Schooled: The Education of Black and Indigenous People in the United States and Abroad, 1730-1980

Khalil Johnson

Schooled: The Education of Black and Indigenous People in the United States and Abroad, 1730-1980, unravels the threads binding four generations of social reformers, missionaries, philanthropists, activists, and teachers who, since the eighteenth century, used schooling to reconcile the founding cataclysms of the United States––the ongoing presence of Indigenous nations, free black people, and non-white immigrants. During the interwar period in the twentieth century, a pedagogical forged among formerly enslaved African American and captive American Indian students at Hampton Institute in Virginia became integral to British Indirect Rule in colonial Africa and Oceania, eventually circling back to the United States to form the backbone of American Indian education policy during the New Deal. This colonial genealogy of American education offers a substantially different interpretation of twentieth century education and activism. The different kinds or rights, discipline, and security African Americans and Native Americans experienced in the United States ultimately brought both groups together on reservations after Brown v. Board of Education. Between 1954 and 1974, southern resistance to desegregation displaced an estimated forty thousand African Americans from teaching positions. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials, urgently in need of teachers, capitalized on displacement and developed a recruitment policy targeting beleaguered black teachers, offering civil rights protections to beleaguered black teachers in exchange for their participation in eliminating Native sovereignty. As BIA employees, African American educators continued to organize resistance against white supremacy and mounted appeals for universal human rights from new homes in Indian Country, while American Indian nations embarked upon their own campaigns for self-determination.

About Khalil Johnson

Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr., specializes in the intertwined histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous people in North America, with emphases on U.S. settler colonialism, education, and counter-hegemonic social movements. He holds an B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, and a Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. While teaching elementary school on the Navajo Nation, he unwittingly joined a historic cohort of African Americans who taught in reservation boarding schools as employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the civil rights era. In his current manuscript project, Schooled: The Education of Black and Indigenous People in the United States and Abroad, 1730-1980, Johnson historicizes the Post-War migration of hundreds of African American educators to Indian Country ultimately unearthed a colonial genealogy of four generations of social reformers, missionaries, philanthropists, activists, and teachers who, since the eighteenth century, have used schooling to reconcile the founding cataclysms of the United States––the ongoing presence of Indigenous nations, free black people, and non-white immigrants. The result is a dramatic and transnational reinterpretation of American education and its consequences for colonized peoples across the globe. Dr. Johnson’s research has received support from numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. His essays and editorials have appeared in American Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, and the Navajo Times. In 2015, he received recognition from the Western History Association for the year’s best essay on Native American history. His teaching areas include courses in the history of emancipatory education and U.S. empire, early African American history, American Indian history, and popular music.