Independent Black Institutions and Rhetorical Literacy Education: A Unique Voice of Color

Black Rhetorical Literacy Education from the Majoritarian White Voice

Majoritarian historical and contemporary accounts of Black Americans’ place in American higher education literacy instruction are those that dismiss the legacy of educational endeavors initiated out of Black American communities. These endeavors often privilege Afrocentric ways of knowing, and because majoritarian stories often “generate from a legacy of racial privilege” (Solórzano and Yosso 28), those about literacy education “distor[t] and silenc[e] the experiences of people of color” (29). The majoritarian White voice speaking to the subject of Blacks in American higher education literacy generally imposes the narrative of the White savior. Yes, these tales say, Blacks had their own community-developed education outlets, but none were sufficient as systemic forms of academic learning. It was only when the mainstream White education system allowed Black Americans into predominantly White colleges that our rhetorical literacy education became adequate and relevant to American society.

This majoritarian historical and contemporary account of Black Americans’ place in literacy education is constructed from a whiteness-valued Eurocentric epistemological perspective. I draw this term from Black feminist intellectual activist Patricia Hill Collins, who defines the Eurocentric epistemological perspective as knowledge validation practices that honor or privilege Eurocentric cultural ways of being (253). Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams describe the consequences of excluding selected perspectives from the history of a discipline like composition studies. The Eurocentric narrative about Black Americans’ literacy instruction in higher education proclaims that, except for in a few anomalous cases, our curricular options were subpar until we were allowed to enter White-majority education sites in the 1960s (Brereton; Brubacher and Rudy; Miller; Thelin). Even though select Blacks accessed and succeeded in mainstream White American colleges and universities, most of the rhetorical purposes of literacy education were aimed at assimilating into mainstream, White-dominated society and culture.

John Seiler Brubacher and Willis Rudy imply that Black Americans, indigenous Americans, and Latinxs received vast changes to their higher educational opportunities with the implementation of affirmative action admissions policies in 1964 and open admissions in 1970 (78-79, 401). The authors deduce that the “threats to withhold federal funds … [to] institutions which were held to be too slow in implementing” affirmative action guidelines resulted in findings by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education that “many colleges and universities were being forced to lower their academic standards and to undermine the quality of their faculties because of the demands flowing from Affirmative Action programs” (79). In noting that Black Americans and other racial formation groups underrepresented in colleges and universities fell behind those of Asian descent in accessing higher education (401), the historical account fails to note that this gap existed within predominantly White institutions. John R. Thelin, by contrast, does include a partial history of historically Black American institutions of higher education. Although, in the discussion of predominantly White institutions, the inclusion of experiences of color remains in step with the majority of historical texts on the subject. Thelin’s approach of considering “key historical episodes that have enduring implications for colleges and universities” (Introduction) ignores, for instance, the inaugural graduation of Black American Richard Henry Green from Yale College in 1857 (JBHE Research Department). Nor does the historical record chronicle the impact of approximately forty Black students graduating from universities and colleges in the North or Lucy Ann Stanton’s certificate in literature from Oberlin College, the first Black American woman to receive such an honor (JBHE Research Department). These events are but a few that create a racial perspectives gap in how researchers historicize American higher education. I share them to show that the majoritarian White voice in historicizing rhetorical literacy education is but a product of a larger cultural phenomenon in college-level education.

Turning to literacy and composition histories in higher education institutions, the discipline has not fared much better in eliminating an absent presence of race (Prendergast) from how it historicizes the discipline in higher education. In the introduction of The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925, John Brereton notes that “the 1865 founding of Cornell University, a school which promised that anyone could learn anything there, was a sign that a determined philanthropist with enough money could influence the course of education” (8). This change led to the 1869 ascension of Charles W. Eliot as Harvard’s president and to the rise of modern English composition literacy instruction and practices. The year 1869 also marks the year that Massachusetts’s first Black American judge, George Lewis Ruffin, graduated from Harvard Law School. Brereton does not examine the role that admitting and educating Black Americans had in executing the new installation of composition.

