Chapter 11: Social Reconstruction in Education: Searching Out Black Voices

The Social Reconstruction movement of the 1930s was one of the most provocative and fascinating educational protest movements of the early twentieth century.¹ In broad terms, it connected education to the class struggle. Historically, it forever connected schooling to social protest.

The loose assemblage of university professors, teachers, school reformers, iconoclastic intellectuals, Progressives, Marxists-Leninists, (anti-Communist) socialists, and assorted radicals made for an interesting adventure in dissent. Although short-lived, this educational “movement” took up highly volatile and super-charged political issues of power, property, wealth distribution, knowledge selection, and societal reform as few other groups of educators, before or after, have dared.