On Doing Justice to Black Mobility and Movement in the Classroom

Introduction

This paper offers the intellectual goals and content that guided a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) K-12 Summer Institute entitled “The Role of Geographic Mobility in the African American Freedom Struggle.” Readers are provided background and concepts for exploring Black geographies of mobility in classrooms. Geographic mobility is a core democratic principle important to understanding the African American Freedom Struggle and the politics of mobility, a recognition that the very dynamics of where, when, and how we move is a product of the exercise of social power and the distribution of rights. Institute teachers worked to develop content expertise and knowledge necessary to answer three major questions: (1) In what ways has geographic mobility been used as a means of racial control and exclusion against African Americans? (2) In what ways have African Americans used geographic mobility as a form of resistance, resilience, and world-making? (3) In what ways have racialized mobility patterns and practices shaped U.S. landscapes and people’s experiences, well-being, and vulnerability in those places?

Purpose

The Geographic Mobility Summer Institute, hosted at the University of Tennessee in 2022, represented an effort on the part of its organizers to bring recent critical innovations in human geography, social science, and historical research into the K–12 classroom and demonstrate how these critical ideas might be married with pedagogical strategies, digital tools, place-based education, and archival and oral history resources. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the workshop’s framing intellectual goals and content and to provide readers with some of the background and concepts necessary for a greater exploration of Black geographies of mobility in classrooms. Our hope in the Geographic Mobility Summer Institute was to enhance the preparation of participating teachers—many of whom were not geography teachers per se—not only to teach about specific mobility struggles undergirding the African American Freedom Struggle but also to expand their understanding of how and why the theme of geographic movement matters, both in general and with respect to American race relations. Geographic mobility is a core democratic principle in many social and spatial contexts, but it is especially important to understanding the Black struggle for equality, self-determination, and racial justice (Lipsitz 2011). Thus, our institute proceeded knowing that an examination of Black movement struggles was more than a historical geographic project; it is also about creating a more spatially informed civics or citizenship education that recognizes the impact of mobility (in)equalities on the distribution of rights in the past, present, and future. Geography education leaders stress that while citizenship is a formal, legally defined condition, it is also enacted through claims and negotiations of space and thus shaped by an unevenness in people, especially vulnerable and marginalized communities, being able to access and move across spaces. In defining an agenda for educators, Schmidt (2019, 42) embraces this more expansive conceptualization of citizenship and the role of geography, writing: “Spatial process[es] including the drawing of boundaries, the regulation of [mobile] bodies, and socially constructed senses of place shape both how we come to belong and how we act as citizens.” Centering the African American Freedom Struggle in our teaching can further problematize the concept of citizenship, partly because citizenship education in geography—even as it has a greater appreciation for difference—has infrequently addressed Black socio-spatial experiences, especially as those racialized experiences have been heavily shaped by the drawing of boundaries and the regulation of bodies and place attachments to which Schmidt (2019) refers.

Intellectual Goals of Institute

Our Geographic Mobility Summer Institute sought to create a space for critical inquiry and collegial interaction that would help participating teachers become familiar with and integrate the mobility turn with Black geographies. The mobility turn is a paradigm shift in the study of the social justice implications of patterns and practices of geographic movement (Cresswell 2008). Black geographies is a multi-approach field that studies the inherent spatiality of Black life and how the plurality of Black world-making and liberation practices enriches our understanding of geography (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Hawthorne 2019). While the mobility turn and Black geographies are now firmly established within the humanities and social sciences, they have thus far not had a significant place in K–12 pedagogical research or curriculum development. Underlying both bodies of thought is a recognition of the centrality of “spatial justice”—how struggles to claim, occupy, and move through spaces and hence access the resources and opportunities found in those spaces—is crucial to the welfare, sustainability, and rights of historically marginalized groups (Armstrong 2012; Schlemper et al. 2023).

