Freedom Schooling - Stokely Carmichael and Rhetorical Education

Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and Critical Rhetorical Education
Author(s): Stephen Schneider

Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Sep., 2006), pp. 46-69
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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Stephen Schneider
Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and

Critical Rhetorical Education
"Freedom Schooling" looks at a Freedom School class taught by Black Power activist
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Specifically, this article explores the philosophies of
language and education that informed this class and the organic relationship fostered
between the classroom and the political goals of African American communities dur
ing the civil rights era.
D iscussions of critical pedagogy have, for the most part, attended to defin
ing exactlywhat critical pedagogy is. In most cases, these discussions, informed
by theorists such as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Ira Shor, center on en
couraging students to question and resist oppressive power relations within
broader social formations. Classrooms become sites for raising consciousness
rather than simply assessing work and applying standards. But absent from
many of these conversations are considerations of historical sites where criti
cal pedagogies-those that encourage students to challenge oppressive power
structures-have already been deployed. These sites not only provide critical
pedagogues with a richer theoretical foundation for their own work but also
with narratives that complicate our own pedagogical projects and encourage
further analysis and debate.
CCC 58:1 / SEPTEMBER 2006
46
SCHNEIDER / FREEDOM SCHOOLING
More recently, the work of Susan Kates, Karyn Hollis, and David Gold has
focused attention on some of these sites-Bryn Mawr Women's Summer School,
Brookwood Labor College, Wilberforce University, and Wiley College-and on
the historical development of critical pedagogies within the United States.
Susan Kates argues that sites such as Brookwood Labor College and Wilberforce
University encouraged "rhetorical study that pursues the relationship between
language and identity, makes civic issues a theme in the
rhetoric classroom, and emphasizes the responsibility of Classrooms become sites for
community service as part of the writing and speaking cur- raising consciousness rather
riculum: and represents "an activist rhetoric [that] is, in than simply assessing work
many ways, the predecessor of what we have more recently and applying standards.
come to call critical pedagogy" (xi, emphasis in original).
Karyn Hollis likewise argues that the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women
Workers encouraged rhetorical practice that "was to prepare working-class
women for a formidable challenge: transforming their oppressive work envi
ronment into a more humane, equitable experience for themselves and other
workers" (1). David Gold points out that African American poet Melvin Tolson
combined more classical rhetorical pedagogies with an agonistic framework
that encouraged students to engage in critical public debate.
These studies point to a rich tradition of critical rhetorical education that
has existed in the United States since the early part of the twentieth century.
But one group of sites continues to be absent from this conversation: those
educational sites that developed out of the civil rights movement. Both the
Citizenship Schools that grew out of the Sea Islands project of the 1950s and
the Freedom Schools that supported the Mississippi Voter Education Project
provided literacy and language arts instruction that directly impacted the out
come of major civil rights campaigns. The absence of these sites from discus
sions of rhetorical education and critical pedagogy not only continues to paint
an incomplete picture of the civil rights movement and the history of educa
tion for social change but also overlooks the pedagogical contributions made
by, such figures as Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and Stokely Carmichael
(Kwame Ture).'
Of considerable interest in this regard is an account by Jane Stembridge,
executive secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), of a "speech class" conducted by Stokely Carmichael.2 The class, held
at the Waveland Work-Study Institute in 1965, focused on the relationship be
tween Standard American English and African American Vernacular English
(U.S. Ebonics).3 Stembridge considered this "the most important class:" not
47
only for the manner in which it introduced students to a critical understand

ing of the English language but also for the manner in which Carmichael es
tablished trust among the students in attendance (Stembridge, as qtd. in Jacobs
and Landow 131).4 This trust was established by beginning the class with stu
dent concerns and taking seriously the social-epistemic conditions already in
habited by those students.
Little is recorded about the classes taught at the Work-Study Institute at
Waveland. Carmichael's autobiography, Readyfor Revolution, indicates that it
was one of several Mississippi Freedom Schools at which Carmichael taught
between June 1964 and March 1965. This would suggest that the students in
attendance would have come from all age groups, varying literacy levels, and
several different vocations.5 Stembridge's own account, which references a dis
cussion of an Atlanta staff meeting, indicates that SNCC organizers were also
in attendance at Waveland. This would suggest that the Waveland Work-Study
Institute may have been part of a work-study program for SNCC organizers
working in the Mississippi Delta (Zinn 234). Nevertheless, these programs were
certainly preparing organizers for teaching in Freedom Schools, and the range
of classes taught at Waveland corresponded with those offered in the Freedom
Schools. However, based on the transcript of the class itself, it would seem
most likely that this was in fact a language arts class run for the local commu
nity as part of the Freedom School project.
The date of the class also yields valuable information about the context
and importance of the class. Held between February and March of 1965, the
class was conducted in the immediate shadow of the assassination of Malcolm
X and the murder ofJimmy Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama (Carmichael and
Thelwell, 439-448). Both deaths had immediate effects on southern African
American populations and were only the latest in a string of violent incidents
that attended the civil rights movement. Many of these events-most notably
the burning of churches and the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Michael
Schwerner and Andrew Goodman-were directed toward the Freedom Schools
themselves (371).
The Freedom Schools had been established to address the poor educa
tional climate among African Americans in Mississippi Delta. Freedom Schools
had been in existence in the area since 1961, but the single biggest period of
Freedom School activity came during the Freedom Summer Project of 1964
(Moses 43; Carson, In Struggle 119). Schools were established to provide basic
education in math, reading, and politics, and normally ran out of local churches
or community buildings. Clayborne Carson reports that the freedom schools
48
were established "to provide an educational experience for students which will
make it more possible for them to challenge the myths of our society, to per
ceive more clearly its realities, and to find alternatives, and ultimately, new
directions for action" (In Struggle 110). As I will argue, this educational phi
losophy allowed Carmichael to develop a classroom with an organic relation
ship to the community and bore witness to the link between education and
organizing that lay at the heart of SNCC's operating philosophy (Carmichael,
Ready 391).
The hostile conditions surrounding the Freedom Schools on their own
make the project a remarkable contribution to the civil rights movement. But
of as much interest is the developed pedagogical approach found in Stokely's
Speech Class. Stembridge (qtd. in Jacobs and Landow) writes that Carmichael
started the class by putting two lists of sentences on the board in front of his
students:
I digs wine I enjoy drinking cocktails

