Radical Black Teachers, Fugitive Pedagogy, and the Struggle for Black Education

What does it mean to teach when the truth itself is being outlawed?
For generations, Black educators have answered that question not by retreating—but by resisting. Not by complying—but by creating what Jarvis R. Givens calls fugitive pedagogy: forms of teaching that slip past the watchful eyes of power, that nurture critical consciousness even when the state demands silence.
We know about this tradition not only through memory, but through the records educators left behind. The Black Teacher Archive, a collection of lesson plans, letters, and classroom materials from Black educators, reveals how teachers challenged the limits placed on what could be taught. These documents show that even when constrained by racist curricula, Black teachers found ways to expand their students’ understanding of history, identity, and possibility.
This tradition begins in the most dangerous of places: the plantation.
Under slavery, teaching Black people to read was illegal across the South. Education was seen as a direct threat to the U.S. system of white supremacy. And yet, enslaved people learned anyway—often in secret, often at great risk.
One of the most powerful examples comes from Lilly Ann Granderson, who was born into slavery in Virginia in 1812 and later taken to Mississippi. Under a system that criminalized Black literacy, Granderson did not simply resist—she organized.
Her school did not meet during the day. It could not. Instead, classes began at midnight, tucked away in a hidden room off a back alley, far from the eyes of enslavers who understood that literacy was a threat to their power. The school was small by necessity—never more than a dozen students at a time—but it was constantly in motion.
Students entered quietly and left with something far more dangerous: the ability to read and write.
When they had learned enough, they made way for others. In this way, Granderson’s classroom functioned as a rotating underground network of learning. Over time, she taught hundreds. And what her students did with that knowledge reveals why her work was so subversive. Some used their literacy to forge travel passes—documents that could mean the difference between bondage and freedom.
In a society built on controlling knowledge, her classroom was an act of organized defiance.
After the Civil War, that struggle did not end—it transformed.
Black educators built schools across the South during Reconstruction, often in the face of white supremacist violence. These classrooms became spaces where newly freed people could claim knowledge that had long been denied to them. Education was central to the broader struggle for political and economic rights, and Black teachers stood at the heart of that movement.
By the early 20th century, the terrain of struggle had shifted again—from access to schooling to the content of what was being taught.
In Washington, D.C., educator and activist Mary Church Terrell helped lead celebrations of Frederick Douglass’s birthday—moments that teachers used to introduce students to Black history absent from official textbooks. Building on this tradition, Carter G. Woodson expanded the idea into a national movement. Recognizing that Black history had been systematically erased or distorted, Woodson launched Negro History Week in 1926 through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. What had been localized efforts like Douglass Day became a coordinated intervention across schools.
Woodson provided teachers with materials, texts, and guidance—and educators across the country took it up. In classrooms nationwide, they carved out time to teach histories that had been denied, turning Negro History Week into a collective act of reclaiming memory.
By the mid-20th century, this tradition took on new forms in the fight against Jim Crow.
Consider Septima Clark, often called the “Mother of the Movement.” Clark understood that literacy was not neutral—it was power. When South Carolina banned NAACP membership for public employees, she refused to renounce her beliefs and was fired from her teaching job. But losing her position did not stop her teaching—it transformed it.
Clark helped build the Citizenship Schools, where Black adults learned to read, write, and pass literacy tests—not just to vote, but to understand and challenge the world around them. These were not just schools; they were incubators of democracy. In those classrooms, education became a tool of liberation, not compliance.
That vision would expand even further during the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1964, during Freedom Summer, activists in Mississippi reimagined what schooling itself could be. At the center of that vision was Charlie Cobb of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who first proposed the idea of Freedom Schools. Cobb believed that young people needed more than access to segregated and underfunded institutions—they needed an education that helped them understand their history, question injustice, and see themselves as agents of change.
The Freedom Schools did exactly that. Students studied Black history, debated political questions, wrote about their own experiences, and imagined new futures. Education was no longer about fitting into the world as it was—it was about transforming it.
Across each of these eras, we see the same pattern: when official systems of education are designed to maintain inequality, Black educators create alternative spaces that tell the truth.
This is the essence of fugitive pedagogy. It insists that education is not about memorizing what power deems acceptable, but about developing the capacity to question, to analyze, and to imagine a different world.
And that tradition is alive.
Today, educators face a new wave of repression: laws banning the teaching of systemic racism, attacks on ethnic studies, and efforts to erase the histories of Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people. These are what Jesse Hagopian has called “truthcrime laws”—policies that attempt to criminalize the act of teaching honestly.
But just as in earlier eras, these efforts are being met with resistance.
Teachers are finding ways to bring in primary sources, to ask critical questions, to create classrooms where students can grapple with the contradictions of this country. They are organizing teach-ins, building networks of solidarity, and refusing to let fear dictate their practice.
In other words, they are carrying forward the tradition of radical Black educators.
This tradition teaches us something essential: the struggle over education is not just about curriculum—it is about power. Who gets to define knowledge? Whose stories are told? And what kind of society are we preparing young people to build?
Radical Black educators have always answered these questions with clarity. They have insisted that education must be rooted in truth, oriented toward justice, and committed to collective liberation. 
And they have shown us that even under the most repressive conditions, teaching the truth is still possible. As Septima Clark reminded us, “We need to be taught to study rather than to believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.”

Jesse Hagopian