The right to attain a comprehensive education has dissolved into an illusion for Black children in Baltimore, sparking concern amongst educators and civil rights activists who say literacy is crucial to social mobilization.

Now, with public schools in the area being grossly underfunded, this pipeline to effective organizing has been relegated to a historical still life recalled by educators today. 

“We want to teach kids to be activists,” said Joseph Smith, a ninth grade English teacher at Frederick Douglass High School. “But [curricula] about how to change the world doesn’t really tell them that.” 

Oppressed groups have often looked to education as a launchpad upon which to craft liberation-geared realities. The Black Power and Civil Rights Movements of the 20th century, in a bid to address shortcomings of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s, necessitated a stern command of the English language to best understand the calamities that Black people endured globally. 

Black Panther Party members such as Marshall “Eddie” Conway championed community-driven political education programs and the distribution of the Black Panther Intercommunal News, a newspaper that was described as “an official organ of party opinion” in a 2002 article published in “Ethnic and Racial Studies,” a peer-reviewed social science academic journal. 

Through their efforts, Black children learned to read and write and became familiar with works from liberation greats such as Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon, and Malcolm X. And although the Black Panther Party’s tradition of Black empowerment through knowledge continued on through local activist groups, those resources are now evaporating.

How did we get here?

A 2022 report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress pointed to the waning education and literacy amongst Black students in the state—46% of Black eighth graders couldn’t read at a basic level and 82% couldn’t read at a proficient level. 

Academics attribute this decline to socioeconomic stratification that was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Coupled with an emphasis on online learning and the mass exodus of teachers due to dismal pay and burnout, children from less-privileged backgrounds continue to be left behind. 

“There were a lot of differential ways that kids and families engaged in school and the way schools engaged with them during the virtual learning time,” said Dr. Stephanie Dodman, an associate professor in the School of Education at George Mason University. Prior to her professorship, Dodman taught special education and elementary school students. 

“[COVID-19] magnified those relationships, and the lack of those relationships, that were already there,” she said.

Teachers, often with minimal training, had difficulty navigating work as policies and procedures kept changing, and students lacked adequate access to computers, stable internet connections, and computer interface literacy lessons.

Smith, the Frederick Douglass High School teacher, joined the school in 2019 after completing the Baltimore City Teaching Residency program, buoyed by the promise of changing his students’ lives—but teaching on Zoom through the height of the pandemic quickly dismayed him. 

“I repressed a lot of [my memories from that time],” he said. “It’s impossible to train someone to be an effective teacher in a few weeks.”  

There was also no school district mandate to turn on cameras during virtual schooling, so he couldn’t accommodate students living with disabilities and attention difficulties. This predicament reemerged in January when Frederick Douglass High students were forced to return online after pipes burst and flooded the school. 

“Kids [didn’t] come to school as much as they should [have],” he said. “What I’ve heard from a lot of my students is that going virtual signifies…an opportunity to disengage.” 

For many teachers, experiences like Smith’s fast-tracked their exodus from the profession. Over 5,500 Maryland teachers left their jobs in 2022 alone, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education. In February, The Real News Network published a letter from Baltimore County teachers who identified pay differences—as high as $15,000 compared to teachers in neighboring counties such as Anne Arundel and Howard—as one of the reasons for their departure.

In March of this year, additionally, a Maryland circuit court concluded that Baltimore Public Schools receives “constitutionally adequate” funding in response to a 2019 lawsuit that claimed the Maryland State Board of Education had deprived Baltimore children of almost $2 billion in funding since the 1990s.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and American Civil Liberties Union rebuked this ruling in a press release, citing that generations of children were being forced to “attend school in dilapidated and unsafe buildings without the resources they need to succeed.” 

“The children of Baltimore City deserve more than a ‘basic’ education, and the law demands more,” said Alaizah Koorji, assistant counsel for the defense fund. 