The peoples wants freedom The people want freedom
Whereinsover the policemens goes Anywhere the officers of the law go,
they causes troubles they cause trouble
I wants to reddish to vote I want to register to vote
(Jacobs and Landau 131-132)
Carmichael then focused classroom discussion on the differences between the

two lists. Labeling the right side "correct English:" Stokely's Speech Class fur
ther interrogated what makes these sentences "correct" and other sentences
"incorrect." The conversation between Carmichael and his students about the
relationship between these two language forms turned on issues of oppres
sion, power, and the role of language in defining the individual and the world.
Stokely's Speech Class thereby challenged students' understanding of the role
of traditional learning, while nonetheless affirming the centrality of education
in political activism and African American liberation.
This analysis explores the philosophies of education and language that
informed Stokely's Speech Class. This class not only suggests what one Free
dom School class looked like but also demonstrates the pedagogical concern
at the heart of Carmichael's own philosophy. Carmichael's critique of tradi
tional American education, and his assertion of the need for education that
met the needs of African American communities, informed his classroom dis
cussion in much the same way as they informed his later speeches. But rather
than relying on the critique-centered pedagogies more commonly associated
49
with critical pedagogy, Carmichael developed a rhetorical pedagogy that val

ued African American epistemologies and used African American Vernacular
English,(AAVE ) forms such as call-and-response and code-switching as the
foundation for politically transformative education. Carmichael's attention to
location and language-or to Burke's concepts of scene and agency-allowed
him to develop an "organic classroom:" one that focused on the link between
critical rhetorical pedagogy and community action.
'On the Left, Except in Class": Carmichael's Philosophy of

Education
Throughout his career, Stokely Carmichael focused considerable attention in
his speeches on the issue of education. This is hardly surprising, given his own
education at Howard University and his involvement with the Student Non
violent Coordinating Committee and the Voter Education Project in Missis
sippi. These experiences, along with his commitment to Black Power as a
liberating political concept, led him to indict traditional American education
as the perpetuation of an oppressive colonial and capitalist society, while at
the same time hold onto education as a vehicle for the conscious organization
and development of African American political leadership.
Carmichael's understanding of the role of education is best summarized
in his landmark 1968 speech, "Free Huey":
Let us move to education. And we must talk very clearly about this concept of
education. Frantz Fanon said it very clearly: "Education is nothing but the re
establishment and reinforcement of values and institutions of a given society."
(Stokely Speaks 118)
Education thus reflects and perpetuates economic-corporate, civil, and state

power relations on the level of civil society. Within colonial power structures,
Fanon notes, educational institutions perpetuate on a pedagogical level the
violence of colonial rule:
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying
the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to
the past of the oppressedpeople, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. (Wretched
of the Earth 210).6
By reinforcing the moral, legal, and historical values of colonial rule, colonial
education disempowers natives on an epistemological level. The erasure of
50
native history also removes those discourses that hold open avenues of politi
cal action.
Carmichael's critique of traditional American education in many ways
follows Fanon's critique of colonial education. In Black Power, Carmichael iden
tifies North American schools and colleges as sites of indirect, or institutional,
oppression (9-10). In his earlier 1966 article, "Who is Qualified?", Carmichael
cited issues such as limited space, financial barriers, opposition from admin
istrations, and oppressive enculturation, as evidence that "[e]ducation is one
major form (and means) of exclusion" (Stokely Speaks 12).
Carmichael believed that traditional schools and colleges par- Education serves these
ticipate in the systems of capitalist and colonial oppression systems by reflecting their
that maintain white supremacy and American culture. Edu- power relations in school
cation serves these systems by reflecting their power relations and college curricula.
in school and college curricula. "All the brother's saying,"
Carmichael argues, "is that whatever this society says is right, when you go to
school they are going to tell you it's right and you got to run it down" (118).
Carmichael's critique of traditional American education was most com
prehensively laid out in a speech given at A&T University, Greensboro, North
Carolina, in December of 1968. In this speech, Carmichael furthered his asser
tion that American education perpetuates an oppressive, racist American cul
ture by questioning the "methodology and ideology" behind such an education
(155). One of his most effective examples was taken from elementary reading
comprehension tests:
The paragraph will say: "The best political system in the world is the two-party
system. That's been proven time and time again. It's the most stable, most equi
table, most fundamental, blah blah blah blah blah." And they ask you down the
bottom, "What's the best system in the world?" You pass if you answer, "Two
party system:' Imagine that. (154)
The use of questions to ideologically coach students into maintaining correct

beliefs is, in Carmichael's assessment, nothing other than the emptying of Af
rican American brains. Both the methodology of the test-that is, the use of
questioning to indoctrinate correct opinion-and the ideology of the test
focusing on the two-party political system-are called into question and iden
tified as mechanisms for furthering broader oppressive cultural formations.
This critique is extended to a number of other areas within the educa
tional system including administrative structures at Columbia University, de
51
gree programs in "black studies:" and second language instruction. Contend

ing that "[w]hat the teacher, and the student, fail to realize is that the method
ology is suited to the ideology [ ...]" Carmichael extended his critique of
education on structural, instructional, and ideo
The major failing thus identified in logical levels (155). By accounting for educational
North American schooling is its failure oppression as a complex of interrelated mecha
to engage and develop cultural models nisms, Carmichael was further able to locate this
beyond those of a white civil society, complex within an American civil society defined
and thus its erasure of African American by white supremacy. Such a picture of American
histories and epistemologies. education also highlights the manyvectors along
which exclusion occurs.
The major failing thus identified in North American schooling is its fail
ure to engage and develop cultural models beyond those of a white civil soci
ety, and thus its erasure of African American histories and epistemologies.
Carmichael highlights this failure in "Free Huey":
Education is supposed to prepare you to live in your community. That's what our
community is like. If the educational system cannot do that, it must teach us how
to change our community. It must do one or the other. The schools we send our
children to do neither; they do something absolutely opposite. (118)
American schools, in failing to respond adequately to the needs of African

