Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn
Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn
Ep 141 Freedom Dreams: How Black Women Shaped American Education
When Emory University professor and scholar Dr. Karida L. Brown began researching America's segregated education system, she didn't expect to uncover a radical history of resistance, innovation, and profound courage. Yet after eight years of meticulous archival work across America and South Africa, that's exactly what she found.
Dr Brown’s latest book, "The Battle for the Black Mind" reveals extraordinary stories of Black women educators who created schools with nothing but vision and determination. Mary Smith Peake risked everything to teach enslaved people to read two decades before Emancipation, establishing a freedom school under an oak tree that still stands on Hampton University's campus today. Lucy Craft Laney built the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute from a church basement into a sprawling educational center spanning two city blocks in Jim Crow Georgia, including the state's first Black nursing school.
Dr Brown, who currently serves on the board of The Obama Presidency Oral History Project, calls these nearly forgotten powerhouses and others like them “Freedom Dreamers”. She says that, "Freedom dreaming is the most radical form of political imagination."
Order The Battle for the Black Mind book: https://www.karida.io/books
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Timestamps:
- 0:00
Meeting Dr. Karida Brown - 8:18
The Battle for the Black Mind - 20:16
Mary Smith Peake's Freedom School - 31:02
Black Americans Birthed Public Education - 39:06
Lucy Craft Laney's Educational Legacy - 47:31
Battle for Education: Competing Interests - 50:17
Freedom Dreams for Today's Challenges
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Hey Ange, hey Liz, How's it going?
Speaker 2:Very well Good. Yes, Today's a good day. Today is an excellent day. I, you know I was a little nervous about this, right? Yes, and you had to kind of talk me off the edge. Yes, because that's what I do. Yes, Listen, we have somebody here that I am so proud of and so happy that she agreed to be on our podcast.
Speaker 1:We're like aunties.
Speaker 2:We're like aunties, but I can't wait for you to meet this dynamic lady. That one right there. Oh, you just wait.
Speaker 1:Just hold one second. Hold one second.
Speaker 2:But before I get all into that, I just want to say welcome to another episode of Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn.
Speaker 1:I'm Angela and that's Leslie, my best friend of almost 50 years. We are two free thinking 60 something year old black women. We have decided to be more bold and joyful in our lives and we invite you to join us. Today we're going to be talking about a topic that comes up quite a bit on our show, podcast All the Things, and that is around legacy. What is your legacy, how to create legacy, how to create legacy, how to rethink legacy, and today we have a guest that is such an example of that. We're going to get to know a little bit about her through her bio, but also just how she got to this place, where she decided to do this really important work for the Black community and everyone across the world. I'm going to let Leslie read her bio and then we'll jump in.
Speaker 2:Dr Corita L Brown is an NAACP Image Award winning author and public intellectual winning author and public intellectual. A professor at Emory University, Brown is a leading scholar of systemic racism and the study of Black life. Her work, which spans over a decade of groundbreaking research and analysis, has earned her both national and international acclaim. She is the co-author of the new Brownies book, A Love Letter to Black Families, continuing the legacy of WEB Du Bois by centering Black narratives and empowering Black futures. Dr Brown has made many media appearances. You can find her work and her talking and her scholarly work all over the Internet if you're interested in looking, and you will be. She's made media appearances in Mother Jones, in Ms Magazine and Washington Post, among other things. I can talk about some of her educational background, but what I do want to say is that she and my bestie here have something in common They've both went to University of Pennsylvania. So it's okay, it's okay.
Speaker 3:I'll just be over here on the side.
Speaker 2:But I bring to you right now Dr Corita L Brown Welcome.
Speaker 3:Welcome, oh my goodness, hey besties, hey darlings. It is such a joy and an honor to be here sitting on the couch with you all this evening. And I really do appreciate the invitation. Thank you, it's great to have you.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I am just so impressed by is your latest book not the first, your latest book that I think it was published or it came out in May of this year, so it's brand new.
Speaker 1:Brand spanking new. It's so pretty, it's so pretty.
Speaker 2:The battle for the black mind.
