THE STRUGGLE FOR A MULTI-CULTURAL CURRICULUM AND THE PEDAGOGY OF SELF-RELIANCE
I would like to address the question from my thirty years’ personal experience as a participant/observer organizer, basing my analysis on qualitative research (subjective-direct experience). Because of the current imbalance in contemporary world society, where the Eurocentric paradigm is prevalent, I feel that it is impossible to be objective concerning the question by using quantitative research methods.
Historical Roots:
The historical basis to develop race, class and gender oppression (the triple oppression paradigm) goes back to Frederick Douglass and his gallant attempts to lay out a social philosophy based on continuous civil disobedience and struggle for African Americans in the 19th century.
W.E.B. DuBois continued this progressive stand in African American social thought throughout the first half of the 20th century. DuBois’ efforts led to the founding of the NAACP, (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), but they were briefly eclipsed by the work of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
In the 1920s, both the UNIA and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) stressed the need to include “Negro” history in the public school curriculums. Dr. Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro History and Life led efforts to establish Negro History Week.
In the 1930s, following the tradition established by Alexander Crummell and Bishop Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, W. D. Fard and Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam incorporated the teaching of Black History into a religious organization to educate the masses of African Americans.
Paul Robeson and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., militant spokesmen of the 1940s and 1950s, both stressed the need for the incorporation of “Negro History” into the American educational system. Because of the apartheid segregation state that faced African Americans living in the South, the struggle for inclusion in the public educational system was at first basically a northern phenomenon, except at historically black colleges.
E. Franklin Frazier often talked about the social pathology in the African American community. Franz Fanon attributed it to the self-negation and alienation African Americans experience living under a colonial subjection based on psychological domination.
During the 1950s, a social revolution began to occur in the African American community. Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott and advocated a philosophy of civil disobedience, or “creative social disorder” to breakdown Jim Crow. Through the efforts of Minister Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, as well as various Black Nationalist groups, there began a process of revolutionary acculturation among African American youth of the 1950s. African American youth gangs gradually began to identify with their African heritage.
By having street meetings, Black Nationalist groups, particularly the Nation of Islam, led by the articulate Malcolm X began to raise the national (race) consciousness of hundreds of thousands of African Americans. The Nation of Islam had an internal education process where members would memorize 30 lessons using a question and answer technique; new members were required to memorize and recite these lessons. While this process was not based on individual critical analytical thinking, it did provide the psychological self-esteem necessary for developing African Americans to sustain a protracted personal and collective culture of resistance to capitalist degeneration.
Malcolm X’s break from the Nation of Islam provided the Black Liberation Movement with the foundation upon which to struggle for a multicultural curriculum and the pedagogy of self-reliance. The process of creating a pedagogy of self-reliance, that is encouraging the masses to engage in the process of resistance against the system that is oppressing them and relying on their own resources, reserves and producing their own leadership, was best implemented by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Southern communities in the early 1960s.
Malcolm X and SNCC were working in close unison before his untimely assassination. Both were learning from one another. Malcolm was beginning to learn the process of the pedagogy of self-reliance from SNCC as he began to structure the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) on the basis of critical thinking for its members. Members of SNCC picked up on Malcolm’s call for “quality” education and community control of schools. In numerous communities across the country, local educators began to demand the infusion of African American history in the public educational system as part of the process of creating a multicultural curriculum.
Clarence 7 X, after teaching African American teenagers the “First 12 Born,” a variation of the 30 lessons of the Nation of Islam, became “Allah” in person for the five percenters nation, a Harlem street gang that grew to 10,000 in the mid 1960s. The five percenters battled with teachers for the inclusion of a multicultural curriculum. The New York Black Panther Party was founded in July 1966 with several hundred members. In September 1966, they led demonstrations and a school boycott for quality education: the inclusion of Black History into the public school curriculum and for community control of schools in New York.
In Detroit, Michigan, a citizen group wrote a textbook on African American history for inclusion in the public school system. It was decided by the collective leadership of he Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) to make the demand for African American History a national demand for youth in the public school system. The purpose was to raise the “National Class Consciousness” of African American youth.
Picking up in 1967, African American students became more radicalized, both on college campuses and in inner cities. SNCC and RAM were concentrating on “re-educating” African American youth as to the realities they had to face: race, class and gender oppression. SNCC, RAM and later the Black Panther Party (BPP) took anti-imperialist positions opposing the U.S. government’s foreign policy.
On March 21, 1967, a group of African American students at Howard University interrupted Hershey’s speech (he was head of the selective service). They chanted, “America’s the Black Man’s Battleground.” African American students began political demonstrations, first on Black college campuses, then in high schools and junior high schools.
On November 17, 1967, four thousand African American students in Philadelphia, PA marched on the Board of (Mis)Education demanding Black History classes, a revamping of the curriculum, the ability to wear African clothing to school, the ability to have a natural hairstyle, and the right to salute the Black National Flag, the Red, Black and Green. A youth group called the Black Guards led these students.
By 1968, the high point of the Black Liberation Movement, African American students were seizing school buildings and boycotting classes en masse in Chicago. Led by RAM and the Black Guards, African American students led a walkout of 30,000 students. They battled the police and racist school administrators.
Starting in 1969 at San Francisco State College and in the early 1970s, at other predominately white colleges, African American students demanded Black Studies classes and departments. They were established at approximately 200 colleges and universities, but were eventually scaled back at many of them by the 1980s. Likewise, at the secondary school level, as the demand for Black History subsided among African American high school and junior high school students, efforts to initiate a truly multiracial, multinational, and multiethnic curriculum in the public school system has slowed to a snail’s pace.
Since Euro-American educators continue to use an Eurocentric approach when teaching the social sciences, many African American educators have reacted by adhering to an African-centric perspective. With 60% of the working class population estimated to be of “Third World” descent, Asian, African American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Arab, etc., it is important, in the 21st century, that an objective, non-centric, culturalist, and pluralist perspective is taught to public school students.
One of the problems that many “Third World” youth are having, identifying with the legitimate public system and role models, is due to the cultural alienation they experience from a system that is based on Euro-centric superiority. A pedagogy of self-reliance would teach “Third World” youth how they can empower themselves by engaging in positive, creative, social action rather than in the self-destruction (drug trade) that thousands are presently involved in.
Muhammad Ahmad (late 1990s)
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