American students, set those students up to fail. By devaluing the knowledge
of African American students, these schools continue to exclude those who
have been the traditional victims of colonial oppression. Far from enabling the
students to better their lives, such schools force these students to accept a
worldview in which they are inferior and unlikely to find upward mobility.
Stokely's Speech Class provided an early record of this critique, calling
into question traditional educational practices at the outset of the class ses
sion. The conversation that follows from Carmichael's writing on the board
captures this line of questioning:
STOKELY What do you think about these sentences? Such as-The peoples
wants freedom?
ZELMA It doesn't sound right.
STOKELY What do you mean?
ZELMA "Peoples" isn't right.
STOKELY Does it mean anything?
MILTON People means everybody. Peoples means everybody in the world.
ALMA Both sentences are right as long as you understand them.
52
HENRY They're both okay, but in a speech class you have to use correct
English.
(Stokely writes "correct English" in corner of blackboard) (Jacobs and Landau 132)
Carmichael's opening questions not only opened up the difference between

the two sets of sentences but also highlighted the power accorded "correct
English." Henry's comment also allowed Carmichael to draw the role of cor
rect English in the functioning of institutional oppression. After Carmichael
wrote "correct English" on the board, Zelma also confirmed that she "was taught
at least to use the sentences on the right side" (132). Carmichael's sentences
thus also drew attention to the classroom as a place in which a specific cul
tural understanding of language is circulated (under the loaded title "correct"),
often to the exclusion of other language varieties that circulate beyond the
classroom.
This criticism of institutional instruction is renewed later in the class,
when Carmichael reflected on the language practices found in different sec
tions of the community:
STOKELY Which way do most people talk?

CLASS Like on the left.
(He asks each student. All but two say "Left." One says that Southerners speak like
on the left, Northerners on the right. Another says that Southerners speak like on
the left, but the majority ofpeople speak like on the right.)
STOKELY Which way do television and radio people speak?
CLASS Left.
(There was a distinction made by the class between Northern commentators and
local programs. Most programs were local and spoke like on the left, they said.)
STOKELY Which way do teachers speak?
CLASS On the left, except in class.
STOKELY If most people speak on the left, why are they trying to change these
people?
GLADYS If you don't talk right, society rejects you. It embarrasses other
people if you don't talk right. (Jacobs and Landau 134)
This discussion is noteworthy for two reasons: the first is the focused criticism
of teachers as functionaries of broader systems of oppression; the second is
Carmichael's use of call and response to circulate the terms left and right. While
it should be acknowledged that these designations are as much spatial refer
ents as they are political markers, the location of "correct English" on the right,
along with rejection and embarrassment, evokes the exclusionary system that
Carmichael hoped to work against. The repetition of the term left, in response
53
to Carmichael's promptings about how people actually speak, suggests, albeit

indirectly, that a left agenda best reflects the lives of oppressed people.7
By invoking an inclusive left agenda, Carmichael gestures to a pedagogy
that takes as its goal liberation rather than exclusion. This commitment to
revolutionary pedagogy, seen in Carmichael's commitment to the Voter Edu
cation Project and again in the account of his speech class, was a constant
aspect of his political program. While addressing students at Morgan State
University in 1967, Carmichael suggested that "the trouble with our black stu
dents is that they just don't read enough. If we could get books like we could
boogaloo, we would be uptight" (Stokely Speaks 67). Naturally, when Carmichael
suggested that students need to read more, he was talking about the careful
selection and examination of those texts that best represent their culture and
their political needs, namely Du Bois, Douglass, Wright, Rogers and McKay
(74).
Left-wing pedagogy is, in this analysis, inseparable from an attendance
to the construction of race in America. As Carmichael later argued in "Free
Huey," a pedagogy anchored in the African American community and intellec
tual tradition ceases to reproduce oppressive power relations and, instead,
becomes a way for African Americans to "organize consciously" (123). Such a
pedagogy moves away from critique-oriented models of critical pedagogy (see
Hardin), and moves instead toward a reconstruction of education using Afri
can American knowledges and practices.
Carmichael thus understood Fanon's description of education instrumen
tally: education can reinforce systematic oppression, or serve more revolution
ary ends. A revolutionary pedagogy is therefore
A revolutionary pedagogy is therefore one that encourages community action and po
one that encourages community action litical leadership. This pedagogical philosophy is
and political leadership. articulated in "Free Huey," where Carmichael
states that "until we control an educational sys
tem that will teach us how to change our community, there's no need to send
anybody to school" (119). While it is not articulated in this form until 1968,
the Voter Education Project, and more specifically the Freedom Schools, rep
resents a concrete attempt to establish such an education system. In fact it is
reasonable to suggest that it was Carmichael's experience teaching in the Free
dom Schools that in no small part led him to this political position.
Freedom schools developed an instrumental, or organic, relationship to
their community as much from their physical and institutional location as
from the language and pedagogies deployed within them. Established in com
54
munity buildings such as churches in response to exclusionary or inadequate

school systems, the Freedom Schools were also outside the institutional struc
tures that determined the role of public schools in the American south. As a
result, Freedom School educators were able to develop a syllabus that met the
needs of their students and the African American community and valued the
epistemologies and language practices of those in attendance.
"Speaking Just Like We Always Have": Carmichael's Philosophy

of Language
Carmichael's pedagogy is noteworthy not only for its identification of the po
litical interests at work in traditional North American classrooms of the 1960s
but also for the methods by which he constructs an alternative pedagogy fo
cused on developing a "resistance-conscious
ness" in his students (Stokely Speaks 89). Carmichael's pedagogy is noteworthy
Carmichael's deployment of African American not only for its identification of the
Vernacular English in his classroom, informed political interests at work in traditional
by his understanding of AAVE as a counter lan- North American classrooms of the 1960s
guage that enables African Americans to define but also for the methods by which he
their relationships to the world around them, constructs an alternative pedagogy

