This article concerns the tragedy of the misuse of power and the power of imagined inferiority. African Americans must lose misconceptions about the majority, heighten understanding about being Black in America and how that makes their children vulnerable to this nation's worst, stop fighting losing battles like affirmative action, and find and…

We suggest that there is a powerful and affirming socialization taking place in African American communities that could be instructive to schools. This article illustrates how educators can build on the strengths found in the black community to effectively teach African American students. Relating the ethos of the barbershop to tenets of…

This article examines the history, present, and future of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). We begin with a brief review of the existing literature on HBCUs, considering common themes and how these institutions changed over time within a broader socio-historical landscape. In addition to historical information, we use a…

The following essay seeks to highlight the use of engaged qualitative community-based research in education to respond to conditions of structural inequality. As "the politics of interruption", the process of creating neighborhood public high schools is centred in community accountability. Responsibility in this mode…

The narrative inquiry reported in this study offers a partial view of Cochrane Academy's nuanced landscape. This article elaborates a theoretical frame, then uses different story perspectives to survey Cochrane's professional knowledge landscape over time. It relates what currently is Cochrane Academy to parkland landscape, and it discusses the…

In this chapter response, the author revisits young men and women whose voluntary writing and visual literacy practices helped teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers rethink the "funds of knowledge" urban youth bring to classroom communities. She examines transformations of everyday spaces into teaching and learning…

This paper investigated African American college students' responses to a set of interview questions selected from a larger survey instrument in an exploratory study of basic attitudes about HIV/AIDS. Forty-two participants responded to an interview schedule in an investigation of student attitudinal domains regarding the HIV/AIDS epidemic.…

Within this article I describe, with the help of my masters in education (MEd) students who are also my coresearchers, the results of a year-long, cooperative inquiry aimed at exploring and making concrete the ways in which cultural and political knowledge can be explored, understood, and personalized as prospective teachers begin to develop…

In this article, the author synthesizes a collection of scholarship done by, and on, Thomas Jesse Jones and Carter G. Woodson as a source for understanding historical conceptions of citizenship education for African Americans. The author contends that Jones and Woodson played central roles in constructing competing conceptions of citizenship…

Against the backdrop of magnificent hooks and hypnotic beats, tapper 50 Cent, whose "street cred" is cemented by his survival in spite of a reported nine gunshot blasts, boasts that he "is into havin' sex" but "ain't into makin' love." On entertainment television, Snoop Dogg declares his desire to produce pornographic films and "become a…

This study uses industrial pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and tract-level demographic data from the 2000 U.S. census to determine whether environmental racial inequality existed in the Detroit metropolitan area in the year 2000. This study differs from prior environmental inequality…

This article is a retrospective analysis of a commentary we published in "The Journal of Negro Education" 25 years ago in which we discussed the interrelationships between and among the interpersonal, institutional, community, and African American achievement variables before and after the historic 1954 "Brown" decision. We discuss in this piece…

In this article, the author presents the life and legacy of Rosa Parks. The author highlights four children's books that accurately portray Parks as an activist and acknowledge the broader context of her life's story--and the years of struggle of the black community against Jim Crow laws. The four children's books share Rosa Park's story in ways…

This article challenges social (dis)organization theory by investigating the impact of religious culture on civic engagement. Using qualitative data from 'Bridge View,' a historically African-American neighborhood in San Francisco experiencing environmental racism, this article asks: (1) How does the Nation of Islam (NOI) affect social…

The unique role played by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the African American community, particularly in the educational plans of students and their families, is more vital to understand. A study analyzes interview and focus-group data with African American students, parents, and counselors at 20 southern California high…