Black teaching, at its best and as I experienced it, included knowledge handed down from past generations. I was recently reminded of this by two news articles in the span of two days. One was an obituary for Irene West, the first Black teacher in California’s Elk Grove school system, a graduate of Fisk University, and the mother of the intellectual giant Cornel West. Her work always exceeded the classroom, carrying over to the many Black community institutions to which she belonged and that she helped sustain. The second article was about the passing of Al Young, the former poet laureate of California. Young was a powerful educator in his own right, but what struck me about him was his recollection of his second-grade teacher in Laurel, Mississippi, during the 1940s. “Miz Chapman, my tireless and inspired all-day second-grade teacher,” Young wrote in one of his books, “was smuggling down to me the majesty and magic of poetry and the blues.” Despite the constraints imposed on Black education during Jim Crow, including racist school curricula and violent surveillance by white school authorities, “Miz Chapman nevertheless forced [Young and his peers] to memorize poems, especially works by colored writers.”
Teachers such as Miz Chapman and Irene West were not anomalies, nor were their methods. Originally from Selma, Alabama, Willis N. Huggins began teaching in New York City public schools in 1924. Recognizing the constraints of the dominant curriculum at Brooklyn’s Bushwick High School, where he taught, Huggins led the Harlem History Club, to help students and community members in the neighborhood where he lived. Many future leaders attended this study group, including the intellectual John Henrik Clarke and Ghana’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah. Huggins also taught Sunday-morning courses on “Negro History.” In the 1930s, he opened Blyden Bookstore, which Clarke recalled as “the first fully equipped bookstore in Harlem.”
Many African American teachers have strived to model an image of Black life not wholly contingent on the external elements of whiteness and white supremacy. Black life has always been, and must continue to be, concerned with more than such defensive posturing. To make anti-anything the total concern of one’s teaching would be to concede that our lives have no meaning without that which we refuse. Like Black educators before them, my teachers worked diligently to equip students with critical resources for reading the world and our lives against the grain. They also modeled for us how our dignity and self-worth might be set apart from our material circumstances.