attempts to forge community identities that will focused on developing a "resistance
in turn serve as the basis for political action
against racist oppression. Such a pedagogy not consciousness in his students
only takes seriously the epistemologies that at
tend AAVE and its use but also the historical conditions that produced them.
By describing the power relations that AAVE emerged from and participates
in, Carmichael attempts to make its usage a transformative political practice.
Carmichael's understanding of the role of AAVE is most clearly expressed
in "Free Huey." In this speech, AAVE language practices emerge as the result of
opposition to white supremacy:
We have never spoken English perfectly. And that is because our people con
sciously resisted a language that did not belong to us. Never did, never will, any
how they try to run it down our throat we ain't gonna have it! You must under
stand that as a level of resistance. Anybody can speak that simple honky's lan
guage correctly. We have not done it because we have resisted. (114)
Carmichael thus understands AAVE as a counterlanguage, one that emerged

as the result of slavery and racial violence. Marcyliena Morgan argues that
"[t]otal institutions such as plantation slavery often lead to antisocieties and
55
This language, while not simply underground institutions where people resist subju
resistant, is built out of the gation" (23). Thus the linguistic resistance that
asymmetrical contact between two Carmichael highlights in "Free Huey" is a counterlan
cultures. Understood as an act of guage that, since slavery, "provided a vehicle for face
subversion and survival, AAVE work and protected and confirmed the existence of
provides Carmichael with a the antisociety" (24-25). This language, while not sim
linguistic agency capable of ply resistant, is built out of the asymmetrical contact
between two cultures. Understood as an act of sub
facilitating a resistant pedagogy. version and survival, AAVE provides Carmichael with
a linguistic agency capable of facilitating a resistant pedagogy.

The role of resistance in Carmichael should also be understood dialecti
cally. Morgan's description of the African American counterlanguage provides
a useful place to start:
It may not have survived and been adapted were it not for dominant Southern
society's relentless monitoring of African Americans' communication and lan
guage. Irrespective of the reason for its continued significance in African Ameri
can interactions, the counterlanguage is the foundation of all African American
discourse. (25)
For Morgan, the counterlanguage thus emerges from asymmetrical and ago
nistic relationships.
This African American counterlanguage further enables the preservation
of social face, or "the image and impression that a person conveys during en
counters, along with others' evaluation of that image;" within African Ameri
can communities (Morgan 23). The white regulation of African American
communication in the segregated South made the public performance and
preservation of social face by African Americans all but impossible. As a re
sult, 'African American culture and antisociety undermined the values, atti
tudes and beliefs that the dominant society held toward them...through the
use of existing African systems of indirectness" (24). This counterlingual indi
rectness enabled the discussion of community issues that could not be directly
represented in discourse. Inasmuch as it emerges from, and sustains the cul
tural and political practices of, African American antisociety, African Ameri
can counterlanguage thus develops as the means for both the preservation of
social face and the contestation of race-based oppression.
Carmichael comprehended the same relationships at work, albeit through
a dialectical lens informed by Marx and Fanon. In his speech to the 1967 Con
ference on the Dialectics of Liberation in London, he asserts that international
56
capitalism and international white supremacy jointly create the economic sys
tem of North America. While Carmichael conceded that this system is only
"accidentally white," it is white nonetheless; in the context of such a system, he
concluded, "Color and culture were, and are, key in our oppression" (Stokely
Speaks 89). Fanon reminds us that colonial regimes also work on the level of
language, as the use of a given language "means above all to assume a culture"
(Black Skin 17). In the case of enslaved Africans transported to Northern
America, the adoption of English meant the assumption of a white, colonial
American culture. This in itself represents an act of epistemic violence, result
ing in the counterlingual practices described by Morgan.
Carmichael encountered a similar theory in the teachings of Sterling
Brown. Brown was an early supporter of the Nonviolent Action Group, Howard's
SNCC affiliate. Carmichael said of Brown:
Maybe, almost certainly, he understood the struggle we were engaged in better

than we did. He, more than any other person, first helped me to understand the
beauty of our people's language and the power of that extraordinary culture that
sustained them through centuries of slavery and generations of apartheid [...]
His writing did not try to "give dignity" to the folk. He allowed their innate dig
nity and humanity to manifest itself in the poetry of their language and the power
of their blues. (Ready 133)
This discussion of the dignity and sustaining power of African American lan
guage accords closely with Morgan's description of counterlanguage.
Carmichael's encounter with Brown no doubt set the stage for his later obser
vations about the resistant use made of spirituals and AAVE rhetorical forms
such as the dozens by SNCC activists. Such experiences further provided
Carmichael with concrete examples of the rhetorical power of counterlingual
practices and his advocacy of linguistic resistance.
It may appear here that Carmichael was making a claim for an essentially
resistant quality to AAVE, and certainly the polemical style of "Free Huey" con
tribute to this. But Carmichael can also be read to argue that AAVE represents
a linguistic agency that, on account of its counterlingual history, provides a
means of resisting white supremacy. That such resistance is not essential or
automatic is implicit in Carmichael's argument that "[w]e must begin, as the
philosopher Camus says, to come alive by saying 'No.' (Stokely Speaks 53-54).
Finally the influence of Marx, Fanon, and existential philosophy on Carmichael
would ground his understanding of AAVE and African American culture in a
historical and materialist philosophy. The development of "resistance-con
sciousness" proceeds from this foundation.
57
Understood in terms of the Understood in terms of the historical and material