Speaker 1:Let's hold it forward a little bit, so it's less shiny. No, not yeah, so it's less blurry. Beautiful, there it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because we got to talk about that cover.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about this cover, but this right now is required reading. Certainly get your copy before it gets on the banned list. We talked about that and we can kind of smile about that, but that's no joke for real.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Books like this have so much rich information and almost marching orders that I can understand and see why many of the masses don't want us to know about these things. It's empowering. And we're going to get into, and it's a battle, and we're going to get into some of the reasons why right now. So, Dr Corita, come on in and tell us about this scholarly piece of work that I'm just so proud of.
Speaker 3:Battle for the Black Mind. This is a work that has been eight years in the making for me. Oh wow, Seven years of multi-sided archival research across the United States and in South Africa, where I was on a dogged pursuit to understand what exactly was a colored school.
Speaker 1:Okay, what exactly was a?
Speaker 3:colored school, ok, what we had in this country for almost a century, and it's sometimes like it gets lost upon us. I know, even for me, that for almost 100 years in these United States, the American school system was, by design, separate and unequal and intentionally designed to be inferior. Right Now, that's not what necessarily happened in segregated schools, but that was an intention and I wanted to understand not only what that was segregated schools, racially segregated schools I wanted to understand the ideology, the philosophy that the architects of the segregated system had in mind for black folks and, of course, the main part about this book what black folks did in spite of this system to not only survive but to thrive and to situate education as a cornerstone of the long black freedom struggle. So that was my mission with this book. As I mentioned, seven years of research, one year of writing and the book came out.
Speaker 3:As you mentioned, may 2025, for the 71st anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education. For the 71st anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education, during a time where this occupier in the White House has actively started the process of dismantling the Department of Education, has a front frontal assault on the higher education system writ large in the United States. So this book needed to come out in such a time as this, and I want you all to experience it as a history of black education, but also as a playbook. Ok, because we got the recipes in the blueprints. Our elders and ancestors left those for us and understand it as a call to action.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful. So there is um, we, leslie and I, both read the book. It is, um, it is uh, it is, as Leslie said, required reading. Um, it deserves to be on the bookshelf and every on the coffee table, because those are the ones that people pick up and flip through. Every home needs to have a copy of this. I purposefully did not state the racial group of the home. Every home should have this level of education, of understanding how this all began.
Speaker 1:There's a particular passage that I've asked Dr Brown to read because when I read it, it just made me see okay, this is why she did this for us, this is why she did this for us. This was the compelling that she felt. And you know, whenever we bring a guest on and they have accomplished tremendous body of work, accomplished tremendous body of work, I always think it's important for us to know who they are and what drives them, so that you can see yourself as not at the end, but kind of where it all began and what was the stirring, so that you can feel that, and whatever your legacy is, that you can begin creating or continue creating, you can use their example. So, dr, we typically call first name Dr Corita.
Speaker 3:Just just call me Corita. We're amongst besties here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and we also like to give props. So you work hard for that, dr Girl, you work hard for it. And we also like to give props. So you work hard for that, dr Girl, you work hard for it. So if you could read, starting on page 148, the Blackademics and then ending with Black education tradition, that would be great. You guys listen up.
Speaker 3:Sure, I've got my copy here. Y'all Yay, y'all Yay. These black academics and dozens of others took the focus off of the tired old question, what's wrong with black people? And shifted it towards the real question what is wrong with the system? They weren't interested in treating symptoms. They were looking for the root causes of inequality symptoms. They were looking for the root causes of inequality.
Speaker 3:This is what we call emancipatory sociology, a sociology that not only diagnoses the problem but also offers solutions, pulling injustice up by its roots and dismantling systems that make life hard for some and easier for others, make life hard for some and easier for others.
Speaker 3:They use sociology as a mighty weapon to attack oppressive systems at their core, and that's the foundation of Black sociology and it's a legacy that runs deep in my veins. As a Black woman sociologist, my work isn't just academic, it's personal. I stand on the shoulders of giants like the ones mentioned above, those who dared to use sociology as a tool for our liberation, not our oppression. My own scholarship delves into the historical roots of systemic racism, revealing the inner workings of how the structures that confine us today built long before we were born. I've traced these systems from the institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade in medieval times all the way to the 17th century, to the African-American great migration of the first half of the 20th century. This book on racial inequality in education is about exposing the machinery that has kept us from our full potential and celebrating our rich Black educational tradition.
