Black Education as the General Strike: The Radical Origins of African American Teaching and Learning

This essay interprets the development of Black educational politics from the slavery era into the early twentieth century through the frame of W.E.B. Du Bois’s conceptualization of “the general strike.” The author insists that fugitive literacy practices among enslaved people posed a direct challenge to the political economy of slavery, and such actions anticipated the grassroots educational movement African Americans led during the Civil War and after. Black people’s pursuit of education disrupted the conditions of work during enslavement, and after emancipation their visions of education continued to be at odds with the racialized labor hierarchy. The essay explores this radical history to unpack its conceptual offering for thinking through contemporary concerns about education and Black social life.