This all deprioritized achievement amongst Black children, and oppressive policies that neglected the importance of Black history in curricula further diminished academic excellence.

Smith said that English curricula introduced in 2022 lacked a recounting of Baltimore’s rich, salient history. In one instance, his students had to read biographies of all white men when learning about changemakers in the city. 

“There were no spaces for Black joy,” he said. “There were no spaces for students to engage their communities.” 

Dodman views this as perilous. 

“When you have [a] curriculum that misaligns with who students are, kids know that,” she said. “They know that what their knowledge is and what their community cultural wealth is, is not what’s being valued.”

Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University, described this as “an attack on Black literacy.” Hansford, a movement lawyer, is also the executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. 

As an adolescent, he was more inclined to read topics about Black history that were “relevant and interesting” to him, and this propelled him toward a degree in African American studies in college and a career as a movement lawyer.  

“[There’s] an anti-literacy campaign to take Black things out of the curriculum because you remove an incentive for kids who may not care about just reading, but who do care about themselves and their people and reading is the mechanism for that,” he said. 

He added that because of a cultural divide within the Black community regarding “acting white,” not representing Black children in education ostracizes them from their Black peers. 

Hansford recalled being bullied for being an avid reader and “acting white” as an adolescent, but his moments of reprieve were when he read books about Malcolm X. 

“If you’re reading something pro-Black you’re not ‘acting white’ [so] it becomes cool to do your reading,” he said. “And what [some politicians] are doing is that they’re removing that and now those kids can say, ‘If you’re going to school and you’re reading, and they’re taking all the Black stuff out, you must be reading the white stuff.’”

This scenario is a product of how teachers treated students during integration in the 1960s and 1970s, Hansford said. In his opinion, Black teachers at all-Black schools encouraged all students to read for empowerment. However, in integrated schools, only high-achieving Black students were applauded, thus transitioning them out of the Black community into the white establishment. 

This reduced chances of effective organization in the Black community, posing a threat to Black political activity. 

“I think there’s been a fall off [in knowledge],” he said. “But it’s not that it’s just a blank slate, but what was filled in were talking points from the right wing…[and] what we have is the indoctrination of misinformation and lies.”  

Is there a way forward?

In his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Brazilian educator Paulo Freire posited that oppressed people cannot humanize themselves unless they acquire knowledge. A 2022 study done at McGill University also supported this, concluding that higher levels of literacy result in higher levels of self-worth and political activity. 

The African Diaspora Alliance, a Baltimore nonprofit organization that connects descendants of Africa to the global African diaspora, facilitates this through a diverse set of educational programs. 

Founded in 2015, ADA came to life when co-founders Moriah Ray and Jasmine Hall “were not with the shits” following the lynching of Freddie Gray. In an effort to learn more about themselves, the global Black struggle and how best they could impact their community, the two traveled to Cuba where they conducted a case study on students at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine. 

“Seeing how many Black people were there who I’d never learned about… I was furious,” said Ray. “The erasure of Black people in the Americas just had me pissed. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re not in this just by ourselves?’”

Her time in Cuba allowed her to engage in complex conversations about race and Blackness—for example, how Cuba protects Assata Shakur but jails Black Cuban activists—that she and Hall brought back to Baltimore youth. 

Through ADA’s youth program, participants meet twice a week to learn about topics such as financial literacy and mental health. And, in some cases, how to read.

This year’s youth program reading was “Assata Shakur,” and one of Ray’s students disclosed to her that they’d been listening to the book because they’d never read a book in its entirety. Perplexed, she visited one of the Baltimore high schools where she discovered that students were provided with Sparknotes summaries of their assigned readings as opposed to reading entire books. 

Despite this, Ray doesn’t believe that the future generation of activists won’t still be able to organize.

“In terms of Black folks’ experience in the Americas, we’re not new to illiteracy,” she said. “My grandfather had a middle school education and could barely write on his own but he made his way further up north to Baltimore and he died owning four different properties.”

