The emerging Black Lives Matter movement has sparked countless discussions about the current leadership of the African American freedom struggle. The tensions among contemporary younger activists and older, well-known civil rights leaders have become increasingly prominent since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The younger leaders frequently employ the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #StayWoke on social media to call attention to their activism and the need to understand the interconnectedness of structural inequality, particularly racism, and the complexities and realities of police brutality. Some of these leaders include educators who are perhaps answering Tondra L. Loder-Jackson's call for a “resurgence of educational activism in this century to finally address the unfinished business of Brown” (p. 155) and a broader collective push for freedom “in a post–civil rights ‘colorblind racist’ context” (p. 149).
Loder-Jackson's Schoolhouse Activists: African American Educators and the Long Birmingham Civil Rights Movement offers a multigenerational account of black educators' activism, observations, practices, and concerns against the backdrop of Birmingham, known for watershed events during the classical phase of the long civil rights movement, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Loder-Jackson addresses the historical debate about whether black educators were activists or accommodationists. Citing civil rights historians who have captured black educators as passive as well as historians of African American education who have captured how black educational institutions were forged despite Jim Crow and the “goodness” of those institutions, she pushes readers to examine the activist-accommodationist dichotomy and the activities of African American educators.
From the outset, Loder-Jackson displays her deep commitment to interdisciplinary training in educational studies by drawing on disciplinary intersections and multiple methodologies to interrogate the history of black educators and contemporary black educators' experiences, dilemmas, and challenges. Loder-Jackson uses life stories to examine how different generations of African American educators conceived of, reflected on, and engaged with activism. She grapples with how to extend and expand Birmingham's civil rights history and black educators' history while simultaneously drawing on Patricia Hill Collins's black feminist thought and other perspectives to examine definitions of activism as conventional or unconventional, the educational activist praxis that has previously occurred in black schools, how activism changes, and contemporary issues. These perspectives allow her to bridge the history of African American education with its current manifestations and issues.
The first part of Loder-Jackson's book, “Breaking Ground and Laying the Foundation,” explores the history of black education in Birmingham, the development of black teachers associations, and the support educators offered during the civil rights movement. Like other historians, she foregrounds the role of everyday black citizens in the development of historic black schools, such as A. H. Parker High School in Birmingham, while also addressing the complexities of inadequate public funding and philanthropic endeavors. She examines the work of several early black educators in Alabama and how their work related to that of Booker T. Washington by including industrial education alongside more academic curricular offerings. Further, Loder-Jackson notes the importance of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in developing the black teaching force, and she argues that, by focusing on key individuals in the history of schooling in Alabama and Birmingham in particular, previous historians have negated the “elaborate, interconnected network of local, state, and national Black educators whose existence is virtually absent in civil rights history and underplayed in many histories of education” (p. 34). This network included organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), and the Alabama State Teachers Association (ASTA). Loder-Jackson uses secondary sources and a rich collection of primary sources, including oral histories, to engage readers about how black educators, whether in K–12 or higher education, walked a tightrope because of the repercussions they could face if they were active in the movement. Her work reveals how some teachers participated in clandestine activities, in particular during the Children's Crusade of 1963, and that former students recalled how teachers supported their activism.
In Part II, “Transitioning and Forging Ahead,” Loder-Jackson examines how black educators envision, remember, and enact activism. She first focuses on those educators born during the silent years (1925–1945) and the baby boomer (1945–1964) generation. One of the book's strengths is discussion of the activist trajectory and how black educators envisioned and remembered their activism. Having asked her participants open-ended questions about the meaning of activism and employing Collins's definition of black women's activism, Loder-Jackson illuminates six elements of the activist trajectory: 1) direct and indirect involvement in young adulthood and college, 2) clandestine support and silent protest during professional years, 3) resistance and adjustment to Brown deferred, 4) student advocacy in segregated and desegregated schools, 5) liberatory education and pedagogy, and 6) preparing white students for a new racial order. Loder-Jackson then engages with the post–civil rights movement cohort—those teachers born between 1966 and 1983. This younger generation concentrated more on what they deemed as problems internal to the African American community. For example, they named commercialization and commodification of hip hop as sources of trouble with today's youth (pp. 137–142; 148). Loder-Jackson acknowledges that her insider status perhaps proffers these perspectives. However, the perspectives seem a bit harsh and could be rendered more complex with scholarly discussion of why youth are drawn to hip hop and their beliefs about the society in which they live.
In general, this book causes us to deliberate what counts as activism and how individuals do or do not conceive of themselves as activists. Readers are pushed to consider why and how particular forms of resistance are assigned activist status. Moreover, Loder-Jackson links the past and present by interviewing teachers born in different phases of the long civil rights movement and examines how the post–hip hop generation is challenged to confront their current circumstances and what teachers can do to support them. Because Schoolhouse Activists covers a long period of time, analysis at times seems quite limited to the Birmingham context. Though this is the focus of her study, occasionally the reader may want further contextual explanations by, for instance, connecting this history to unfolding events in Montgomery, Mobile, or Selma. Some questions one may ask after reading the book include: How do these multigenerational teachers resonate with the research on black teachers in different locations or geographic regions? How can commentary on today's youth be rendered more complex with considerations of political, economic, and social change and stagnation in the South?
These questions aside, Loder-Jackson provides much to contemplate about how to bridge generations of black teachers and the importance of thinking about classrooms and schools as sites for social justice. Her bibliography in itself is a resource for scholars of African American educational history and African American education. By drawing on the work of Collins, Loder-Jackson expands the boundaries of African American educational history's intersection with theory. Overall, Schoolhouse Activists is an engaging account of black educators in Birmingham that provides new history and raises important questions about the activism of black educators past and present.
