbook out of sight understanding that if she were to be caught she would be vulnerable to the disciplinary practices of jim crow authorities but she was undeterred one of mcgee's students from that year recounted quote she read to us from that book when the principal would come in she would simply lift her eyes to the outline that resided on the desk and began teaching us from the outline when the principal disappeared her eyes went back to the book in her lap end quote tessie mcgee's method of instruction constitutes a textbook example of what i am calling fugitive pedagogy fugitive pedagogy consists of african-americans physical and intellectual acts that explicitly challenged anti-black protocols of educational domination actions that often took place in discrete or partially concealed fashion my use of the term fugitive draws inspiration from the literary scholar stephen bess and cydia hartman's discussion of what they call fugitive justice where they introduce the idea of two competing narratives of the fugitive's identity fugitive connotes the dual image of one who escapes enslavement or jailed confinement which justifies his capture even death at the hands of law enforcement yet as best and hartman explain the violence of enslavement and legal capture engenders as well the countervailing narrative of and by the fugitive as victim of anti-black domination and we find parallel equally competing historical images when adapting this concept to american education the dominant story of the nation's past had long vilified devalued and disrespected black people thereby justifying their persecution in various forms enslavement disenfranchisement and imprisonment this violent reality and the hypocrisy it exposed about the nation prompted a counter-historical narrative and way of knowing indeed one represented in the extensive factual evidence contained in carter g woodson's textbooks wearing the mask as the poet paul lawrence dunbar called it had long been part and parcel of black teachers professional disposition tessie mcgee's concealed lesson plan rejected the degrading representations of black life in school curricula and such refusal manifested in physical form mcgee's public display of the official outline was a masked performance of complicity an embodied text that accompanied the subversive and spoken content of her lesson mcgee's physical act of switching texts also communicated important messages to her students demonstrating how defiance could at times be disguised by public performances of deference to the coercive regime of school authorities so now for the remainder of my time i want to look closer at three aspects of this particular scenario i've just shared the teachers the textbooks and the students i'll offer a closer reading of teachers like miss mcgee and their efforts to disrupt anti-black protocols in education and then how woodson's textbooks built on an expansive intellectual tradition in the heritage of black education and finally the students who bore witness to their teachers fugitive practice leaving a record of it to be studied in the future the teachers teachers like ms mcgee gained access to alternative scripts of knowledge through what the sociologist aldon morris has called insurgent intellectual networks these were institutions like carter g woodson's association for the study of negro life and history which he founded in 1915 while working as a school teacher but also black teacher associations such organizations comprised a veiled yet networked black educational world one where black americans said one thing but often did another given rampant anti-black violence the true political intentions informing black teaching were rarely on full display african americans responded often in quiet calculated acts of resistance against oppressive school settings that reflected a world order built on black subjection and fugitive pedagogy was a collective endeavor even when manifesting as these individual acts of practice for example the principal entering miss mcgee's classroom was a black man named j.l jones records suggest that principal jones supported the inclusion of black history and culture at webster parish he was a leading member in the louisiana color teachers association which had explicitly endorsed carter g woodson and his work by the 1930s and we know that woodson regularly appeared on programs at the annual meetings of black teacher associations at both the state and national level in the documents that you see on the screen one is of carter g woodson's life membership in the national black teacher organization but also a newspaper clipping one of many newspaper clippings where we see woodson appearing at these annual meetings that black teachers hosted this is one is from tennessee but we have evidence of him also being in in louisiana and all the states across the south as well and in many northern places as well so given this context it is not implausible then to consider that principal jones and miss mcgee may have very likely conspired together the principal testing the teacher to ensure she could protect herself and the school if a white official entered the room the intrusion of white surveillance had a hand in shaping school ecology it was not atypical for white people to drop by unannounced during the school day either to show off their negro school to visitors or for some routine inspection such visits were primarily met to demonstrate power which was essential to reproducing domination so this is all to say the person walking into mcgee's classroom could just as easily have been a white school official black educators walked a tight rope when challenging such oppressive schooling contacts because if they were to fall or be caught there was no safety net to catch them in fact just a few years prior the white school