We Are An African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and The Radical Imagination.

• Author: Uneke, Okori

Rickford, Russell. We Are An African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and The Radical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ix + 368 pages. Paperback, $27.95.

In We Are An African People, historian Russell Rickford narrates the rise and decline of black-run independent educational institutions in dozens of urban settings across the United States. Young activist-intellectuals, many of whom were veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, founded these private schools. The institutions included preschools and K-12 facilities, as well as tertiary campuses. Independent black schools arose as grassroots "counterinstitutions" from the critique of white cultural hegemony. They served as replacements of the civil rights movement's "freedom schools" linked to mass struggles of the early and mid-1960s and as antecedents to recent Afrocentric academies (p. 2). They combined academic instruction with robust political education, seeking to instill students with a militant black consciousness and a deep commitment to black self-determination. As Rickford describes it, "Pan-African nationalist schools were far more than vessels of formal education. There were cooperatives, collectives, cultural centers, organs of community action and agitprop, the laboratories for a spectrum of ideas--from anti-imperialism and Third Worldism on the left to patriarchy and racial fundamentalism on the right" (p. 4).

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the practical inadequacies of school desegregation campaigns and the political imagination of a collection of activists, who having observed the shortcomings of desegregation battles and grassroots push for decent public education concluded that the degradation of public schools were tantamount to "educational genocide" (p. 24). To the activists, only self-governing sociocultural arrangements were crucial to black emancipation and reawakening. Therefore, the organizers started these schools not only as genuine alternative to substandard inner-city public schools, but also as medium to decolonize the minds of African-American youth and reinvigorate a sense of African identity. Part of the appeal of the broad ideal of these independent institutions was to mold a team of young activists dedicated to the struggle for black political self-determination throughout the world. In effect, the organizers believed that African Americans must prepare its youth not only to...