THE BATTLE FOR THE BLACK MIND

How Black identity has been shaped by schools and ideologies of control.

“The struggle over the Black mind has been a defining feature of each generation’s fight,” writes Brown, a sociologist. Like a flag planted on alien soil, her book stakes a claim on Black education as central to American history. The book shows how Black Americans fit, or did not fit, into institutions of instruction over the past two centuries. It reveals how the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education, framed largely in the wake of Booker T. Washington’s example, was education not by Black Americans but for them. It tells the story of the founding and the flourishing of historically Black colleges and universities. Brown writes a personal history of coming to terms with what it means to be educated and Black in America. She sounds a call for activism in response to governmental scaling back of diversity initiatives and the recognition of African American achievement. Familiar names from Black history take on new urgency here: W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke (the first Black Rhodes scholar), Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Thomas Jesse Jones. In its chronicles of these and many other figures, and in its clear outlining of the legal and social watersheds in American history (from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education), the book offers an effective and forceful guide charting Black history. Written in a vivid vernacular by a gifted teacher, it speaks for a generation of students who are asking “questions that demand justice and recognition: What were the contributions of our ancestors? What does true repair look like in this moment? They are pushing for access, representation, and a profound sense of belonging. And they’re not waiting around—they’re demanding change now.”

An uncompromising history of Black education in America.