We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

Dozens of nationalist schools that taught Pan-African ideas opened in American cities during the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. They ranged from preschool to post-secondary programmes. Many were accused of teaching hatred and were routinely harassed by the authorities, yet they passed on black consciousness to their pupils and their families.

Founded by activist intellectuals and veterans of the civil rights movement, these schools aimed for more than academic skills and self-esteem. They sought to decolonise young minds and build a lasting sense of African identity, training a generation of activists for black political self-rule. Most closed quickly and reached only a small number of children, but the schools reveal how Pan-Africanism worked as a social and intellectual movement.

Rickford presents the period as an inventive stretch of organising that followed the civil rights era, and he links the schools to the later Afrocentric movement and to debates about urban education, race and identity.