Speaker 1:Well, there you go. Well, there you go.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Emancipation of the enslaved, of those held in bondage who were not allowed to read and write in English. They came with language but they weren't allowed to read and write in English. And how, these women, despite all of the cruelty, all of the wickedness that was going on, that they established these ways of teaching Can you talk to us about? I know you have a favorite, I know you have a favorite, you know, but it changes every time.
Speaker 3:These women who are the protagonists of the book, they were some bad sisters and I see parts of myself, parts of my mother, parts of my grandmother, the women in my life, in all of these women. So you know, I'll pick one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you'll pick one. Yeah, you'll pick one. I don't remember her name, but she is the one that started teaching under the tree.
Speaker 3:The book maybe?
Speaker 1:Yes, and there's a spoiler alert about what that tree is up to now. But yeah, if you could tell us her story, that is a pretty incredible, incredible story.
Speaker 3:Mary Smith Peake. She was born a free Black woman of color during slavery, meaning that although she lived in Virginia, which was a slave state, her family were not enslaved and what that afforded Mary? Her parents sent her north to DC where she was able to access an education. Mary almost completes high school and upon attaining that education she could have stayed north. She could have escaped the horrors of living in a slave society. But no, she goes back to her hometown of Norfolk and then Hampton, virginia. And what does she do with that education? She got what she do, she, she.
Speaker 3:Mary was up to things. She starts a, a dressmaking uh, business, right, and that's what she's doing during the day, because it's providing her cover for what she's really up to. Mary smith peak is sneaking on to plantations teaching enslaved black Americans how to read, write and what she calls cipher. Why? Because she knew she knew a couple of things. She knew that knowledge is power, and so did our enslaved brothers and sisters who were, who were working with Mary at that time, also knew that a day would come when her people would be free and they would need that to be able to guide their pathway into freedom, liberty and citizenship. So she saw something, she had vision Right. And she, she didn't wait for it to be true, she didn't wait for signs of it to be true. She was doing this. Y'all back in the 1840s Unbelievable.
Speaker 2:It was a knowing a knowing that she had.
Speaker 3:So 20 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. However, you know she lives in Hampton Virginia. During the time that the Civil War comes, the Confederate Army burns Hampton Virginia down to the ground. The townspeople, especially enslaved Black Americans, run to the nearest Union Army camp, fort Monroe, including Mary and her family. And what does Mary do? She sets up a freedom school under an oak tree on that union base and it starts off with five people, adults and children and within two weeks there are 60 folks meeting and gathering under that freedom tree. She continues to teach. The American Missionary Association from up north hears about this black woman doing this and they send resources south to buy her a small house so she can continue her teaching, and they sent her a small salary. She becomes the first black teacher of record for a freedman school. Wow, ok, this is while black people lay and waited the precipice of freedom. We don't know what the outcome of this war is going to be but she's getting us ready, right, mary, doesn't?
Speaker 3:she didn't live to see the end of the Civil War, so she didn't know the outcome. She died in 1864. That freedom tree still exists. It is, in fact, the opening of the campus of Hampton University, and when you think about that school, I want you to understand it as a school that was built on the blood, sweat, tears and freedom dreams of that Black woman who saw a future for us where education would be the necessary pillar to get us to where we're going, where education would be the necessary pillar to get us to where we're going. I want you to understand the power of freedom dreaming, because it is the most radical form of political imagination and it is the foundation that activates any movement.
Speaker 2:Mm, I just need you to use that phrase again Freedom dreaming.
Speaker 1:Freedom dreaming that one Wow.
Speaker 3:That one and shout out to the historian Dr Robin DG Kelly for coining that term for us, so I just want to give that credit to him yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's not about what we see in front of us, especially in a time like this. It's about dreaming forward.
Speaker 2:It's what our minds see, if your mind can conceive it.
Speaker 1:Exactly and under those circumstances.
