Stealin’ the Meetin’: The Roots & Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School.

Robert Robinson

This Spencer project chronicles the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School and its extension of the Black radical tradition in education. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP) has occupied much of the broad discourse on Black Power activism in the United States. Many of the lay conversations about the BPP evoke images of men with guns and berets. However, the growing scholarship on Black Power and BPP texts situate the Party within the gender, economic, educational, and political struggles in the Black Bay Area, the nation, and Third World movement discourse. In the area of education, a number of works have discussed the Party's programs for children, and a smaller number focus on its flagship school: The Oakland Community School (OCS). As the final iteration of the Panthers' full-time day school that operated from 1970-1982, the OCS has allowed researchers to view the relationship between ideology, political practice, and educational praxis. Drawing from widely-cited archives, rarely-cited archives, author-conducted oral history interviews, recorded panel discussions, periodicals, and secondary source material, the study extends the OCS narrative by tracing its curricular trajectory and highlighting the voices of students, parents, and staff. As the first full-length book of the school, Stealin' the Meetin' traces the roots of the OCS to the history of Black self-determination and Black education in the U.S., positioning the school in the long tradition of education for liberation that critical educators still draw from today.

About Robert Robinson

Robert P. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at John Jay College and Doctoral Faculty in Urban Education, Africana Studies, and Interactive Technology & Pedagogy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Prior to higher education, he was a K-12 educator and mentor for 11 years. His broad research and teaching focus on the Black Freedom Movement, Black education history, Blackqueer studies, digital humanities, history of education, and curriculum studies. Robinson's work can be found in Women's Studies Quarterly, the Journal for Multicultural Education, Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion, Theory, Research and Action in Urban Education, and more. His forthcoming book: Stealin' the Meetin': The Roots & Legacy of the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School will be published through NYU Press under their Black Power Series.