Arising in the 1990s, the mobility turn captures the increased importance that scholars place on understanding the positive and negative social meanings that physical movement has for people and the way these movements work to define and influence various dimensions of cultural and political life and identity (Cresswell and Merriman 2011). Especially important within the mobility turn is that the theme of movement is more than physical motion between point A and B. Underlying any and all movements is the politics of mobility, a recognition that the very dynamics of where, when, and how we move is a product of the exercise of social power and that these socially constructed and contested movements and practices have a direct bearing on people’s realization of well-being (or vulnerability) and freedom (or oppression). Freedom to move varies by who/where you are within structures of opportunities and disparities; while some social actors and groups realize this freedom, others experience immobility, forced migration and displacements, or segregated access to spaces. Mobility is recognized as an unevenly distributed resource important to the well-being of social actors and the life chances of groups rather than an unproblematic fact of life (Cresswell 2008).

Scholars have grown interested in understanding the role of migration, tourism, and daily travel in controlling or empowering historically discriminated groups (Alderman, Kingsbury, and Dwyer 2013). They also recognize that transportation is not socially neutral; rather, racial and class politics guide its organization, use, and impact. Transportation justice, a framework now firmly established in academic studies and political advocacy movements, seeks to expose and challenge the disparities in mobility that spring from the unequal way that public and private transportation is planned in terms of access, funding, and location (Bullard, Johnson, and Torres 2004). As our institute demonstrated, the African American experience is an especially powerful example of the socially controlled but also contestable nature of geographic mobility and transportation practices as part of wider struggles over rights, belonging, and equality (Parks 2016).

The roots of Black geographies date back to generations of geographers of color resisting and existing within a largely white discipline, but it has gained momentum as a formal field of study within the past two decades. Black geographies center the lives, spatial practices, and ways of knowing of people of color, and in doing so, the field redefines foundational ideas about what counts as geographic theory, methods, and curriculum in a still white-centric discipline (Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017). This vein of thought looks beyond the idea of geography simply being the container of history to consider the role that space, place, environment, and mobility play in constituting and structuring past and present processes of oppression and liberation. For African Americans, spatial surroundings and geographic ­movements have always been part of the project of constructing and reinforcing, but also challenging, the racial categories and social hierarchies undergirding white supremacy. Our Black Geographies of Mobility Summer Institute built upon and drew assigned readings from Black-led scholarship on African American mobility, transportation, and migration across and within places (e.g., Bay 2021; Kelley 2010; Sorin 2020; Taylor 2020; Wilkerson 2011). This scholarship assisted organizers and participating educators in recognizing the wide-ranging ways in which geographic movement was (and remains) central to civil rights struggles—whether as the basis of legislation and court cases, a political tactic or tool in protest, or the everyday ways in which Black communities experience and subvert racism. The latter point proved especially important to our institute’s goal of addressing the dialectical tension between mobility as a form of control and as a form of resistance.

According to the field of Black geographies, African American social life operates within but also outside traditional Cartesian coordinates. To fully understand the consequential role of geographic mobility in social life necessitates that we not confine ourselves to conventional definitions of maps and data. Instead, we need to recover and center the agency and stories of people behind the dots, lines, and polygons depicted on maps of movement (Hyman forthcoming). It requires that we pay attention pedagogically to the Black geographic knowledge produced through a wide range of artistic expressions, political strategies of resistance, and alternative cartographic and place-making practices (Lenderman et al. 2015). McKittrick (2011) used the term “Black sense of place” to capture the emerging and contested states of being and belonging for African Americans and Black diasporic communities more broadly. A Black sense of place, according to her, situates racism and antiracist resistance within a richer conception of the role of struggle, humanity, and creativity within Black life. Given McKittrick’s (2011) ideas about the varied experiences and place-making practices that define Blackness, it is helpful to think of multiple Black senses of place. As our Geographic Mobility Summer Institute sought to illustrate, Black senses of place are not limited to African Americans’ fixed and rooted connections within locations, but are also enacted through their fluid encounters with people and places—including through Black senses of what geographic mobility and movement meant (and continue to mean) to the struggle for freedom. As the work of Finney and Potter (2018) illustrates, the act of asserting Black rights to claim place and to occupy certain spaces, including for the purposes of touristic travel, is frequently a struggle against historic and contemporary efforts to control and police the mobile Black body. Acknowledging a Black sense of movement, in terms of how it is both oppressed and empowered, allows geography educators to situate geographic mobility within an understanding of the political negotiation of life and the physical and emotional labor, violence, and joy that African American communities encounter when moving on their own.