historical and material condi- conditions from which it emerged, AAVE becomes not
tions from which it emerged, an imperfect or deficient version of "correct English" but
AAVE becomes not an imperfect rather a rhetorical agency that enables resistant political
or deficient version of "correct action. The counterlingual practices that enable AAVE
English" but rather a rhetorical also provide an alternative political discourse that rejects
agency that enables resistant the oppressive practices reflected in Standard American
a y litil a te s isnt English and traditional sites of education. By rejecting
p these practices-in line with Camus' refusal-the Afri
can American community can move toward self-definition and broader politi
cal involvement in American civil society.
The act of self-definition is as important to Carmichael as the need for
resistance-consciousness. As such, he argues fervently for the need for African
Americans to control the right to define:
And you must understand that, because the first need of a free people is to be
able to define their own terms and have those terms recognized by their oppres
sors. It is also the first need that all oppressors must suppress. I think it is what
Camus talks about. He says that when a slave says no, he begins to exist. You see
you define to contain. That's all you do. If we allow white people to define us by
calling us Negroes, which means apathetic, lazy, stupid, and all those other things,
then we must accept those definitions
We must define what we are-and then move from our definitions and tell
them, Recognize what we say we are! (65)
The ability to define is, for Carmichael, the ability of the individual to set po
litical goals based on how they understand their relationship to society (32).
As a rhetorical agency of the African American community, it becomes a lan
guage of "undying love" among community members; thus resistance-con
sciousness also enables the autonomous organization of healthy African
American communities (148). This theory of language as a vehicle for self
definition accords closely with the centrality of the word in Freire's Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, where the true word, motivated by love, becomes the only
vehicle for transforming the world (Freire 88-89). In the context of Black Power,
this argument also has the following conclusions: first, that "correct English"
represents the means by which others have defined and therefore disempow
ered African Americans; second, that African Americans therefore need to turn
to their own communities to discover how best to define themselves; and fi
nally, that AAVE, as a counterlanguage and an agency of the African American
58
community, provides a historical medium that already provides the terms for
such a definition.
Such an act of self-definition was already at the heart of SNCC projects
such as the Freedom Schools. Carmichael explicitly identifies the role of self
definition in SNCC project in his 1966 article "What We Want":
An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community-as does

the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [...]-must speak in the tone of
that community, not as somebody else's buffer zone. This is the significance of
Black Power as a slogan. For once, black people are going to use the words they
want to use-not just the words whites want to hear. (18)
Black Power thus emerges as a philosophy as much of linguistic activism as

direct political action; it is concerned at all points with developing the rhetori
cal agency that will allow African American to recognize themselves as agents.
It is this understanding of AAVE that lead Geneva Smitherman to declare that
"Black Power is Black Language:" insofar as "language is the basic instrument
of social reality" ("Black Power" 88). Seen in this light, Stokely's Speech Class
and the Freedom Schools project provide some of the immediate conditions
from which Black Power will emerge and further indicate the pedagogical na
ture of the Black Power movement. As such, it is hardly surprising to find the
politics of the English language and issues of definition at the heart of
Carmichael's pedagogy.
Carmichael's pedagogy is also noteworthy insofar as it advocates a
student's right to their own language six years before the drafting of the Stu
dents' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution. Both Steven Parks
and Keith Gilyard have noted that it
was Carmichael's language politics, Carmichael's language politics,along with the
along with the upheaval of the civil upheaval of the civil rights movement .., in many
rights movement, which in many ways set the stage for contemporary debates about
ways set the stage for contemporary the role of AAVE in American education.
debates about the role of AAVE in
American education. Carmichael's philosophy also predates the pioneering
works of Labov and Dillard on African American language but indicates that
the African American community was, in 1965, already aware of the political
role that language played as both the ends and the vehicle of classroom prac
tice.8
Insofar as Carmichael started with students' own language and experi
ence, his classroom also predated and preempted contemporary discussions
59
CCC 5 8: 1 / SE PTEM BE R 2006
within the field of critical pedagogy. By starting his class with the local issue of
language and its relationship to community, Carmichael developed a peda
gogy similar to that of Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He also reminded
us that critical pedagogy aims at resistance not simply as a trope but as a
rearticulation of the relationship between education and the direct experience
of students. Carmichael's pedagogy thus insisted on the need for education to
positively transform local conditions. Such transformations were contained
not only in the critical questions he asks but also in his turn to AAVE language
practices as the basis of his speech class.
These issues, as well as the transformative potential of AAVE, can be
readily seen in the transcript of Stokely's Speech Class. While students ini
tially identified the AAVE sentences on the board as a version of incorrect
English, Carmichael concerned himself with redefining AAVE as a tool for the
oppressed in their struggle for emancipation. He performed such an argument
when he established a call-and-response pattern whereby students can recog
nize the political value of self-definition and discursive resistance: when the
class resoundingly answers "No!" to the question of whether or not they should
learn correct English, they engage in one such act of self-definition. Carmichael's
pedagogy thus aimed not only at the development of "resistance-conscious
ness," but also in the reevaluation of students' own language as a transforma
tive political practice.
This criticism of correct English further allowed Carmichael to question
his students' rationale for learning such language practices:
STOKELY Will society reject you if you don't speak like on the right side of the
board? Gladys said society would reject you.
GLADYS You might as well face it, man! What we gotta do is go out and be
come middle class. If you can't speak good English, you don't have a
car, a job, or anything.
STOKELY If society rejects you because you don't speak good English, should
you learn to speak good English?
CLASS No!
ALMA I'm tired of doing what society say. Let society say "reddish" for a
while. People ought to just accept each other.
ZELMA I think we should be speaking just like we always have.
ALMA If I change for society, I wouldn't be free anyway.
ERNESTINE I'd like to learn correct English for my own sake.
SHIRLEY I would too.
ALMA If the majority speaks on the left, then a minority must rule society.
Why do we have to change to be accepted by the minority group?
(Jacobs and Landau 134-135)
60
While Carmichael didn't foreclose on the idea of learning correct English, he