Brereton’s goal for this collection is to “supply … all those interested in the history of English composition with some of the most significant documents in readily accessible form” (xii) by connecting theory to practice (xiv) through the central documents that compositionists of the time sourced (xv). Brereton acknowledges the limitations of focusing on the public record, because “a great deal of what we would now regard as postsecondary writing was done by … men and women . . . at historically black institutions,” and even as these marginalized institutions may have borrowed pedagogical and curricular methods and outcomes from majority White schools, “some students and some teachers asserted themselves in new and important ways” (xv-xvi). Although, the Introduction does remark that “[Black American] writers were forging a distinctive voice (or series of voices) in nineteenth-century America,” it additionally notes that Black students and faculty were still expected to perform discourses of whiteness (Inoue) in their writing practices (Brereton 21). In The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns, Thomas P. Miller narrates a history of college English studies, broader than composition studies but including composition and literacy studies. This historical record does make a few strides in acknowledging the presence of Black Americans in literacy instruction and its development in the American education system through the centuries. Similarly to the accounts reviewed thus far, Miller includes the cases of Black Americans in the development of English and literacy studies within the purview of Euro-American histories. These acknowledgements are significant, but their limitations represent yet another erasure of lived experiences from Black American students with literacy in the education system.

These tales about the arrival of Black Americans at historically White sites of higher education ignores the history of Black American-centric education in Black communities, constructing Eurocentric education as the ultimate key to social mobility for Black Americans. The result of these perspectives is that they construct histories that have “social, political, and cultural consequences” (Royster and Williams 563). The account of the Black American presence in composition studies that Royster and Williams present counters or revises the conventional Eurocentric epistemological perspectives of this presence. Drawing inspiration from the ways that Royster and Williams “counter mythologies about African American presence” in the history of composition studies (579), I aim to wield a unique voice of color to counter perspectives that emulate the “majoritarian racial privilege” within American rhetorical literacy education.

Independent Black institutions arose as a way for parents and community members to counter the hidden curriculum of White supremacy offered in traditional schools. Unlike these homeschool collectives and online sites of community learning, Citizenship Schools, Freedom Schools, and Black Panther Liberation Schools constituted more official sites of general education and literacy education for Black communities. Each offered its own counter-story to dominant narratives of literacy education histories. Lathan proclaims Citizenship Schools as “a chapter in the continuing struggle against the overwhelming justification for relegating black people to subhuman positions: the belief that they were, by and large, illiterate” (xiii). The literacy and political education of older community members became central to Civil-Rights-era Black American communities in the South and prompted the creation of Citizenship Schools in 1957 Tennessee. These counter-stories also provide a Black American perspective of the range of uses for rhetorical literacy education in community affairs. Along with Freedom Schools, Citizenship Schools developed within the Black communities and taught formal writing education to enhance citizenship practices as well as service to the community. Citizenship Schools created a unique voice of color to the White American education perspective “that Black students were capable of little learning” and in doing so developed a participatory student body where such an opportunity did not exist for these students before (Levine 37). A key goal of both Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools was to create more Black voters, particularly in the South in order to bring Black American interests and concerns to government representation.

Freedom Schools developed as a derivative of the civil rights goals established during Freedom Summer, 1964. ​The schools aligned with the overall Freedom Summer objective “[t]o create a truly representative political party [from] the vast majority of disempowered African Americans” by “develop[ing] the self confidence [sic] and organizational skills required of active citizens” (Emery, Braselmann, and Gold 5). Freedom Summer activists aimed to change the perception that registering to vote was something only White people did, believing their “main challenge was getting Black people to challenge themselves” (Cobb 70). The Freedom School model of education produced formal literacy education as a resource for preparing students for social action of multiple kinds, for example, to teach others and organize boycotts. The everyday reality of Black students that Freedom Schools aimed to upset included “[n]ew brick school buildings built to give the illusion of ‘separate but equal’ [but] contained virtually bookless libraries and science labs with no equipment” (Cobb 71) and teachers removing Black students from class for questioning about voting and organized freedom rides (67). Thus, one concern of Freedom Schools was to inspire students to brave their public-school classrooms to ask critical questions of their teachers (Cobb 67). Carmen Kynard suggests that this inspiration derived from the very racial oppression in the education system that created critically conscious and educated citizens to challenge that system (Vernacular 25). Part of the rhetorical literacy education of Freedom Schools included preparing students for participation within the mainstream education programs.

The Black Panther Party’s Liberation Schools built upon and enhanced the previously discussed models with a resolute political approach to the education of young Black Americans. Liberation Schools reflected a distinct connection between politics and pedagogy, an approach that counters the formative, universalist Eurocentric epistemological perspectives to keep politics out of the classroom. Like the Black Panther Party that developed the education program, these schools aimed to “chang[e] the way Black people were viewed in the public sphere, and in the process [they] changed the way Black people looked at themselves” (Pough 71). Its vision for creating young revolutionaries addresses Shirley Wilson Logan’s central question in “‘To Get an Education and Teach My People’: Rhetoric for Social Change,” which is “Rhetorical education for what?” (36) The rhetorical literacy education at Liberation Schools taught students the history of socio-political conventions including “racism, capitalism, fascism, cultural nationalism, and socialism” (Perlstein 262). Rather than teaching reading, writing, and other literacies as disconnected from social contexts, teachers urged students to confront and question the entire gamut of school-related practices (Perlstein 264), including the “Pledge of Allegiance.” Not unlike Freedom Schools, the educational system itself became a topic of study within Liberation Schools.

