Chapter 1: African American Activism and the Struggle for Educational Achievement and Leadership: A Historical Perspective

The history of African American education is replete with struggle, courage and persistence. The struggle has often been in the form of activism with advocacy and agitation. Understanding how resistance and activism are developed and applied is important in the struggle for educational equality and opportunity. Utilizing historical examples that show how courage and persistence were hallmarks of community resistance and activism, this chapter discusses the development of educational resistance and activism within the African American community. This chapter also focuses on examples of African American educational leadership and how that leadership was developed and honed within the culture of community resistance and activism.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground;

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. (Douglass, 1857, para. 7 & 8)