Speaker 2:I can only imagine how difficult it was. People probably thought that you know why is she doing this? Wasting time getting us in trouble. You know, creating problems, this good trouble and the bravery that it took yes, that was, it was illegal at that time.
Speaker 1:I just keep thinking of um uh, harriet tubman, and I keep thinking about her in terms of her going back, um mary going back, but also that there's so few of these women that we know of by name and that's one of the wonderful things about your book that we can do and because she wasn't the only one, she wasn't the only one at the root of educating formerly enslaved people in America, and so it was such an empowering experience that I had reading and then reading the names, and then another name, and then another name, of these women who started this work, and there's this particular part that I didn't know at all, and that is that educating Black people, or seeing the value of educating Black people and starting these Black schools that preceded educating White people. So, if you can talk about that, we were in front of education. That was our thing. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, educating the masses was our thing. Yes, that then went. So tell us a little bit about what you uncovered there.
Speaker 3:Well, let me take us back to this period, right at the end of the Civil War, where the dust is still settling. From that time, I want you to know that after the Civil War, there was no public education system in the South for black or white children. For black or white children, yeah, school education was a institution that was available to the wealthy and privileged, ok. And this idea of universal education as a basic right for every American citizen? That was not a thing in the South. It was newly freed African-Americans, the freedmen who. What was the first thing that black Americans did once they, once they, took their freedom? They searched for their families to reunite, they got in community and started building churches. And what did they often build inside those churches? Schools.
Speaker 2:Education systems. Education systems.
Speaker 3:Schools were one of the main institutions, one of the first things that newly freed African-Americans not only built themselves but advocated for, and during that time we had the Freedmen's Bureau. Ok, ok, and what that institution did? I want you to understand it as one of America's very first social safety systems. Ok, so before Medicaid or Medicare or the GI Bill OK so these are all, yeah, yeah yeah, and what does a federal social safety agency do?
Speaker 3:It ensures that our most vulnerable populations have a standard of what it means to be American. So, whether it is your elderly veterans, our disabled brothers and sisters, in this case, right after 250 years of institutionalized chattel slavery, African-American. So this social safety net. It was in charge of the Freedmen's Bank, which gave African-Americans the opportunity to save their money, earn interest and buy land.
Speaker 1:And buy land we did.
Speaker 3:During that period of reconstruction, black people purchased 15 million acres of land. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, without the 40 acres and a mule.
Speaker 2:Without the 40 acres. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Without the 40 acres and a mule. Also, during this time of Reconstruction era, with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau, of Reconstruction era, with the support of the Freedmen's Bureau, that institution also helped negotiate labor contracts between white employers and African-American laborers, because you know that was a new dynamic in the South.
Speaker 3:OK, but one of the most lasting impacts of the Freedmen's Bureau was they invested over five million dollars, which is a little over $130 million in today's dollars, in building schools throughout the South. They built over 5,000 schools in a five-year period between 1865 and 1870. And what that meant was, in addition to the autonomous private schools that Black folks were setting up themselves, you had this safety net, this institution, the Freedmen's Bureau that's ensuring that communities have at least one schoolhouse Right.
Speaker 1:You know from community to community A standard, a standard.
Speaker 3:And it was black Americans who advocated for that. It was Black Americans who insisted that that be something that these United States owed to them in freedom. And you saw a response, a strong response, from the white South, first of all saying, hold on, we don't want black Americans getting any education. And also, but if they are going to have education, our kids should have it too. And there you have the birth of the American public school system in the South, nationalizing what we know today as public education.
Speaker 1:Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable. And a testament to the all boats with the, all boats rise with the with the tides rise, yeah. Raises all boats, and it's oftentimes us, the, the, the, the, the ones who have less than that are the inclusive right?
Speaker 2:yes, and we bring everyone in everyone up.
Speaker 1:Right, it's, it's. It's an incredible, um new fact. That fact that you're bringing this is not a new deal. This is not what the government kind of handed out to us. It began with us.
Speaker 2:Self-agency. That's right and that's what it is. We recognized a need and, rather than wait for a handout or wait for someone else to do it for us, that period of reconstruction we saw so many gains in so many different arenas and obviously we see why that was so threatening to the larger population.
Speaker 1:It was crushed. It was crushed.