Citizenship, Freedom, and Liberation Schools’ educational models stem from critical moments in American history, where the literacy education of Black Americans was a source of either oppression or progression. Independent Black institutions are modern-day constructions of Afrocentric rhetorical literacy education representing a unique voice of color. With modern versions first established in the early 1970s, IBIs have gained increasing popularity over the last thirty years. These schools use an Afrocentric program of education to teach relevant curriculum and values to preschool through high school-aged students (Lomotey 455). They come in the form of “homeschool collectives” and “African-centered schools” (Changa)—or Afrikan-centered, as many practitioners prefer to spell the term, where they hold a more encompassing view of success than do mainstream schools (Lomotey 456). IBIs’ unique voice of color about the most effective curriculum to help Black Americans prepare for active community life can inform approaches for theorizing and teaching literacy in composition studies.

This counter-narrative to traditional rhetorical education practices responds to Kynard’s argument that “​when we have talked about understanding the social contexts of literacy, language, and discourse, … ​we have not done so from the perspectives of interrogating deep political and ideological shifts that have left structured inequalities and violence firmly in place, especially in reference to, but not solely based on, race” (“Literacy/Literacies,” 64) and Logan’s question “[r]hetorical education for what?” (“‘To Get an Education,’”36). It takes on Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams’s call for “a systematic commitment to resist the primacy of ‘officialized’ narratives” (582) about literacy education. They are able to uphold these approaches in part because “money to support IBIs comes directly from African American communities” (Bush 392). Such a financial model permits these institutions to “refrain from depending on outside financial support to prevent unwanted control and influence” (Bush 392).

Lawson Bush, Edward C. Bush. and Tonia Causey-Bush trace IBIs through a 10,000-year historical evolution through ancient African systematic apprenticeship education. These roots can be detected in modern iterations of IBIs, which include as part of student success “attitudes toward school and the nature of the relationships between school personnel, students, and families” (Lomotey 456). Community relations is a central aspect of IBIs. This community connection is embedded within the Afrocentric institutional philosophies. These philosophies originate from various principles based in African diasporic epistemological perspectives. IBIs privilege Afrocentric narratives of history and culture, which may be one of the reasons that their institutional histories, like those of their HBCU cousins, are absent from mainstream narratives about literacy education in America. These collectives of homeschool, virtual, and community-based education teach through an African-centered worldview, a perspective that conflicts with the perpetuation of Eurocentric ways of being of dominant rhetorical literacy education. Similar to indigenous American tribal community schools (Lee and McCarty), this unique voice of color rejects the notion that students are best rhetorically prepared for society when they learn and adopt Euro-Western rhetorical traditions and literacy practices.

For example, some IBIs are based in the concept of “nommo,” the notion that “all magic is word magic, and that the generation and transformation of sounds contribute to a [rhetor’s] power” (Asante 60). Some are based in “Ma’at” or “ancient African principles of ethical character development” (Lee 166).² Others share values with the seven Kwanzaa traditions of Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Kuumba (creativity), Nia (purpose), and Imani (faith) (Lee; Lomotey). According to a Facebook post citing Kalonji Jama Changa on the page for the Council of Independent Black Institutions, these institutions are “growing everyday [sic], not as an alternative to public school, but as our own paradigm for academic excellence, cultural awareness, and the quintessential foundation for Black self-sufficiency and sovereignty for African people” (Council of Independent Black Institutions). Their community-based approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and administration exhibit an emphasis on rhetorical action. By grounding their curricular and pedagogical approaches in Nguzo Saba, or “Seven Principles of Blackness,” IBIs deliver literacy education that “develops in students a communal and civic identity” (Enoch 7) relevant to who they are and their social positions by teaching Black American students “to look at the world through an African-centered set of lenses that … has a wider periphery and more depth” (Lomotey 456). Further, as Kynard suggests, it helps Black American literacies mobilize beyond systemic stifling that never positions these literacies or their participants as equal (Vernacular 26).