board in muskogee oklahoma which was heavily influenced by the ku klux klan i should say they had learned that carter g woodson's textbook was being used in the local black high school the books were confiscated teachers were reprimanded and the principal was threatened and forced to resign and after reading the textbook the school board quote expressed horror and surprise that such a work should have crept into our negro schools they wrote and they went on to assure their white constituents that they would be more vigilant moving forward stating quote we must not take in teachers who will create discord by teaching isms of any sort end quote and examples of this kind of violent oversight are plentiful and they move forward and backwards in time as far as black teachers are concerned african-american educators were routinely targeted and fired for challenging white authority some notable examples being ida b wells who was fired as a teacher in memphis tennessee in the 1890s john w davison who was fired in georgia in the early 20th century and i should say for teaching latin not for teaching african american history but also anna julia cooper who was demoted as the principal of the m street school in the early 20th century in dc and of course the iconic case of september clark who was fired in south carolina and yet some teachers lost more than their jobs harry and harriet moore were fired in 1946 and later killed when their home was bombed in memphis florida black teachers awareness of such stories prompted them at times to conceal their pedagogical objectives in the presence of intrusive white power subjection to surveillance and violence motivated by no causal logic whatsoever was a fact of blackness african american educators developed strategies to contest this reality which ranged from building institutions to advocate for their interests down to things that they did at the interpersonal and psychic levels so fugitivity and its historical reference holds in place the realities of constraint and african americans straining against sad confinement it is careful not to overstate one or the other and as the poet fred moden aptly notes escape is an activity not an achievement the possible threat of recapture always lingered escape was unresolved and uncertain and black teachers carried intimate knowledge of such precarity so now the textbooks so as previously mentioned my interest in the historical framings of black education began with the textbook i might come across that reference to woodson's textbooks one of which you see pictured on the screen being read by a group of junior high students in new orleans in the 1930s i was aware that woodson played a central role in african american studies as the second black person to receive a phd from harvard in 1912 and as the founder of negro history week in 1926 which of course we celebrate today as black history month but even with this prior knowledge i was shocked to learn about the size of his impact on educational practice during jim crow in the private spaces of black teachers classrooms while most accounts emphasize woodson's role as a historian and some of you may have heard him refer to as the father of black history much less have been written about woodson's near 30-year career as a public school teacher and what intrigued me most about woodson's textbooks as well as those written by black school teachers before him was their extensive commemoration of fugitive slaves and black fugitive life as early as 1890 we find black educators writing textbooks filled with heroic narratives about enslaved blacks who absconded from plantations those who led slave revolts stories about black maroon communities in the dismal swamps of virginia suriname brazil and jamaica but that's not all the fugitive slave emerged as a folk hero a cultural symbol and curriculum developed by these educators the fugitive slave also appeared in school naming practices and commemorative ceremonies in school activities so i'm sharing all of this just to um to create this kind of context to share that it was these observations that prompted my initial reliance on the fugitive slave archetype and on fugitive pedagogy as a theory and practice of black educational life in the united states and so this is to say the term is much much more than just some elaborate metaphor but it's naming a phenomenon that surfaced in the archival record at multiple levels and what's more the concept is drawing a narrative line from those practices of enslaved black people who defied anti-literacy laws which criminalize black education to the actions of black teachers like tessie mcgee and the post-emancipation period right so the language of fugitive pedagogy is offering this kind of continuum for us to think about these subversive politics of black education that cut across these time periods and furthermore it was clarifying to learn that the very first black author textbooks were actually written by fugitive slaves james w c pennington an escaped slave from maryland inaugurated this tradition in 1841. a textbook on the origins and history of the colored people represents the beginning of a formalized practice of black people striving to rewrite the epistemological order the fugitive slave william wells brown also wrote a textbook in 1863 so as the 19th century witnessed the proliferation of black newspapers journals and various other forms of black print culture textbooks became tools not only of the masters but also of the fugitive slave such counter readings of the world carried over to carter g woodson's theorizing about black education in his iconic text the miseducation of the negro woodson wrote quote starting out after the civil war the opponents of freedom and social justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the negro's mind and as