Speaker 3:I will also add to the scorecard 2,000 Black elected officials serving in political office at the state, local and federal level to Black congresspeople. Okay, so in that short time of that 12 years, during Reconstruction, 12 years the progress was unbelievable from land ownership, education, political and civic engagement, and there also you had the Freedmen's Bureau seating, seating and supporting the foundation of many of our HBCUs which I also talk about in the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely want to hear about the HBCUs, because there's some nuances there which you bring out, which again Girl, it's more than nuance.
Speaker 2:It's like what the what?
Speaker 3:I'm spilling the tea. Yeah, you are spilling the tea. Nuances. I'm reading and I'm like what the what? I'm spilling the tea. Yeah, yeah, you are spilling the tea.
Speaker 2:Nuances.
Speaker 3:I'm reading and I'm like, but wait wait a minute.
Speaker 2:Wait a minute, you know, because we will get into the HBCUs. I just want to speak about the Haynes Normal and Industrial Institute. That's my favorite, that story, miss Lucy. Miss Lucy yeah, go story Miss Lucy. Miss Lucy is my favorite.
Speaker 3:Oh, my goodness. And ladies, why is it that you know? You say that these names, these black women's names, you're reading some of their names for the first time. I learned their names for the first time, too, through this research. So this is important, this storytelling that we're doing and saying their names Lucy Craft Laney. It's a form of what the brilliant sociologist, dr Marcus Anthony Hunter calls intellectual reparations. It's a form of reparations for the ideas that we've introduced into this world and society that we don't get credit for. And here in this book I had the opportunity to do that for several black women, educationists who built schools, built black private schools that lasted for a century or more.
Speaker 2:It seems like one book at a time, it seems like one book at a time. And what was most impressive is how these ladies went north soliciting Almost. It reminded me like they would just show up to these larger organizations in the north and advertise come in with flyers about this is what we're doing down south. Can you give us a little money? And this, and that it was so resourceful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want you to understand these Black women educationists. So we'll go with Lucy Craftlaney, because she was the OG, she was the blueprint, okay. Miss Lucy also was born during slavery, okay, but she also was born free. Her parents insisted that she learn to read and write, even though it was illegal when she grew up. She gets, she's able to navigate a high school education for herself and becomes a part of the first graduating class of Atlanta University, which is today Clark.
Speaker 2:Atlanta.
Speaker 3:University. So she was there before Du Bois stepped on the scene as a professor there. Ok, miss Lucy taught, she became a teacher in the public school system OK, for 10 years. And it became very clear to her that the state would not do right by black children. It was not yet ready to protect and nourish young black minds in the way that they deserved. So she wasn't saying that, you know, she didn't want us to have rights, but she very much understood that the system was going to fail our children. So she went and founded her own school. Miss Lucy didn't have no money, miss Lucy didn't have a building. Miss Lucy didn't have the business training to know how to do that. And nonetheless, black women are capable of the wholly impossible. So she just starts it and she starts a school in the basement of a church in Augusta, georgia. Within a year she has over 200 pupils. She has started fundraising private dollars from religious institutions, individual wealthy donors from the North, black and white of the likes of everyone, from the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's to Madam CJ.
Speaker 3:Walker herself was a major donor to her school and over time she builds what goes from an elementary school. It grows into a high school. It takes up two city blocks in Augusta and for our listeners, please go there, because it stands as a museum today. Okay, and in addition to that, she founds the first Black nursing school in the state of Georgia on that campus. Why? Because African-Americans were excluded, were not allowed to attend the med school, but we needed to be able to provide access to health care for one another. So you can see this enterprising mind that was.
Speaker 3:Lucy Craft Laney and every black educationist that I featured through the book. And I read this book because you will just be not only empowered by these stories, but you'll fall in love with these women. Only empowered by these stories, but you'll fall in love with these women, yes. And they also have left us instruction on how to move in today, in such a time as this.
