In the opening pages of Fugitive Pedagogy, Jarvis Givens tells the reader about Tessie McGee. In the early 1930s, McGee taught history at Webster Parish Training School, a segregated African American high school in northwestern Louisiana. McGee had a prescribed social studies curriculum she was expected to follow, but she incorporated subtle acts of subversion to teach her students Black history and undermine the Eurocentric messaging of traditional history textbooks. “She used to read from [Carter G. Woodson's] book,” one of her students would recall decades later. “When the principal would come in, she would . . . simply lift her eyes to the outline that resided on the desk and teach us from the outline. When the principal disappeared, her eyes went back to the book in her lap” (pp. 1–2).
McGee's story serves as an example of “fugitive pedagogy,” a concept that Givens first identifies outside the context of education. In his introduction, he explains that “fugitivity” was part of a long tradition of “subversive practices [in] black social life,” functioning as a key method of survival “over and against the persistent violence of white supremacy” (p. 10). Fugitive practices date back to the enslavement of African peoples and they continued into Jim Crow. In the aftermath of slavery, African Americans treated fugitivity as a shared cultural inheritance, adopting it as an orientation toward their social world. For Givens, Black teaching and learning was no exception. From covert reading lessons among enslaved peoples to classroom plays depicting the life of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, Givens sees Black education steeped in fugitive practices.
Fugitive pedagogy is more than tradition. Givens employs the concept as an interpretative framework—a way of looking past surface-level information provided in Black archival sources. At the core of Fugitive Pedagogy is an argument about methodology, interpretation, and the Black historical record. To understand Black Americans’ engagement with school during de jure segregation, historians must be aware of subtle ways Black teaching and learning aligned with a larger project of racial self-determination. Throughout the book, Givens carefully guides his readers through instances of epistemic resistance that were carried out by interwar Black teachers. To be sure, records documenting a clear act of pedagogical subversion, such as Tessie McGee's story, are exceedingly rare; indeed, it is difficult to find any record of Black classrooms during Jim Crow. But Givens combines limited classroom records with curriculum and textbooks developed to teach students about Black history and culture, much of which was written by African American educators. As he argues, in a context in which Black people experienced the pervasive message that they were less human—devoid of culture, history, and legitimate knowledge—the effort of educators to humanize Black identity through the curriculum was an act of political defiance. Segregation did not prevent the prying eyes of White administrators, but it did enable the development of Black institutions that catered to African American teachers and passed along resources and practices of fugitive pedagogy.
Givens's book may be about Black teaching generally, but Carter G. Woodson is the educator who anchors this story. In this respect, Fugitive Pedagogy is part of a growing literature interested in Woodson status as an “educator”—Black teachers dubbed him a “schoolmaster to his race”—rather than the more traditional approach of viewing him through his accomplishment in the field of Black history. In the first two chapters, Givens provides a biography of Woodson's early life and his establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). His foray into teaching began as a boy in post-Reconstruction Virginia, reading newspapers aloud to his father and later a group of Civil War veterans he worked with as a young man the in the coal mines in West Virginia. During the turn of the century, Woodson traveled to the Philippines to teach along with thousands of other Americans who worked for a United States War Department program aimed at bolstering US military occupation of the country. Later he worked as a teacher at M Street High School in Washington, DC, one of the more prestigious Black schools during the period. Woodson's most significant influence in the world of education did not come from his own teaching, but rather his founding of the ASNLH. Woodson created the ASNLH in 1915 and it quickly became his life's work. By the late 1920s, the organization served as a network among Black teachers. It was not that Woodson himself was enacting fugitive pedagogy—although Givens points to moments when that was the case—but that the ASNLH became a kind of organizational home base for Black curricular resistance. The ASNLH offered textbooks on Black history, pictures of famous African Americans, and promoted Negro History Week, all while helping to organize and mentor teachers. Through the ASNLH, Woodson helped create and sustain a grassroots network of Black teachers practicing fugitive pedagogy.
Later chapters shift from biography to theory. In chapter 3, Givens focuses on Woodson's criticism of American schooling stemming from his famous Mis-education of the Negro (1933). He frames Woodson's book as part of a larger tradition of Black educational criticism that sought to provide a “new language to talk about Blackness, power, and technologies of schooling” (p. 96). Chapter 4 examines themes that emerged from Woodson's textbooks and the ASNLH's curriculum materials. In this chapter, Givens is particularly interested in the imagery of the “fugitive slave,” which served as an important symbol of Black resistance and which Woodson drew heavily upon in his teaching material. Chapter 5 highlights professional networks among Black teachers, arguing that the ASNLH, as well as state-level teacher organizations, played an important role in shaping Black schoolteachers’ political understanding of their work. Fugitive pedagogy was not an individual practice; it was a professional standard integrated into the culture of Black education. The final chapter examines Black students’ experience of fugitive pedagogy. This chapter relies significantly on oral histories from African American students, many of whom discuss the transformative experience of Negro History Week and the power of Black educational spaces. The conclusion connects Givens's history of fugitive pedagogy with the emergence of Black studies in higher education in the 1960s.
These summaries of Givens's six chapters and conclusion fail to capture the interpretative brilliance of Fugitive Pedagogy. Fugitive pedagogy functions as a conceptual apparatus—a “metanarrative” of Black education—but Givens also gracefully draws on a range of other scholarship from Black studies (and the context of Black life), such as the ideas of “vindicationism” and the “oppositional gaze,” to fill out our understanding of African Americans’ educational pursuits. He does this in chapter 3 when he argues for viewing Woodson's educational criticism as its own normative theory—it served as the basis for new forms of Black representation and guided educators toward the emancipatory potential of their curricula. In a similar vein, Fugitive Pedagogy offers a new orientation toward Black archives. Givens shows that schooling was deeply intertwined with the social and political aspirations of African Americans. We must draw upon the latter to inform our understanding of the former. I suspect Givens's book will have an influence that stretches well beyond scholarship on Woodson.
Like any piece of interpretative history, there is room for disagreement. My biggest concern with Fugitive Pedagogy is that the author leaves little middle ground between the cultural practices of dominant White society and Black fugitivity. Granted, Givens is careful in his framing of the idea of “fugitive”—it is not meant to be an essentialist ideal applied to all teachers or a particular achievement. Fugitive pedagogy may have been a means of intellectual “escape” for African Americans, but, as he explains, “escape is an activity,” not an endpoint. Still, even as an activity, the concept of fugitive pedagogy tends to overlook the ways in which Black educators and intellectuals worked within the boundaries of White supremacy, even as they pushed back on its racial hierarchies and dehumanizing representations. For example, many of the same teachers that Givens praises drew heavily upon a discourse of civilization that had served as an intellectual foundation for colonial expansion and systems of racial apartheid. Of course, these teachers were resisting an ideal of Whiteness as a defining marker of civilization; rather, they were arguing for Black people's inclusion within the highest rungs of civilization. Woodson also operated in the language and logic of dominant White society, particularly in his heavy emphasis that the ASNLH's scholarship represented an “objective” or “scientific” rendering of Black people's past. The ideal of scholarly “objectivity” has long been used to disparage alternative forms of knowledge production and cultural life, including the “propaganda” of Black radicals and indigenous forms of oral history and storytelling.
This concern does not undermine the power and potency of Fugitive Pedagogy. Givens's book is beautifully written, elegantly argued, and provides a valuable intervention into the historiography of Black education. In this moment, it also provides a timely reminder that conservative backlash against race-conscious curricula is far from new. For those carrying the banner of “antiracist” education, Woodson and the Black teachers in Fugitive Pedagogy may offer valuable lessons about where we go from here.