“I think that literacy is absolutely important and essential, but I don’t think it historically… has ever been something that we use as an excuse to not gain freedom,” she added. 

Ray views literacy as being “a piece of the pie”—a sentiment unforeign to Hansford, the Howard law professor.

Hansford believes that individuals also need to be politicized, a concept he learned from activist Fred Hampton Jr. while on a study abroad trip to Brazil during his undergraduate years. 

“When I was young, I had to see that the outcomes taking place in the world were not just because some people worked hard and were rich whereas others didn’t,” he said. “I had to see political action resulting in certain outcomes. Being politicized was the transition.”

He added that slave rebellions happened during a time where it was illegal for Black people to read; thus, illiteracy shouldn’t preclude one from political action. However, its benefits are invaluable. 

“The danger is that you can be more easily manipulated. So, if you don’t have that ability for critical thinking, you get stuff like ‘Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,’” he said.

A 2022 report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card, reported that 33% of Maryland’s eighth graders could not read at a basic level. For Black students, this number was an alarming 46%. Furthermore, 82% of Black students could not read at a proficient level, according to the report. 

As reading levels fall, Black Baltimoreans are slipping further away from their ability to liberate themselves. Particularly during a time where socioeconomic barriers, further pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and draconian legislation actively bar Black children from accessing wholesome education.

“Reading is a fundamental human right,” said movement lawyer Justin Hansford. “Wherever people are oppressed or marginalized, they need to have the power of education to be able to organize politically, advance economically, build their own businesses, to be able to do anything—fight against stigma, build strong, healthy families.” 

Hansford is a fervent movement lawyer and executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University’s School of Law. He’s been involved in a number of high profile legal efforts, including co-authoring a shadow report—information provided by non-governmental organizations to UN committees—as part of “Ferguson to Geneva,” a delegation consisting of the parents of Michael Brown and Black leaders from St. Louis, Missouri. The report was presented in 2015 before the United Nations Committee Against Torture. He also was part of the leadership team for “Justice for Garvey,” a coalition fighting for the posthumous pardoning of civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, which former President Barack Obama denied. 

Currently, Hansford is a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, an effort steeped in the centuries-old call for Black freedom on all the continents and that explores various methods for achieving it, including reparations.

To better understand the place literacy and education occupy in the fight for Black liberation, Hansford and I talked about his journey into activism, the cultural complications and implications of being Black and educated, and how technology could shape future generations’ ability to stand up to oppressive systems of governance.

Tinashe Chingarande: What was the defining moment when you decided you wanted to be an activist?

Justin Hansford: I would not be an activist unless I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X at 15. It was a transformative experience for me to see his transformation in real time and to envision myself as someone who could make a difference for my community. It was not assigned to me; I was actually suspended from school for fighting, and I was at home, and my mother had the book. But because it was Malcolm X, it was something I was willing to sit down and read—because he had such an influential profile in the culture. So I really took that to heart, and reading the book transformed my entire life. His passion for Black history inspired me, so I started to read all of these books about Black history in the United States and actually going back to Africa. I read about Marcus Garvey and that started a journey for me. He became one of my heroes, too.

Tinashe: I saw you were involved in some work to encourage former President Obama to posthumously pardon Marcus Garvey.

Justin: Yeah, that’s the central part of my activism. It’s really one of the first things I did as an activist. 

Literacy is basically the reason why I’m here today. I was a reader primarily; I was not an activist at 15. I went to a couple of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) conventions, but I was mostly a student of Black history. I studied African American Studies at Howard University. But during a study abroad program in Brazil, where we compared African American and Afro-Brazilian culture, I came across the son of Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton Jr. has done a lot of activism in the same frame as his father. I met him through a classmate. He’s really the one who pushed me to take what I read about and go try to do it myself. He politicized me through activism supporting political prisoners. 

