Karida Brown Will Discuss Her Book “The Battle for the Black Mind on October 25th, 10:30 a.m., at the Madison Central Library: Documenting a 400 Year Struggle
Above: Karida L. Brown is an American sociologist, author, professor, and public intellectual who serves as Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Below: The sleeve of Brown’s book “Battle for the Black Mind”
by Jonathan Gramling
Karida L. Brown, NAACP Image Award recipient, historian and professor at Emory College understands that education is not just about teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. She understands that education is the pathway to people’s minds and can control what and how they think. This has been happening to African Americans for over 400 years.
“This is why history matters because the the context about why we fight for education is well-recorded,” Brown said. “During slavery, which lasted over 250 years in this country, African Americans were by and large denied the right to even read and write. There were laws on the books in almost every state across the south prohibiting Black people from even gathering in an attempt to learn and get an education. Those laws had penalties that were either fined or even death. So you have a people who are wholly denied the access to education, who are wholly subjugated and reduced to a condition of slavery. And if we believe that knowledge is power — which I do — our oppressors understood that all too well, which is why they wanted to keep an ignorant population.”
In doing research for her book “The Battle for the Black Mind,” Brown learned that people have been trying to exercise that control over African Americans ever since.
“I got the title because I started out wanting to retell the story of the history of Black education in America,” Brown said. “This book is the result of eight years of archival research. It is a deeply researched book. Early on into that process, it became clear to me, to my surprise, that everyone had a stake in Black education. It wasn’t just African Americans, although they had the biggest, deeply invested interest in Black education. But so too did the white South. The white South really asked the question not of what kind of education Black Americans should have, but asked the question on whether they should have it or not.”
That battle continued on after the end of the Civil War.
“We can learn lessons from our past, not just from America’s slavery past, but in particular Jim Crow, a period when African Americans were freed, African Americans became citizens after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation and yet were not afforded full citizenship,” Brown emphasized. “This was largely because of the fall of Reconstruction, the introduction of Jim Crow laws, which excluded and/or minimized access for Black people to all of the assets of national life, including education. This is why Black Americans have always fought so hard for education. This is why African Americans worked so hard to build their own schools and make sure that they got education come hell or high water. So there is a context to this that is important for all of us to know. That is one thing that I try to bring to light in The Battle for the Black Mind, but not just stay in the past. History repeats itself sometimes. It can be instructive for how people resisted oppressive structures and systems. And that is what they needed in spite of those systems.”
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs, sprang up during the Jim Crow era and were a dichotomy of African American education. On the one hand, they segregated African American students from the white schools that trained many of society’s leaders and on the other hand, they nurtured African American arts and literature and history.
“HBCUs are an artifact of segregation in the U.S.,” Brown said. “They are an artifact of a white supremacist system meaning they only exist because of an exclusionary system. And HBCUs are also an heirloom to all Black Americans, whether you attended an HBCU or not. They have been the places that provided not only an intellectual home for generations of Black Americans, but they have also been sanctuaries for the Black arts, supporting Black creative and literary figures. The archives at HBCUs hold many historical collections that during a period that mainstream museums and archives wouldn’t collect. HBCUs do so much. They have done so much for African Americans and continue to do so including still today graduating the majority of Black doctors, lawyers, engineers at the undergrad level. So HBCUs are the engine of the American education system that has just been a well-spring for African Americans in terms of being able to use education as the great equalizer.”
There was a tremendous growth in African American schools during Jim Crow, founded with different interests in mind.
“You see the emergence of not only HBCUs, but also the proliferation of Black segregated elementary schools. And by the thousands, they were established all throughout the rural and urban communities throughout the South. Some of them were public schools. But most of them from the end of the Civil War into the 1930s were private schools. Why? Because during Jim Crow, that was the era of states rights. States rights to do what and to whom? During that time, even though African Americans were paying into the local tax systems in their communities, local and state school boards were all white. And the decisions about how to distribute and allocate resources to the public school system were left to those school boards. Well you know what happened there. Black schools got pennies on the dollar vis-a-vis white schools. They were woefully under-resourced, were woefully incapable of supporting their student populations and therefore you saw African Americans come hell or high water founding their own schools. They were founding their own private schools in churches in local communities. They were pooling their resources and making sure that even if the state wasn’t going to provide for and nourish Black minds, they would find a way to do it on their own.”