Content Themes of Institute

The NEH-funded summer institute examined many types of movements in the context of the African American experience, including (1) private and public transportation access, use, and impacts across everyday spaces; (2) voluntary and forced ­migration and relocation into and out of regions; (3) touristic navigation and wayfinding through (un)welcoming communities and places; and (4) wider place- and community-redefining circulations of capital investment, diffusions of culture (including music), networks of social and political mobilization, and the role of feelings in moving people psychologically and physically. Our institute elevated the emotional geographies and social relationships that surround human geographic mobility rather than merely discussing movement as a series of origins and destinations, macro-level flows, traditional distance-decay models, and push-pull factors. This emphasis on the felt and socially lived dimensions of mobility is part of a growing focus on Black emotional geographies as key to understanding fully the racist pressures long affecting Black bodies and souls, along with the subtle and overt expressions of Black agency, resilience, and memory wielded against this oppression (Jones 2019; Roberts and Butler 2022).

During the institute, we worked to define the African American Freedom Struggle against racism in non-monolithic terms historically and geographically, inspired in part by Bledsoe and Wright’s (2019) recognition of the plurality of Black social movements and spatial practices composing the fight for self-determination. Discussion focused on the Black Freedom Struggle as an unfinished, always-emerging project foundational to the United States—from enslavement to the Jim Crow era to contemporary Black Lives Matter movements. Emphasis was placed on top-down, monumental civil rights campaigns as well as lesser known but no less important grassroots struggles for human rights. These struggles are manifest not only in formal protest and what traditionally counts as activism but also in patterns of resistant living and working, the everyday carving out and creating of places of survival, dignity, and leisure. Finally, moments were created in the workshop to discuss the Black Freedom Struggle as inherently intersectional—meaning that it is shaped by the intersecting identities of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and region.

Geographic Mobility Summer Institute leaders and guest faculty worked with participating educators to build content expertise and knowledge necessary to answer three major questions: (1) In what ways has geographic mobility been used as a means of racial control and exclusion against African Americans? (2) In what ways have African Americans used geographic mobility as a form of resistance, self-determination, and world-making? (3) In what ways have racialized mobility patterns and practices shaped U.S. landscapes and people’s experiences and well-being in those places?

Mobility as Control

In taking on the first theme of how mobility is deployed as a technology of racism, Geographic Mobility Summer Institute educators explored the significant role of geographic movement in the subjugation and oppression of African Americans. Beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and later during the U.S. domestic slave trade (The Second Middle Passage) that moved enslaved African Americans inter-regionally within the United States, mobility has played a key role in a white-dominated society’s controlling of Black bodies, spirits, and lives. The enslaved could not leave their owners without permission and only traveled across large distances if sold or hired out by their enslavers or if they worked to escape or self-emancipate themselves. Participating teachers, for example, conducted critical readings of antebellum ads published to re-capture the enslaved who had run away. These documents were created and deployed to control the free movements of African Americans and often invoked racist iconography, degrading descriptions, and past evidence of brutal treatment, but they are also powerful social texts revealing information about the life experiences, agency, and valued skills of enslaved people and the contested relationship they had with their enslavers.

Forced geographic mobility and immobility were not simply by-products of enslavement but played a key role in the development and maintenance of slavery along with the wider project of structural racism. Educators discussed how racialized control of Black movement during slavery was foundational to the making of the American national economy and global flows of capital, commodities, and ideas about race (Baptist 2014). The necessity of a holistic perspective of geographic mobility that saw how different movements of people, things, and cultures worked with or against each other rather than artificially separating them was key for the education of participants.

Within the institute, a pedagogical focus on the Jim Crow era (conventionally beginning in the 1870s) was crucial to developing content expertise about the racialization of movement (Alderman and Inwood 2014). After the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction, African Americans were once again faced with harsh restrictions on their mobility in efforts to reassert a white-dominated racial status quo and to roll back political and economic freedom strides made in the wake of the Civil War. Educators examined and discussed so-called “Jim Crow” laws established across the United States to racially segregate life and deprive Black Americans of many of the rights afforded to their white counterparts. These rigid laws were part of a broad array of formal and informal social practices that sanctioned racial apartheid; limited the educational, economic, and political rights of African Americans; and led to frequent instances of lynching and false imprisonment.

