Fugitive Pedagogy and the Many Paths to BLM at School

This year, as we prepare for the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, we honor a truth: education for Black freedom has never existed without a backlash. From enslaved people risking their lives to teach children letters in secret, to Reconstruction teachers facing arson, to Jim Crow educators nurturing Black intellectual life despite surveillance and threats—Black education has always required courage, creativity, and strategy. Historian Jarvis Givens calls this “fugitive pedagogy”—teaching that refuses domination and insists Black children deserve truth and dignity.

Today, educators again face gag orders, book bans, intimidation, and what we call truth crime laws designed to punish honest teaching. We recognize the fear and the real risk. And still, we teach. But we do so with strategy and imagination, knowing there is not one way to participate in Black Lives Matter at School.

There are many righteous ways to take part

• Some educators can teach lessons every day centering Black history, Black joy, and Black liberation.
• Some schools can host assemblies, panels, restorative circles, or art showcases.
• Some communities can organize citywide events, marches, teach-ins, or celebrations.
• Some people may express solidarity simply and powerfully—by wearing a BLM at School t-shirt, signaling visibility, courage, and care.
• For some, it will mean engaging in fugitive pedagogy: subtle, careful, quiet forms of truth-telling within classrooms.

​In places where the law criminalizes honesty, participation may look different—but no less powerful. For some that could mean moving learning beyond school walls—organizing Freedom School programs, community teach-ins, and public education spaces outside of the school day.

What matters is that we stay in motion together. Whether loudly or quietly, inside classrooms or beyond them, we are part of a long lineage of educators, students, families, and communities who refuse to surrender truth, memory, love, or the right of Black children to learn fully and freely.​

There is room for everyone in this movement.
Choose the path that keeps you safe, honors your community, and keeps the work alive.
Black lives still matter. Black truth still matters.
Black education will continue no matter what the lawbook says.

~ Jesse