During Jim Crow, the white Northern industrialists also worked to control what African Americans learned.
“You have northern missionaries who wanted to support and be a part of building out the Black education system in the South after the Civil War,” Brown said. “But they had specific intentions of what that should look like in developing a Christian education system in the U.S. that followed a certain model of education. Also I think most
importantly that I illuminate in my book is that Northern philanthropy, big philanthropy as we know it today was birthed on building out the education system in the South. And big philanthropy had a great interest in controlling Black education. Why? Because philanthropy at that time in the early 20th Century was really a proxy for industrial barons — the Rockefellers and the Carnegies — and guess what? They needed an endless supply of cheap labor, labor that would do and not think. And that was the type of curricula that they wanted to promote for the emergence of Black schools, so they would have a ready labor supply laying in wait in the South during that period of time. Therefore, it’s not just the history of what one group of people did. It was a battle for the Black mind. And the stakes were oh so high.”
One of the central figures in African American education during Jim Crow was Booker T. Washington. In some ways, Washington was both a help and a hindrance to the education of Black minds. Yes, he promoted the education of African Americans, but the type of education they received coincided with the interests of the Northern industrialists.
“During his lifetime, he was the most influential and powerful Black American in the world,” Brown said. “What do I mean by that? He had at arm’s reach and in his corner the wealthiest white industrialists of that time to the extent that Tuskegee Institute, the school that he ran for about 25 years until the end of his life, was endowed by Andrew Carnegie to the tune of $600,000 in 1904. That was the largest donation to any HBCU made in history. He’s receiving the lion’s share of philanthropic dollars to support his school. That gave him a certain stature and level of power and influence in the Black education ecosystem. Carnegie also in that endowment agreed to pay for Booker T. Washington’s salary for the rest of his life so that he could continue, according to Andrew Carnegie, ‘to continue his good work as the Moses to his people.’ What did he mean by that? Booker T. Washington was doing way more than just running his school, the Tuskegee Institute, where he was promoting the industrial model of education that promoted the idea that Black people should adopt a curricula that focused on agricultural labor, domestic service and teaching thereof and shy away from the liberal arts, shy away from exercising one’s civic engagement including the vote. So Booker T. Washington was very vocal about Black people also should not be looking to migrate to the North for better opportunities. They should stay in the South and prove themselves to white Southerners that they were worthy laborers and citizens.”
It’s a battle for the Black mind that continues today.
“That was a common phenomenon throughout the South where you see right after Brown vs. Board of Education a proliferation of private schools opening up throughout the South,” Brown said. “And these were just a new version of segregated white schools. Many white Southern parents refused to allow their children to go to school when African Americans, Native Americans, anyone who was different. The proliferation of private, all-white schools was no coincidence. It was a response to a progressive inclusive federal law that was Brown vs. Board of Education. And that runs a lot with today, the watering down of the education system, the attempt to fully dismantle the Dept. of Education, to white wash our memory institutions like museums, libraries and archives, the attempt to ban books and ban curricula such as critical race theory. All of these are rhythms of the pendulum swinging in this country, back and forth.”
While the battle for the Black mind has seemed like a never-ending uphill struggle, Brown wants people to be inspired by the book and have hope.
“The Battle for the Black Mind is a history,” Brown said. “It is playbook and a call to action. In this history, it’s not just about the doom and gloom of it all. In fact, the core of the book — the part of the book that I most enjoyed — teaches what Black educators and school founders did to build their own educational institutions. I featured three Black women in particular — Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McCloud Bethune and Charlotte Hawkins Brown — and take you through their journeys in raising money for their schools for building out different curricula models and graduating generations of Black minds who became those first generations of what Atlanta University Studies called ‘the college-bred Negroes.’ It’s a book where I hope our readers will get a sense of pride, empowerment and a playbook. We are in a fight today, the battle continues. Perhaps it’s different tactics and strategies. But there are lessons that we can learn from these women who are featured in the book.”
The battle for the Black mind has been a struggle for over 400 years. And if there is any message in Karida Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind, it’s that ultimately, it is what African Americans decide it is when they are engaged in the struggle. Victories, large and small, are everywhere.