adopted an oppositional stance toward Gladys's desire to integrate by adopt
ing these language practices. Such practices, as Alma later makes clear, only
provide for continued oppression and subservience to white rule. By opposing
the ready acceptance of those language practices in the classroom, Carmichael
encouraged his students to oppose the assumptions behind such operations.
By encouraging students to build resistance-consciousness and engage in self
definition, he provided an educational space in which the crucial development
of social face can occur. Carmichael ended the session by summarizing these
concerns as two questions: "What is society? Who makes the rules for soci
ety?" (135).
Carmichael's pedagogy thus emphasized code switching and the com
munal value of AAVE to question both the relationship of his student to white
rule and their rationale for learning only "correct English" in school. Code
switching is a central element in African American communication that fo
cuses on "recognizing and exercising discourses of power and representation"
as a means of access to multiple social situations (Morgan 73). Morgan further
emphasizes that it is the failure to encourage code switching in American
schools, and the choice that students are asked to make about language as a
result, that continues to disenfranchise African American students today (143).
Stokely's Speech Class encouraged code switching as a means for negotiating
cultural transactions and maintaining face, while at the same time remaining
aware of the structures of oppression that constantly inform language use.
Code switching was a regular aspect of Carmichael's public performances.
Pat Jefferson has noted that Carmichael was a "master of audience adapta
tion" and "used language suited to each group" (21). Larry Robinson also notes
that Carmichael's speeches regularly accommodated the language practices
of their various audiences, using "dignified" and "tame" messages for white
audiences and jazz-influenced improvisation and call-and-response patterns
for African American audiences (212-213). Thus, in "Free Huey," Carmichael
uses African American rhetorical forms of repetition and signifyin' to commu
nicate with a primarily African American audience. By contrast, in his speech
to the 1967 Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, Carmichael uses pri
marily Standard American English to communicate with a considerably dif
ferent audience. The May 15, 1967, issue of Newsweek noted that Carmichael's
code-switching was self-consciously rooted in the politics of audience and lo
cation and reported Carmichael "soaking whites $1,000 for a rather tame ex
61
position of black power, charging Negro colleges $500 for the gloves-off treat
ment" ("Which Way" 28).
Carmichael's ability to negotiate multiple political and cultural discourses
not only indicated his own proficiency in code-switching, but also demon
strated the centrality of code-switching to his political efforts. It therefore seems
reasonable that he would see such rhetorical practices as the basis for devel
oping critical political awareness in his students. Such practices not only pro
vide the means to develop an organic bridge between Carmichael's own
philosophical and rhetorical training but also allowed him to develop a peda
gogy anchored in the epistemologies and language practices of the students
he taught.
The Organic Classroom: Freedom Schools and Critical

Rhetorical Pedagogy
While Carmichael's classroom practices themselves contributed a potential
model for language arts instructors, my aim in this section is to look at how
close analysis of his speech class complicated our own pedagogical theories.
In terms of classroom praxis, the work of Geneva Smitherman and Elaine
Richardson provide productive discussions of the deployment of AAVE in the
writing classroom and how best to translate Carmichael's concerns about lan
guage into usable composition pedagogies. Stephen Parks' Class Politics: The
Movementfor the Students'Rights to Their Own Language has also noted the
contribution of the Black Power movement to the adoption of the Students'
Right to Their Own Language resolution at the 1974 Conference on College
Composition and Communication, while Keith Gilyard's 'African American
Contributions to Composition Studies" locates the contributions of the same
social movements to contemporary debates on the use of AAVE in language
arts instruction.
As such, this essay hopes to focus more directly on the contribution of
Stokely's Speech Class to our understanding of critical rhetorical education
and the role of the classroom itself in those pedagogies. My claim is not that
we can derive a general theory or a classroom model from Carmichael's class.
As a singular class, it rather provides only one instance of the many critical
education projects that have been undertaken within American social move
ments, and speaks to the complexity and diversity of critical rhetorical
pedagogies. Rather, my argument here is that closer attention to these histori
cal sites and the practices developed within them can help us to further de
velop our understanding of critical pedagogies and their role in U.S. history.
62
Specific attention to such sites thus calls into question attempts to articulate
static theoretical models of education by reminding us of the need to build
"organic" pedagogies in response to social and political circumstances.
Jane Stembridge provides a lengthy list of conclusions about Carmichael's
class. She notes that the students in the class arrived at the following argu
ments:
* there is something called "correct English" and something called
"incorrect English";
* most people in the country use some form of incorrect or broken

English;
* it is not embarrassing to these people themselves;
* it is made embarrassing by other people because it is embarrassing to

them;
* they are a minority, the people who use correct English;
* they decide what is correct English;
* they make that important and use it to shame people and keep them
out of society;
* they make that a requirement for jobs and acceptance;
* they decide who is acceptable to society by shame but not everybody

can be shamed not Mr Turnbow, for example;
* the main thing is to understand what people mean when they talk;
* that is not the main thing to society. (qtd. in Jacobs and Landau 135-136)
I quote these points in their entirety as they provide a summary of the class,
and a useful commentary on what an SNCC organizer saw as the goals of Free
dom School education. This commentary is likewise informative for the man
ner in which it matches up with the goals of critical pedagogues within the
field of rhetoric and composition: to show the means by which language and
discourse establish and perpetuate oppressive power relations, and to further
provide students with the discursive skills to intervene and alter those rela
tions. Carmichael's class focused students' attention first and foremost on the
political relationships that Standard American English establishes, and the
tension between these relationships and the goals of language users.
63
But the structure of Stokely's Speech Class also calls attention to the
manner in which Carmichael constructed a pedagogy that reflected the cul
ture and needs of the African American community. Stembridge comments
that Carmichael "spoke to where they were at, and they were at different places,
and the places changed during the movement of the
Stokely's Speech Class also calls discussion" (136). This provided an educational en
attention to the manner in which vironment that encouraged "self-trust" and "self-love,"
Carmichael constructed a pedagogy and provided students with the means to actively
that reflected the culture and needs engage in the learning process. As I have argued
of the African American community. above, this environment is in no small way con
structed by Carmichael's use of AAVE as a pedagogi
cal agency. By using language practices familiar to his students, he not only
recognized the epistemological value of those practices but also created an
"organic" classroom centered on student needs.
Again, this goal is similar to that of many critical language arts instruc
tors. But the Freedom School movement also demands that we take seriously
the role of location-physical and institutional-in the development of such
pedagogies.9 Freedom Schools, being located in community buildings and di
rected toward concrete goals such as voter registration, asserted an educa
tional model centered not around assessment or standards but rather around
action and community organization.
Thus they were from the outset "organic." This should not be understood
as denoting an "authentic" relationship to the "folk": Freedom Schools were,
for the most part, organized by students and educators with considerable aca
demic training. These educators were further taken from areas such as Chi
cago, Washington D.C., and New York, and were therefore unlikely to
immediately share either socioeconomic or geographic circumstances with the
students they taught. Read in this light, the term organic denotes the manner
in which these educators created classrooms that acted in a functionary or
instrumental fashion to meet community needs.10 If educators such as Stokely
Carmichael can be said to be "organic intellectuals," it is on account of their
ability to adopt this functionary role.
Understanding organic classrooms as operating instrumentally to com
munity needs further complicates the critical/functional divide in literacy edu
cation. Freedom Schools were, by virtue of meeting educational needs not
immediately available to African Americans in the Mississippi Delta, as inter
ested in skills instruction as they were in engaging students' critical capaci
ties. The nature of the voter registration test further demanded that Freedom
64
School educators instruct students in "correct" English. But as Stokely's Speech