There’s a concert called “Black August” that no longer exists, but Erykah Badu, Mos Def [Yasiin Bey], and all these folks from that movement were involved in it. I used to do these concerts where they’d support former Black Panthers who were incarcerated. I did some cop watching work surrounding police brutality issues—we would  observe police stops and record them to report if we saw anything that was abusive. The group that I did my activism with is called Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

Tinashe: I feel like the term ‘activist’ has become relatively ambiguous, given how social media and the 2020 George Floyd protests changed what activism looks like. From what you’ve done so far and have been involved in, what are the things that make the activism experience unique?

Justin: It’s the action part. There’s a distinction between organizers and activists. Organizers are people who are in the community having meetings, setting up protests, raising money, maybe taking petitions to the legislators, or helping to put together events. 

Activists, in theory, don’t have to do all that. It’s much more of an umbrella term.

The question is: If someone just goes on Twitter [X] and tweets about their outrage, does that make them an activist? Can you really be an activist without actually doing the organizing? That’s a question that started to emerge in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown.

I personally am conflicted about it. If you have enough power to topple the government through stories you’re telling on social media, then that is activism. You can be a Twitter activist; if you can create change through the mechanism of storytelling, that can also be included in activism. Activism is anything that you do to create political change. If you are a driver of political change, you’re an activist.

I would consider myself an activist lawyer. We call it “movement lawyering.” I am a movement lawyer, but I represent the movement. I have a political outcome I want. I work with campaigns, individuals, organizers, or coalitions of organizations. I use the law as a tool for my activism. 

Tinashe: When looking at US history, education has been a point of convergence for legislators and activists, from Brown v. Board of Education, to  the emergence and approval of African American studies curricula, to the creation of affirmative action, even though it didn’t benefit as many Black people. Now that we’re flipping from a culture where legislative efforts helped encourage and support Black people who wanted to attain an education to active attacks against Black literacy through the underfunding of school districts and manipulating of curricula, what do you have to say about that?

Justin: There is an attack on Black literacy. From my own experience, I was a lot more likely to read and study things that were relevant and interesting to me—Black history and Black studies. If you’re wiping those things off of the curriculum, you are disincentivizing me from studying as a youth. There’s already a thing in Black culture that you’re “acting white” if you study, so this just compounds the already-existing disincentives for Black youth to read and study as much as they can. 

I go back to my personal history; I was already one of those kids that liked to read, and I was beat up for “acting white” and all these different things. But once I started reading about Malcolm X and being more militant… some of the kids who used to bully me for reading other stuff—they saw me reading Malcolm X and were not going to bully me for that. Because if you’re reading something pro-Black, then you’re not “acting white”; it becomes cool to do your reading. And what some politicians are doing is they’re removing that.  Now those kids can say, “If you’re going to school and you’re reading, and they’re taking all the Black stuff out, then you must be reading the white stuff.” It sounds silly when you talk about it.

Tinashe: I actually think that holds water!

Justin: It is an anti-literacy campaign to take Black things out of the curriculum, because you remove an incentive for kids who may not care about just reading, but who do care about themselves and their people, and reading is the mechanism for that. It makes the thing in our culture about—the “You’re reading white stuff, you must be selling out” thing—relevant. It’s a two-pronged attack.

Tinashe: Why do you think there’s this assumption in the Black community that when you align yourself with education it’s seen as white? How did we go from the Black Power and Civil Rights movements necessitating “education for liberation” to now— if you’re an avid reader you’re called an “oreo,” a derogatory term for Black people who have forsaken their Black values and traditions for “white affectations?”

Justin: I don’t know how we made that journey. But, I believe that if you were at an all-Black school with all-Black teachers and they were the ones telling you to read for empowerment, it was a much different conversation than when you got integrated into a majority-white school and the readers and high achievers got applause from white teachers and the establishment, and the Black kids went on to transition out of the Black community. In the past, that achievement did not mean you could get out of the Black community. These are my instincts. 