Speaker 3:I want to remind you that Miss Lucy Craft Laney did this without an endowment. She had to rob Peter to pay Paul and figure out how to raise those dollars, year after year, to keep that school open. It stayed open for over a half a century. It graduated thousands of Black minds, so think generations of our very first African-American college graduates. Many of them came from the Haynes Institute. And this, again you can trace this story back to the root was her freedom dreams. And she and she did all of this in the gym in the Jim Crow South, where African-Americans didn't have the right to vote, where they were excluded from all manner of you know society of national life. And yet, and still, without taking one tax dollar, she did all that. So I want us to ask ourselves what is your freedom dream and how are we taking the baton in this leg of the relay to do our part.
Speaker 2:Okay, and I think was it Adam Clayton Powell that said what's in your hand, you know what's in your hand? You know what's in your hand. You know what I mean. In her case, she didn't have very much in her hand and look what she did. It was in her head and then in her heart. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious. I have so many questions, you know so you entitled your book the Battle for the Black Mind, so I really want to kind of Dig it. How? Because I know you probably vetted many different titles. Right, you have this body of work. It's one of the most difficult things. Okay, what am I going to put on the cover of this Beyond the Beautiful Les? Can you hold it up again so we can just look at that beautiful artwork? We might want to mention the person there.
Speaker 2:The artist and there's a story about the young man that's on the cover as well.
Speaker 1:So is that the tree at the bottom? Is that the there's a tree on the?
Speaker 3:back as well. Yeah, I'm so glad y'all caught that.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, yes, come on now, yeah.
Speaker 3:That is Very special. Caught that. Yes, oh, yes, come on now. Oh, is it? Yeah, that's, that is very special actually. Uh, um, the artist and I went to hampton university, um, on a field visit for this cover and and just walked the grounds under that tree, under mary smith's's oak tree. It was a part of the spiritual practice that goes into my writing practice. It was also to allow us to embody visually. You know how we wanted to use this motif of the tree that you kind of read throughout the book. Yes, but that this line work that you see on the cover, with the tree in this young man's shirt, is in fact the tree from Hampton. So we took images there and I will note the artist, charlie Palmer, is also my dear husband. Yes, that's my man dear husband.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's my man. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:Another talent beyond words. So yeah, so talk about the battle, Like why do you see this as a battle? And maybe bring it forward to where we are now and and how we can fight, because I want to win the battle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it looks like we're winning the battle, you know. I think that the masses need to know that. Well, the many people already know we're winning the battle. That's why they're fighting harder. But let's talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:It was. It became clear to me very early on in the research that everybody had a vested interest in black education. Everybody cared about black minds. For some it was a matter of national security. There was a real question about the danger of allowing African-Americans in freedom to have access to education. For some, the question was what kind of education should black folks have? For others it was a question of should we have it at all? Okay, you also had many Northern missionaries who had a deep interest in helping to build up the black education system. Black and white missionaries who dropped everything that they had going on in their homes in Connecticut and Massachusetts and Rhode Island and move south right after the Civil War and lived there and lived and worked as teachers in many of these freedmen schools. They had an interest in the Black mind. Yeah, what was their motivation?
Speaker 1:What would make them?
Speaker 3:do that. For some it was a proselytizing mission to reinforce a religious education. For others it, you know, it was about control, meaning, you know, shaping the contours of what black folks were allowed to learn and what would be off limits for us. So you had a lot of differing interest, but nobody had more of an interest in Black education than Black Americans themselves. So why I call this a battle and I dedicate two chapters squarely on this topic? Also, philanthropist what we know today is like big philanthropy, which were, you know, predominantly white institutions. Big philanthropy was born on supporting and financing the spread of the education system in the South. They too had a specific interest in black education. Why? Because who were America's first philanthropists? They were your robber barons from the Gilded Age.
Speaker 2:They were your Carnegie's. They were your.
Speaker 3:Rockefeller's and so on. And what did they need? An endless supply of manual labor. They wanted laborers who would do not think they wanted to break unions OK. They wanted to save costs and stop having to import labor from Europe when they could just tap into and exploit the potential labor pool of black Americans in the South into and exploit the potential labor pool of black Americans in the South. So you have all these forces landing on this battleground of the black education system. That's why it's called Battle for the Black Mind.