Class demonstrated, the focus on skills existed in a complimentary relation
ship to a focus on political awareness.
But taking seriously the pedagogical roles of location and language-Burke's

scene and agency-also complicates attempts to readily transfer critical
pedagogies such as those of Freire and Carmichael to more traditional class
rooms. University writing classrooms often have competing roles and find
themselves as much in the service of the university and its goals as they are in
the service of student needs. This is not to say that critical pedagogies are in
appropriate or impossible in university classrooms; it does, however, demand
that we investigate the manner in which scene and agency are in many ways
already determined in educational environments. Put another way, the found
ing of an organic classroom may prove to be contingent on conditions not
found in university environments. Given the harsh environment that sur
rounded the Freedom Schools, we should probably be thankful such condi
tions don't immediately determine our own pedagogical projects.
But beyond the individual lessons that we might take from Stembridge's
account, Stokely's Speech Class also functions as an informative reminder of a
strong tradition of critical rhetorical education long extant within the United
States. This tradition, which led to the development of the Freedom Schools
and the Voter Education Project, not only acknowledges the links between
political organization and education, but also builds its pedagogies out of the
relationship between historical conditions, students and language. In meeting
the emergent political needs of the African American community, the Free
dom Schools created organic classrooms rooted in struggle. Stokely's Speech
Class demonstrates the rhetorical nature of both those classrooms and the
social struggles in which they participated.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the generous comments offered on this article by Elaine
Richardson and an anonymous CCC reviewer, and thefeedback provided byAdam
Banks on an early version of this argument. I would also like to thank Keith Gilyard
for his assistance throughout the writing of this article.
Notes
1. Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture in 1968, which is, in light
of the argument I make below, an important event to note. I refer to Ture here as
65
Stokely Carmichael as this is the name under which he taught the Waveland class,
and the name that continues to appear alongside Kwame Ture on his published
works. Kwame Ture passed away in 1998 after a prolonged battle with cancer.
2. Jane Stembridge had, by 1965, left SNCC in an officiai capacity. She stayed on in
Mississippi to continue civil rights work and was engaged in this capacity when
she attended the Waveland Work-Study Institute.
3. While I have elected to use the term "African American Vernacular English" to
describe the language deployed by Carmichael, it should be noted that prominent
scholars and linguists have debated by which name African American languages
should be known. In her "Introduction to Ebonics," Geneva Smitherman notes that
the term Ebonics was deployed by a group of African American scholars "as a
superordinate term, covering all the African-European language mixtures devel
oped in various African-European contact situations throughout the world" (29).
The term Ebonics thus emphasized "the concept of a linguistic continuum from
Africa to the 'New World,'" a concept opposed to the deficit models associated
with the terms Black English or Black Vernacular English.
My use of African American Vernacular English should not be under
stood as a return to such a deficit model; my use of the term rather designates one
specific language variety used by Carmichael in his speech class and his speeches.
As well, African American Vernacular English here not only distinguishes it as one
language among the many covered by the term Ebonics but also as one among the
many forms of English spoken by the African American community. As my argu
ment makes clear, however, African American Vernacular English should be un
derstood within the framework described by Smitherman and demands specific
attention as its own language by scholars.
4. The citations given here refer to the account of the class found in Jacobs and
Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents. The transcript is reproduced
in Carmichael's Stokely Speaks, but without Stembridge s critical reflections on the
class.
5. The Student Voice for July 15,1964, reported that "[t]here are now 1,500 students
ranging in age from eight years to 82 years enrolled in 25 Freedom Schools in Mis
sissippi" (169). Clayborne Carson reports that enrollment in the Freedom Schools
was nearly twice what had been anticipated {In Struggle 119).
6. Of course, Carmichael needn't have gone so far afield to find critiques of Ameri
can educational institutions. As Elaine Richardson points out, Carter G. Woodson
and WE.B. DuBois both authored substantial critiques of American education that
in many ways resemble Fanons arguments. It should, however, be noted that
Woodsons critique appeared thirty years before The Wretched of the Earth was
translated. While Carmichael does not cite Woodson in any of his speeches, it is
reasonable?given his time at Howard University and his commitment to issues of
66
education?to assume that he was familiar with both critiques.

7. It should be noted that Carmichael does at times define "Black Power" as a con
cept that exists beyond a left-right political spectrum. While this might seem to
compromise my reading of his deployment of the term "left" in his classroom con
versation, I think that this attempt to think beyond left-right politics more accu
rately reflects a pragmatic understanding of the need for coalition-building among
African communities than an attempt to transcend political philosophies.
Carmichael remains anticapitalist throughout his career and is therefore arguably
a left thinker. His attempt to locate Black Power outside of a left political philoso
phy is necessitated by his doctrine of undying love for all Africans by all Africans; it
is therefore the role of the Black Power advocate to use his or her understanding of
inclusive politics to overcome their aversion to conservatives among their own
number.
8. Keith Gilyard s "African American Contributions to Composition Studies" tracks