Tinashe: So in an environment where online platforms like The Shade Room and Baller Alert are huge fixtures in the Black community, what impact does this have on Black people’s education when people believed the lies on gossip sites—like in the case of rapper Megan thee Stallion’s shooting—more than actual reporting being done by court reporters? What’s your take on how social media impacts Black literacy because it’s not just young people but older people also living in a knowledge gutter?

Justin: The problem with newspapers is that they’re going to give you a certain lens, a lens that is either right-wing or left-wing in the US, and even abroad they’re going to give a lens of the establishment and the official narrative. There’s always a gap between that and the views of young people and grassroots organizations. 

If you go to The Washington Post, they’re also going to give you a specific view. The New York Times and Fox News are giving you a certain view.

But, definitely, if you’re watching Shaderoom to get your news I’d say don’t do that—these online platforms can build on conspiracy theories. But in terms of media literacy, I’ve been taught to read newspapers to know what the official narrative is. They’re making the mainstream narrative, but don’t read that thinking that that is the whole truth. 

Tinashe: During your six years at Howard, what trends have you seen in terms of the kind of knowledge your students come with?

Justin: I think that there’s been a fall-off. I was talking with a friend about knowledge of Black history and knowledge of the fairness of having reparations, and there’s a huge gap in knowledge about what happened to us as a people. But it’s not that it’s just a blank slate; what was filling in those gaps were talking points from the right wing. It’s not even a blank slate of ignorance— in some cases, that would be better. Instead, what we actually have is the indoctrination of misinformation and lies. People have absorbed bad talking points that we have to undo.

Tinashe: Given that we live in an anti-intellectual climate, how do you make your talking points translate to the average Black person? Because I think there’s a divide in the Black community between people who theorize their experiences compared to those whose perception of their surroundings is rooted solely on what they physically experienced?

Justin: You’re right. But I think it’s more about being politicized than intellectualized. When I was young, I had to see that the outcomes taking place in the world were not just because some people worked hard and were rich, whereas others didn’t work hard and weren’t rich. I had to see political action resulting in certain outcomes. Being politicized was the transition. 

Tinashe: Where do you think activism is headed with this next generation? Gen-alpha, I think they’re called.

Justin: I think it’s going to be driven by technology a lot. I tend to think that because more people are living online, as opposed to in person, it’s possible that activism online will make a leap forward.

Tinashe: Would you still say the same if we think about how misinformation and disinformation are rife online and people are likelier to be deceived?

Justin: People are being deceived online and offline, but I think that online literacy will improve. The way people interact with the written word—people tend to give it more gravitas because they know someone took the time to write it and edit it. I think people are starting to understand that you need to take what you hear from a random meme with the same grain of salt that you would with what you hear from a random person. I think literacy is going to improve and it won’t be as easy to mislead people in the future. When TVs were first invented, people were scared of television and thought it was going to destroy the world. 

Tinashe: What do you think activism will look like when studies are showing rapidly declining reading scores and we have a rising generation of literally undereducated children?

Justin: You would hope that with technology advancing, people would be able to catch up and get back on track. But from my experience traveling around the world, people still do political activism.

Tinashe: Even in the absence of literacy?

Justin: Yes, even our own people—we had slave uprisings even though it was illegal for us to read. Illiteracy doesn’t preclude you from activism. The danger is that you can be more easily manipulated. So if you don’t have that ability for critical thinking, you get stuff like “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

Tinashe: Jonestown!

Justin: …because superstition comes in when you don’t have as much education.

Tinashe: So are you saying that the key to effective activism would be populism supported by the critical thinking that education gives you?

Justin: Yes! And without that you get authoritarianism.

Tinashe: And so we should all learn to read and write so we’re not easily manipulated?

Justin: That’s what George Orwell would tell us. 

This interview has been edited for clarity, length and style.