Speaker 3:It's not just a history. It's not just a tale of what one, any one group, did. This is a story about power. Think of a tug of war. But it's not just two ways, it's multiple ropes trying to pull that thing and shape that thing. Because we all understand knowledge is power and whoever would win this battle would be able to shape the future for generations to come. And that is why today we are seeing the same battles happening. Where's that battlefield? Our American education system is once again under attack. And there are all these competing interests because we know that the moral conscious of the nation is, and has always been, rooted in the school yeah, right education right, oh my gosh, wow, okay, so we won't go into this too much, but I did want to ask you to touch on the um, um, how, um?
Speaker 1:w eb du bois and um, um and washington, what's it? It's not um, I'm just WEB Du Bois and Washington. It's not.
Speaker 2:Washington. I'm just reading the.
Speaker 1:Miscommunication of the Negro, and say the name Leslie Washington. What's his first name?
Speaker 2:Booker T Washington.
Speaker 1:Booker T Washington. Thank you, how those two men were at odds, if you could just kind of mention that. I just want to kind of, because I know a lot of people kind of hear about that and this is philanthropists. Thanks to Dr Brown's book, I'm learning this, how these philanthropists got involved.
Speaker 2:Inserted themselves into the fight and chose sides and stirred the pot and because they had an interest.
Speaker 1:It was messy Because they had an interest it was messy, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I will be brief and I won't share too much, because I want our readers and friends to really dig into this chapter.
Speaker 2:No spoiler alerts. No spoiler alerts.
Speaker 3:But I will say this I have a whole chapter on the beef between Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois, and this is really important because I want everybody to understand what that battle was really about yes, and the what it did for black political thought at the time. So I say that before there was Kendrick and Drake, before Jay-Z and Nas, before Biggie and Tupac, this beef between WEB Du Bois and Booker T Washington, that was. That was the original disc tape. That was the original disc tape. Never before in American history did we see two black titans come out on the public stage and go at it, yeah, and put all their business out in the street and we don't do that right and it and it was important and and I I say that in the book because I want to, um, I want to remind us that book because I want to.
Speaker 3:I want to remind us that disc tapes are, in fact, an important genre in African American history. It is, yes, it's the beef between the two figures, but what it is those two figures stand in for and they are avatars for different ideologies.
Speaker 2:That we're not a monolith, and that's just what I'm saying. We are not a monolith. Yes, and that's just what I'm saying. We are not a monolith. So it's not one thought. It's such a diversity of thought and opinions.
Speaker 1:Malcolm and Martin all the way down. Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 3:And what the disc tape as a genre does, and I love that you brought in Malcolm and Martin just another binary that we can think about it. What the genre does is it allows room for everyday folks to get into the political discourse and we start having these discussions in our home, in our communities. We start beefing, but that is the fertilizer for political action. So so I didn't want to minimize that it really, it really is a form.
Speaker 1:OK, it's an aesthetic, a black aesthetic.
Speaker 3:And what were Booker T Washington and Du Bois? What was at the core of their beef? It was over black education. Their beef it was over black education. It was this beef.
Speaker 2:Each one had different ideas about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, industrial education or liberal education? Which one was the pathway? I do believe that both of these men had the same destination in mind at the end of their freedom dreams for black people they wanted us to be free, healthy, whole and self-determined. However, the pathway for how they thought we should get there were diametrically opposed and they beefed about that vehemently. And what is important also, that I want you all to have an open mind about when you read this book, because folks be on my social media, coming at my, coming at my neck, because I've talked about some of I talk about some of your heroes in this book, that critical discourse. We need to be able to ask ourselves questions, to interrogate these facets of our political history, because they will inform us and equip us for today and what we know, what we saw from these men. Even though they beefed for the entirety of Booker T Washington's life, him and Du Bois continue to write each other letters. They continue to sit on panels with one another yes.
Speaker 3:So what that told me was you know they both love black people enough to fight it out, but still get back in there because they, they both knew what we're going. So that that lesson there is. Y'all, we can't be canceling each other this cancel culture.
Speaker 2:Come on now. Yeah, and the importance of truth and not hiding the truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I listen. Really, this book is mind-expanding.
Speaker 2:That's a great way to say it.