Movement was one facet of life where the consequences of Jim Crow were especially visible. African Americans were denied equal access to public transportation, from being forced to sit in back of busses and occupy separate railroad cars or compartments to being refused service at airport terminals (Bay 2021). While automobiles afforded more freedom than segregated public transportation, racism’s humiliating and violent reach was felt by African Americans even while driving, as they encountered hyper-policing, sundown towns that disallowed overnight stays by people of color, and the humiliation of separate but not really equal accommodations (Loewen 2005; Seiler 2008).

While civil rights mobilization and legislation of the 1950s and 1960s brought greater freedom of movement, institute content always qualified these strides with the reality that contemporary African Americans and other people of color continue to see limits in their right to walk, jog, and drive in public spaces without threats of violence and racial profiling by citizens and law enforcement. Educators discussed the concept of “Traveling/Driving While Black” to draw attention to how many modern Black travelers remain apprehensive and fearful of overt discrimination and microaggressive sleights even as they work to exert greater positive agency over their own tourism movements (Dillette, Benjamin, and Carpenter 2019; Ranganath 2022). The institute also deployed the lens of “Transportation Racism” (Bullard, Johnson, and Torres 2004) to interpret ongoing restrictions in the funding and coverage of public transit, racial and class gaps in auto ownership, inaccessibility to healthy food options (food deserts), the disproportionate economic burdens of commuting on people of color, and the impact of poor walkability on the physical health and pedestrian safety of low-income neighborhoods.

Mobility as Resistance

The structures and practices used to control people’s movements are never comprehensive, and institute educators were exposed to historical and contemporary case studies of African Americans redefining the terms of their geographic mobility to resist and be resourceful against institutionalized discrimination and segregation. During the era of slavery, the enslaved ran away and removed their labor-producing bodies from white control through a wide array of resistant mobility networks and pathways. Geographers such as Christy Hyman (forthcoming) are shifting our attention and vocabulary away from the enslaved being “runaways” or “escaped labor” to being “freedom-seekers” engaged in liberation and making alterative places of being. While much popular and curricular attention on these emancipatory movements focus on the Underground Railroad that helped those held in bondage flee to the North or Canada, these accounts run the risk of depicting the enslaved as mere “passengers” or “cargo” guided by conductors and protected by stationmasters. While discussions of abolitionists Harriet Tubman, William Still (Diemer 2022), and others highlight the critical role that African Americans played as conductors on the Underground Railroad, there is often a neglect of the bodily and geographic work performed by enslaved people of color in freeing themselves and their strategic practices in traveling, hiding, and resisting re-capture.

Drawing from the historical work of Franklin and Schweninger (2000), educators were encouraged to think of the escape from slavery as a multifaceted movement of rebellion that was not always meant to take the enslaved far from the plantation or even northward. Indeed, while some enslaved ran away to merely be free and reach distant places, some escaped to neighboring areas and laid out for brief or long periods of time as a way of “striking a bargain,” a way of forcing concessions from enslavers on issues related to their treatment and that of their families. In the Geographic Mobility Summer Institute, we framed these moments of self-emancipation, and the entirety of the Black Freedom Struggle, in terms of the “antiracism mobility work” of African Americans as they moved in ways that subverted and survived white supremacy (Alderman and Inwood 2016). This antiracist mobility work refers to the creative practices of Black individuals, groups, and institutions to move (or stay put) on their own terms in a society that sought to immobilize or forcibly remove them. This creative antiracist mobility work has been wide-ranging geographically, deployed in daily struggles for survivability and material reproduction as well as more spectacular moments of protest, and achieved through a variety of bodily, technological, and social practices key to geographic self-determination.