much as the freedom of body had to be conceded end quote so here woodson suggests that the political conflicts at the core of black education were fundamentally linked to the legacies and social technologies of enslavement and in his first textbook the negro in our history he offers the following how some of these slaves learned in spite of opposition makes a beautiful story knowing the value of learning as a means of escape and having longing for it too because it was forbidden many slaves continued their education under adverse circumstances so what's in name the entanglement of violent white opposition and the enslaved people's steady practice of learning as a means of escape offering this as a generative lesson for black teachers and students during jim crow because indeed this was the origin story that framed what was politically at stake in their teaching and learning at its highest calling black education continued to be a stealing away from and refusal of the american school's official protocols and curricula and so now i want to say just something very briefly about the official curriculum that tessie mcgee was supposed to follow right and so we're able to learn about what that official outline and what the official curriculum was by going to the public school records from louisiana from the 1930s which was a textbook adoption state by the 1930s and then identifying what those texts were and then going and looking at them right i'm not going to go in depth about what these textbooks from the 1930s in louisiana said suffice it to say that they rendered distorted representations of black life but i'll give you just one brief example from um from the 10th grade textbook which was called modern times and the living past by henry elsin so in the first chapter elsin writes quote not only are almost all the civilized nations of today of the white race but throughout all the historic ages this race has taken the lead and has been foremost in the world's progress end quote he then explains that quote almost the entire book will be devoted to the doings of the caucasian race or more specifically at least nine tenths of the book must be given to an account of the indo-european branch of the race as the indo-europeans have dominated the world for the past 2 500 years in quote so based on louisiana's adopted curriculum tessie mcgee and her students were narratively condemned to borrow from the black study scholar sylvia winter it deemed them to be of no human concern so while we are unaware of the exact passages ms mcgee may have been reading from carter g woodson's textbooks we at least know what she was negating and woodson worked fervently from his office at 1538 9th street northwest in the historic shaw district in washington dc woodson lived worked and died in this building and it's from this post that he responded personally to letters written by individual teachers some writing him with historical questions others inquiring in hush tones about how they might strategically work to challenge curriculum standards on a local level woodson and his very small staff mailed textbooks to individual teachers in schools across the country they packaged negro history kits by hand and they shipped off decorative materials for teachers to use in refashioning their classrooms and interestingly enough woodson's educational program expanded most dramatically during the depression years because after developing an unfavorable reputation among white philanthropists he would come to rely on the black masses to support his association for the study of negro life in history and it's important to emphasize that black teachers were at the forefront of this cause woodson charged that the reconstitution of knowledge was a critical step in challenging violent assault against black humanity he professed quote there would be no lynching if it did not start in the school room end quote woodson often named this schoolroom lynching duality because it highlighted what was fundamentally at stake education was not just about vocational trades developing more african american professionals or bourgeois performances of citizenship it was about insisting on black social and political life as opposed to death it meant making legible the social disfiguring of black humanity that whiteness demands for its propping up then refusing it through counter readings of both the word and world pending radical reformation of the american school woodson urged educators to perform bold acts of defiance and so now i want to say a bit about the students black students were always watching to elevate the significance of tessie mcgee's fugitive pedagogy i want to invert the scenario and draw your attention to the student as witness the sixteen-year-old jerry moore who took note of ms mcgee as she removed her mask of compliance documenting how quote her eyes went back to the book in her lap in recounting this one gesture by his teacher jerry moore revealed how what was seen heard and felt in black classrooms all affected what students learned education extended far beyond what was uttered or written they learned from the value systems that shaped school routines and the actions of their teachers all the while students were watching them witnessing we find black students insisting that they have always been more than mere objects of history but instead its subjects angela davis was born in birmingham alabama in 1944 the scholar and activist recalled that quote woodson's negro history week was the highlight of our year end quote during these commemorative weeks teachers instructed students to quote slam shut and cast aside those books that did their best to persuade us that our ancestors were much better off during slavery than they would have been had they remained in africa end quote davis and her schoolmates