Speaker 1:I believe Leslie and I have been talking about AI a lot. It's one of the things that we fear, but we've decided to look at it in the face and kind of. And as I read your book and even now hearing you kind of go into it a little more deeply, I'm thinking about this time. What are we prepared to do this time? What are our freedom dreams?
Speaker 2:this time, this time.
Speaker 1:And a call to action you
Speaker 2:know to really make those freedom dreams a reality.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So let us remind ourselves today, like we're not just going to do democracy because that is a verb, we're not going to take it for granted and think it's something that's just going to fall in our lap OK. But when we do democracy there, it matters how we show up to yes and we can show. We can show up with our heads held high, knowing that we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, who have assured the relay for us generation after generation after generation, and did it with grace and aplomb and love and radical freedom, dreaming and political imagination. So how dare we think that we're going to be woe is me and wallowing in fear and analysis, paralysis and feeling overwhelmed like there's nothing we can do.
Speaker 3:Perhaps today might be difficult, but I'm here to tell you that there is no fascist regime in history that's ever lasted. It's empirically a fact that these types of regimes do not last. So what does that tell us? While we're the small axes fall in those big trees of oppression, standing up every day doing the things that we need to do to take our democracy back, we also have to have a mindset of those freedom dreams of what comes after, a mindset of those freedom dreams of what comes after. What United States do we want for ourselves to live in, to be able to grow old in for our children and grandchildren, for those who are not born yet of our families? And we have to imagine that and show up in that form.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's what Miss Lucy did, that's what Mary did and Mary did, and yeah, yeah, they weren't thinking for themselves.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, okay, oh my gosh, I got chills Girl you just gave me. I like my eyes got a little wet. I'm like sweating yeah, but yeah. Like sweating yeah, but yeah, it's real.
Speaker 3:I appreciate the opportunity whenever I get to talk about this. You know, sometimes when we read books about our history that deal especially with this period of time of Jim Crow, it's like you got to brace yourself and gird your loins because it was hard, it was heartbreaking and an all manner of injustice and terror, and I'm not diminishing that. But I was also reading the archive for hope. I was also reading the archive for joy, yes, you know, because we had that too and it wasn't hard to find.
Speaker 2:And that's what I felt reading these early stories about what she did, what.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah. So I think that's also, and we need those reminders because it's easy to identify and name the things that aren't working. But there is so much that was being done on the ground then Our Lucys, our Marys, our Charlotte Hawkins Browns, but there's so much that is being done on the ground right now, today, and we cannot lose sight of what we are doing. That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right. Wow, sight of what we are doing. That's right. That's right. And I'm going to bring this to a close and again talk about legacy. You know, even if you don't feel like you're the one, because it only takes one, find organizations, be in community where it's already started. It's already started and you can join, link up, as we say Jameek, you can link up with work that is already going on and see how you can bring your gifts and talents to that work. That is how this happens. These women started schools. They were not alone. They had to get resources. They were resourceful. Be the resources.
Speaker 1:Be, the resources to help to put these changes that we want to see in place.
Speaker 2:But even more than that, ange, and I think that what's easier than that, dr Corita, as an oral historian, we just got to keep talking about it. We just got to keep talking about it. I mean this book, I mean we just got to talk about it. Hey, did you know such and such? Let me show you. Let me show you. You ain't going to believe this. Look at the picture.
Speaker 3:Look at this tree.
Speaker 2:We just have to keep talking about it. Yeah, yes. That's a part of our history too, and that is also a part of our history.
Speaker 1:The griot part of our history where we share stories, we pass on stories. Yeah, we appreciate you being here so very much. Yes, yes, we applaud your work. We're here for you if there's anything that you believe we can do, even in the farthest reaches of your mind, if you can think of anything that Leslie or I can be of service to your work we are here for you, we are the aunties.
Speaker 1:We are here for you and we are just cheering you on with everything and keeping you in prayer, of course, oh, thank you yes. Yes, thank you.
Speaker 2:Wow, I appreciate that. Thank you, oh, wow, appreciate that. And I'm like sweating, I'm like getting tearful and what a way to end.
Speaker 1:But you know why? Because I feel it. I feel it in my spirit, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I got to say this has been another episode of Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn, brooklyn.