Treating geographic movement as part of the work of Black protest and resistant living provided summer institute participants at the University of Tennessee with a framework for highlighting the physical, emotional, and social labor of a wide range of people living with and against racism—an important counterpoint to traditional curricular treatments of the Civil Rights Movement that allows discussions of nationally prominent campaigns and leaders to overshadow the resistant living and organizing of everyday communities. Antiracist mobility work helped focus the institute faculty and participants to recover the practices that enliven and make possible a number of examples of resistant and resilient Black geographic movement.

Geographic Mobility Summer Institute educators explored the planning and labor behind a number of Black geographic movement practices that tend to receive limited attention in the classroom. These included (1) streetcar boycotts waged by African Americans in 25 southern cities from 1900 to 1907 that preceded better-known protests against segregation on busses (Kelley 2010); (2) the alternative carpool system and walking protests carried out by African Americans during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that allowed boycotters to stay off segregated city busses for over a year in the 1950s (Alderman, Kingsbury, and Dwyer 2013); (3) the brave journeys of the Red Ball Express’ African American truck drivers as they transported fuel across France during World War II after D-Day (Carey 2021); (4) the savvy antiracist driving of stock car driver Wendell Scott as he challenged the color barrier in NASCAR beginning in the 1950s (Alderman and Inwood 2016); and (5) the ways in which Black travelers presently use social media and their own tourism networks to navigate and negotiate occurrences of racism while away from home (Dillette, Benjamin, and Carpenter 2019).

The lens of antiracist mobility work also allowed Geographic Mobility Summer Institute participating teachers to reexamine and reinterpret better-known content about the African American Freedom Struggle. For example, the Green Book, a Jim Crow–era travel guide created by and for African American motorists, is now a fairly well-known and widely used chapter for bringing attention to the fact that highways, cities, and towns were never open to everyone. Our workshop discussions pushed past the idea that the Green Book was simply a historical listing of destinations that would welcome Black travelers and allow them to avoid the humiliation and violence of mobility discrimination. Educators were encouraged to view the Green Book as part of a larger contested history of Black automobility and use it as a platform for understanding how African American travelers created and used a uniquely Black geographic knowledge of U.S. highways and communities as they navigated around and found refuge within hostile landscapes (Mitchell and Collins 2014). Places listed in the travel guide allow us to conceptualize the work of tourism and hospitality as a form of resistance against white supremacy (Bottone 2022). We depicted the Green Book as a critical archive of Black mobility and place-making work that, when combined with GIS and repeat photography, can be deployed to map changing patterns of historical racial segregation and contemporary remains of urban communities of color in the face of decades of demolition, gentrification, urban renewal, and highway construction (Bottone 2020). Despite the prominence of the travel guide in present-day discussions of travel, our institute also read beyond the Green Book to identify the larger array of driving strategies, travel decisions, and socio-emotional labor deployed by Black motorists in the Jim Crow era (Alderman, Williams, and Bottone 2022).

Teacher participants worked with guest faculty/facilitators to explore the mobility work behind another well-known geographic movement that greatly contributed to the fight for civil rights: the Great Migration of African Americans from the Southeast to northern, midwestern, and western cities from 1910 to 1970 (Inwood 2014). There was a concerted effort to complicate iconic textbook maps of the Great Migration that tend to reduce the 20th-century Black escape from the Jim Crow South as a series of unproblematic, unidirectional flow lines that belie the difficult decisions, trips, and consequences experienced by migrating individuals and families as they found opportunity but also continued inequality and discrimination outside the South. In seeing the Great Migrations of African Americans as embodied human practices, lived experiences, and wider systems of knowing and resisting racism, the Geographic Mobility Summer Institute created content moments in which a detailed spatial analysis of migration patterns (e.g., examining variation by decade, region, and city) was combined with the journey stories of Black migrants as retold in Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson 2011) and reflected in the creative expressions of artist Beauford Delaney and blues musician Muddy Waters (Strait 2021). The concept of journey stories can be applied more broadly in the geography classroom to capture examples of how ordinary people actively experience oppressive mobility but also (re)work the act of moving as they negotiate their well-being and rights. Even the smallest story can unlock and give meaning to larger geographic patterns and processes, and journey stories as a content innovation can be crucial to building student empathy, allowing them to locate their own stories of movement, privilege, and marginalization.

