The least studied aspect of the Black Power movement may be the educational initiatives to which it gave birth, the rethinking of what it means to raise black children in the context of white supremacy, reflecting “a strategic and philosophical shift from the pursuit of reform within a liberal democracy to the attempt to build the prospective infrastructure for an independent black nation, an entity that many activists imagined as a political and spiritual extension of the Third World” (p. 3). In We Are an African People, historian Russell Rickford takes on, with considerable success, the daunting task of reclaiming that history. From the first, while he finds much that is powerful and generative in the nationalist vision, he makes it abundantly clear that he is disturbed by the narrowness and romanticism of some versions of nationalism. His language makes sure that no one misses the point—“infantile” nationalisms or “bourgeois” nationalisms. He doesn't want this history framed as a declension story, but that seems a reasonable label for a story that ends with the institutions that once “embodied the promise of Black Power” overwhelmed by neoliberalism and bourgeois Afrocentrism, “stripped of oppositional meaning” (p. 253).

With the Black Power movement at the center, the story stretches across the twentieth century. He finds the proximate roots of Pan-African nationalist schools partly in the late 1960s struggles for community control, following the collapse of the integrationist ideal. (The community control story is told largely through a New York City lens, which gives it a particular flavor.) After he tells that story—a more chronological presentation might have been clearer—he moves back in time to discuss precursors, educational institutions that grew out of mass struggle, the schools connected to Marcus Garvey's movement, those of the Nation of Islam, and various efforts of the civil rights movement in the post-war Deep South, most generatively the Freedom Schools of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Rickford does yeoman's work bringing some clarity to the swirling ideological and political currents of the times; he manages to convey both the wide variety of approaches taken to liberatory education and the underlying coherence of purpose and vision. He challenges reductionist assumptions about the movement and critiques reductionist thinking within it. He adds to the literature rejecting Black Power as merely the irrational decline of the Civil Rights struggle. He is emphatic in his insistence on seeing nationalism as constantly evolving, buttressing the point with many vivid vignettes of personal growth and transformation, including stories of women who eventually learned to articulate the needs of women and girls despite men who thought that nations could be built on the subordination of women. (We could have used more on men like Haki Madhubuti and Amiri Baraka, who went through the same learning process.) His index lists something in the neighborhood of forty different schools—to say nothing of educators’ groups, theater projects, parent organizations, and other educational formations—and he has an impressive knowledge of the local context, the key personalities, the politics, and the struggles faced in many of them. The scholarship is at a high level, but he manages to convey something of the excitement of the times, the sense of new intellectual ground being turned, and turned yet again. Even when he is repeating twice-told tales, he adds little-known facts or novel interpretations.

The scholarship is sufficiently thick that one might fail to notice that nestled between the mountains of evidence supporting some points are other points supported only by assertion. Some of the more arguable interpretations raise the possibility that the close focus on the movement's contradictions—sexism, rigidity, narrow focus on race, reductionist thinking, elitism, and disrespect for the lived African American experience paired with romanticized visions of Africa—leads Professor Rickford into indulging in some of the polemics he should be analyzing. The portrait of Amiri Baraka might have made it clear that, staunch nationalist though he was, he crossed all kinds of ethnic and ideological lines to forge alliances in Newark. Summarizing the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, as anemic, chauvinist, bourgeois nationalism (p. 137) seems at odds with other accounts stressing the complexity of viewpoints vigorously represented there, such as Komozi Woodard's A Nation within a Nation (1999). Just the presence of the National Welfare Rights Organization meant that questions of gender and class received some attention. Similarly, it seems odd to omit the fact that Safisha Madhubuti, the animating force behind Chicago's New Concept Development Center, became president of the American Educational Research Association, suggesting something about the caliber of some of the people willing to devote themselves to this work. So much attention is given to the movement's problematic side that some of its possibilities are obscured.

Thus, the decision of some schools, often after decades-long struggles to stay financially solvent, to accept charter school funding is framed as a fundamental betrayal:

We need to see the final analysis, not assume it. This feels like the kind of reductionist thinking much of the book skillfully critiques. Self-sacrificing idealists don't inevitably become corporate stooges because they are finally getting paid. Corporate fat cats don't always get the schools they think they are paying for.

We could assess that better with a more sustained discussion of the impact these schools had on their students, irrespective of their funding sources. The book opens with Julius Nyerere: “Our education must therefore inculcate a sense of commitment to the whole community and help the pupils accept the values appropriate to our kind of future, not those appropriate to our colonial past” (p. 1). Well, did these schools do that? Even in a book framed as intellectual history, that question seems pivotal. Some schools cite impressive anecdotal evidence about their impact, and the bits Rickford offers are interesting. It is no easy question, but a more extensive discussion of whether these schools, problems notwithstanding, were delivering, in their own terms, a better education, would help us understand what there is in this history that can be built upon.

No book addresses all the important questions. This is still a strong, scholarly contribution to a much overlooked and continuing educational experiment, one that will, we should hope, start a great many debates that don't have easy answers.