more closely the contributions of the social movements of the 1960s to the field of
rhetoric and composition. These contributions came both in the form of a push
for greater representation within professional organizations and in the form of
expanding the debate about appropriate instructional models within the compo
sition classroom. Scholars such as Marian Musgrave, Melvin Butler, and Carol Reed
increasingly argued for the use of AAVE forms in some capacity in the writing
classroom, while linguists William Labov, J.L. Dillard, and Geneva Smitherman
contributed publications that developed linguistic understandings of African
American language. Thelma Curl and Lisa Delpit, have further argued for the need
to also teach African American students the cultural and linguistic codes of soci
ety at large, but in a way that culturally situates such codes (see Gilyard). Of course,
as Elaine Richardson reminds us, the debate is hardly one-sided with prominent
African Americans such as Clarence Thomas deriding their own linguistic heri
tage (10-11).
9. It should be noted that records of individual Freedom School classes are rare,
which makes it hard for us to generalize about the pedagogies deployed within
them; the variety of volunteers that taught the classes further make difficult gen
eralizations about the practices employed. However, the centrality of location and
the need to start with the knowledge that students already possessed are widely
regarded as fundamental elements of Freedom School organization. It is these foun
dations that the argument that follows refers to.
10. My use of the term organic emphasizes the role of an organ as a machine in the
service of a larger body. Raymond Williams notes in Keywords that, in English,
"organ" originally designated an instrument, and only in the nineteenth century
came to describe biological or vital process (227-229). Burkes discussion of agency
refers to Aristotle's organon to emphasize the idea of instrumentality, and Gramsci s
67
CCC 5 8: 1 / SE PTEM BE R 2006
use of the term, which describes the movement from conjunctural moments of
conflict to enduring political structures that promote the needs of disempowered
communities-similarly denotes this instrumental relationship (Burke 276;
Gramsci 177-178). Note that I do not take these instrumental relationships to be
neutral relationships, but rather relationships that orient themselves within the
purposes and needs of local communities.
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the
Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Prison Notebooks. Ed. and Trans.
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell
Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Smith. New York: International
Power Back to Pan-Africanism. New Publishers, 1971.
York: Random House, 1971.
Hardin, Joe Marshall. Opening Spaces:
Carmichael, Stokely, and Ekwueme Michael
Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory
Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life
in Composition. Albany: State U of New
and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael York P, 2001.
(Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.
Hollis, Karyn. Liberating Voices: Writing at
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and
the Bryn Mawr Summer School for
the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Women Workers. Carbondale: Southern
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Illinois UP, 2004.
-(ed.). The Student Voice, 1960-1965: Jacobs, Paul, and Saul Landau. The New
Periodical of the Student Nonviolent
Radicals: A Report with Documents. New
Coordinating Committee. Westport: York: Random House, 1966.
Meckler, 1990.
Jefferson, Pat. '"Stokely's Cool': Style."
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.
Todays Speech 16.3 (1968):19-24
Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New
York: Grove, 1967. Kates, Susan. Activist Rhetorics and
American Higher Education, 1885-1937.
-. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001.
Constance Farrington. New York: Grove,
1963. Morgan, Marcyliena. Language, Discourse
and Power in African American Culture.
Freir?, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Studies in the Social and Cultural
Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York:
Foundations of Language 20. Cam
Continuum, 1993.
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Gilyard, Keith. "African American Moses, Robert,and Charles E. Cobb, Jr..
Contributions to Composition Studies."
Radical Equations: Math Literacy and
CCC 50.4 (1999): 626-44.
Civil Rights. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
Gold, David. '"Nothing Educates Us Like a Parks, Stephen. Class Politics: The
Shock': The Integrated Rhetoric of
Movement for the Students'Right to
Melvin B. Toison." CCC 55.2 (2003): 226
Their Own Language. Urbana: NCTE,
53. 2000.
68
Richardson, Elaine. African American Ture, Kwame, and Charles V. Hamilton.

Literacies. London: Routledge, 2003. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.
New York Vintage Books, 1992.
Robinson, Larry. "Stokely Carmichael: Jazz
Artist." Western Speech 34 (1970): 212 "Which Way for the Negro?" Newsweek.
218. May 15,1967:27-34.
Smitherman, Geneva. "Black Power Is Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabu
Black Language." Black Culture: Reading lary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New
and Writing Black, ed. Gloria M. York Oxford UP, 1983.
Simmons and Helene Hutchinson. New
Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolition
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972.
ists. Westport: Greenwood, 1985.
-. Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture
and Education in America. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Stephen Schneider
Stephen Schneider is a doctoral candidate in English at The Pennsylvania State
University. His academic work focuses on the links between literacy education and
social movements and the development of critical language arts pedagogies in
noninstitutional settings.
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Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and Critical Rhetorical Education

Author(s): Stephen Schneider

Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and

CCC 58:1 / SEPTEMBER 2006

only for the manner in which it introduced students to a critical understand

I digs wine I enjoy drinking cocktails

Carmichael then focused classroom discussion on the differences between the

with critical pedagogy, Carmichael developed a rhetorical pedagogy that val

'On the Left, Except in Class": Carmichael's Philosophy of

Education thus reflects and perpetuates economic-corporate, civil, and state

The use of questions to ideologically coach students into maintaining correct

gree programs in "black studies:" and second language instruction. Contend

American schools, in failing to respond adequately to the needs of African

Carmichael's opening questions not only opened up the difference between

STOKELY Which way do most people talk?

to Carmichael's promptings about how people actually speak, suggests, albeit

munity buildings such as churches in response to exclusionary or inadequate

"Speaking Just Like We Always Have": Carmichael's Philosophy

their relationships to the world around them, constructs an alternative pedagogy

Carmichael thus understands AAVE as a counterlanguage, one that emerged

a linguistic agency capable of facilitating a resistant pedagogy.

Maybe, almost certainly, he understood the struggle we were engaged in better

Understood in terms of the Understood in terms of the historical and material

An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community-as does

Black Power thus emerges as a philosophy as much of linguistic activism as

While Carmichael didn't foreclose on the idea of learning correct English, he

The Organic Classroom: Freedom Schools and Critical

* most people in the country use some form of incorrect or broken

* it is made embarrassing by other people because it is embarrassing to

* they decide what is correct English;

* they make that a requirement for jobs and acceptance;

* they decide who is acceptable to society by shame but not everybody

School educators instruct students in "correct" English. But as Stokely's Speech

But taking seriously the pedagogical roles of location and language-Burke's

education?to assume that he was familiar with both critiques.

8. Keith Gilyard s "African American Contributions to Composition Studies" tracks

Richardson, Elaine. African American Ture, Kwame, and Charles V. Hamilton.

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