were then allowed to quote rely on our own ability to produce knowledge about the conditions surrounding our lives in quote students engaged in a shared critique in their of the white curriculum and they're casting it aside more than a captive audience black students were active participants dissident learners participating in a tradition of fugitive pedagogy davis recalled encountering a photo of harriet tubman and she states nostalgically quote i remember i always visualized harriet tubman as my grandmother i thought my grandmother bore this striking resemblance to her and that still remains with me to this day end quote tupman's picture inspired davis not only because it shared some likeness with her grandmother or because of the implications it had for her own raised and gendered body but also because of the scripts accompanying the image of this fugitive slave according to davis her teachers always emphasized how quote harriet tubman helped more of those slaves to gain their freedom than any of the other conductors on the underground railroad end quote in writing about her student experiences in birmingham davis also bore witness to the vulnerability of her teachers she described belittling actions of white visitors and school authorities writing quote when these white assaults were staged i tried to decipher the emotions on the teacher's face acquiescence obsequiousness defiance or the pain of realizing that if she did fight back she would surely lose her job in quote undergirding these experiences was a shared vulnerability between teachers and students and davis gives language to this when we're calling the racialized violence in birmingham during her childhood she recalled the sounds of bombs exploding across the street from her home as well as her mother having been the teacher to one of the young girls killed in the bombing of 16th street baptist church such events reflected the perpetual threat students teachers and communities had to reckon with both in and outside of the classroom the shared vulnerability of black teachers and students prompted shared action jerry moore recognized this in miss mcgee's classroom as her lesson plan switched with the turning of a doorknob angela davis recounted the intellectual partnership between teachers and students as they engaged in a shared critique of the american curriculum such moments hinged on a fugitive reading practice of the known world congressman john lewis offered similar narratives when recalling quote the unbelievable teachers in troy alabama he states he goes on to explain quote when i was a little child growing up in rural alabama a short walk to the cotton fields my teachers would tell us to cut out photographs and pictures of great african americans for carter g woodson's negro history week end quote and he states that it was these same teachers that discreetly informed him and his classmates about the civil rights protests and boycotts taking place in cities like montgomery just a few miles away and the transcript of students bearing witness to fugitive pedagogy goes far and wide in 1929 a student at the national training school for women and girls explained the following in her school yearbook quote this school teaches history and negro history and the students are tremendously inspired by learning the truth about their own race dr carter g woodson's books are used as the text here and we have a room a real library if you please set apart for the study of negro life in history end quote and then a few pages later the training school students celebrated one of their peers catherine allen for being outspoken against matters of racial injustice having been inspired by their lessons in negro history allen became a race agitator as her classmates called her in fact quote many race agitators have been discovered and miss allen a senior is sure to become another surgeon the truth end quote the student celebrated the young activists in the making and the fugitive slave reappears as a folk hero sojourner truth having been featured as her own superlative category for students like angela davis john lewis and the training school girls their teachers fugitive pedagogy allowed them to situate themselves in a continuum of consciousness they were taught to aspire to be part of a tradition of black people who disrupted an anti-black social order these scenarios scattered across time and place were not sporadic unplanned events or mere infra politics they reflect coordinated efforts on the part of black educators fugitive pedagogy in the classroom was a dress rehearsal student active participation in the subversive politics of black education anticipated and prefigured their active involvement in the civil rights and black power movements on the horizon not to mention their demands for black studies in colleges and universities resistance was omnipresent in many black segregated classrooms contrary to popular assumptions black educators promoted that resistance in the minds of their students and it built up over time and culminated in the modern black freedom struggle their pedagogy was like a river and it moved through the lives of their students it ebbed and flowed took unexpected turns but always continued in the direction of a new world i look to black teachers of the past whose fugitive acts i believe can teach us much about the future they represent a tradition that has been plundered from today's black educators who are its rightful inheritors and yet all who are committed to critical pedagogy or anti-racist teaching as the term has recently become popularized might draw inspiration from their legacy i see the cast of characters in my book as standard bearers a tradition passed through these teachers and their students and their heritage is one worthy of both praise and deep study thank you [Applause]