Russell Rickford. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination.

Black power scholarship has flourished over the last decade. A number of new biographies of icons of the movement, such as Stokely Carmichael and Maulana Karenga, and monographs exploring major organizations of the period, such as the Black Panther Party, have recently been published. Yet, until now, there has been no in-depth study of the attempt by activists to build independent educational institutions to promote the ideals of black power. Russell Rickford’s We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination offers an insightful examination of black nationalist independent schools and their role in the black power era. Rickford contends that while the 1970s are seen as a period of decline for black power, black nationalist activists and theoreticians formed schools that promoted black power values and sentiments during this decade. The author maintains that black independent educational institutions became an important arena in which to wage the fight for black power consciousness. According to Rickford, the creators of the schools were highly idealistic, believing that they could address the multitude of social evils that plagued black people. Pan-African self-determining schools became vehicles for building a movement to take on the racial disparities in society. The author claims that these black-operated independent institutions “cannot be dismissed as empty symbolism or narrow identity politics.” Instead, they “represented conscious attempts to transcend rhetoric and create enduring mechanisms of consciousness and resistance” (6).