Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland

This project investigates Black political organizing in Chicago around inequities in public education. Between the late 1960s and the 2000s Black Chicagoans organized within and outside of the public school system around integration, Black educational institution building, and community control. These diverse ideological and programmatic approaches eventually coalesced into unlikely alliances to navigate an increasingly privatized public education system. This project forces a reconsideration of the complexity of Black civic life and political possibilities in urban America in the Post-Civil Rights era. Investigating political organizing within, and beyond, the institutional setting of public schools furthers understandings of the dynamic relationship between schools and communities.