Mobility as Place-(Un)Making

Another important content innovation within our Black Geographies of Mobility Summer Institute was making important connections between the racialized politics of geographic movement and the making and un-making of places. Participating educators were encouraged to think about how prevailing mobility and transportation regimes have shaped landscapes in the United States, historically and now, in both positive and negative ways (Kerski 2015). For example, the workshop used lectures, readings, and hands-on lessons to understand the historical geography of how planners and engineers constructed transportation infrastructure that worked to compromise the mobility and well-being of Black communities—whether through building roads in the middle of minority neighborhoods, not installing sidewalks in poor communities, using ramps and overpasses to isolate Black and Brown communities, or keeping public transit systems out of wealthy white areas. The Geographic Mobility Summer Institute specifically explored the history and consequences of the building of the federal interstate highway system beginning in the 1950s (Archer 2020). The deliberate construction of these interstates, rather than an ideologically innocent process, led to the splintering and paving over of many Black neighborhoods and business districts across the United States—from Detroit (I-375) and St. Paul (I-94) to New Orleans (I-10) and Nashville (I-40).

We discussed with educators that the destructive effects of transportation infrastructure—especially when combined with the histories of redlining (Pearcy 2020) and urban renewal programs that razed neighborhoods unfairly labeled as blighted—has had lasting legacies on communities of color. This un-making of place has brought losses in property, entrepreneurial capacity, and intergenerational wealth among some African Americans, as well as spurring white flight suburbanization and further segregation and neglect of Black people and places, constructing a culture of distrust for future transportation and urban planning no matter how well intended. Yet, there are ongoing efforts—both at the government and community organizational levels—to take responsibility for the race and class inequalities historically created by oppressive transportation infrastructure and to reconnect Black neighborhoods divided by highways by promoting greenways, transit programs, investments in businesses and residences, and even the removal and reengineering of some roads and overpasses. As participating teachers found when visiting Nashville, a city currently trying to bridge communities north and south of I-40, reparative efforts can be complicated by wider geographic movements of (dis)investment and redevelopment, such as the ongoing displacement of Black residents at the hands of gentrification.

In emphasizing the role of transportation in the un-making of places associated with African American neighborhoods, institute leaders and participating teachers stressed the importance of not seeing these Black communities as erased. Community storytelling projects, such as “2892 Miles to Go”—which amplifies local stories about race and justice in the historic Rondo community of St. Paul (as well as in Louisville, Tulsa, and along the iconic Route 66)—demonstrate how neighborhoods negatively impacted by highway construction and urban renewal refuse to be forgotten and show a persistence and resiliency in their narratives, social practices, and other place-based community expressions.

An important content theme within the workshop was the active Black place-making that happens amid and in direct response to discriminatory access to geographic mobility. We highlighted, for example, the geography of parks and beaches, business districts, resorts and tourist accommodations, ­educational institutions, and performance spaces for African Americans that arose out of racial segregation but that also became places of refuge and respite for those traveling and residing under the burden of Jim Crow. In our institute, we identified these geographies as “Black counter-public spaces,” where African Americans claimed and made places of racial segregation and limited mobility as their own and transformed them into locations where Black identities, cultural traditions, and political debate could flourish separate from and in opposition to the white-dominated public sphere (Inwood 2011). People’s movements into and within these Harlems, Black Wall Streets, Sweet Auburn Avenues, and Little Africas would be essential to sharing information and news important to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of these sites of Black place-making created by the controlled mobility of African Americans proved to be important incubators for planning political protest during formal civil rights campaigns since they were away from the prying eyes and ears of the white establishment.

Lessons for Teaching Black Mobility

Our NEH-funded institute at the University of Tennessee sought to create an opportunity to bring the mobility turn and the field of Black geographies into conversation in ways that support K–12 educators interested in teaching the civil rights implications of Black spatial movement and mobility. While organizers began the institute with a clear idea of the themes to be addressed, it became quickly apparent that the 18 participating teachers were active co-constructors of that content through the spaces of dialogue and project development they created in the three-week workshop. Our participants, 78% of whom currently work at the high school level (all but one in public schools), freely shared their own pedagogical background and innovations, stemming from their average 18 years of experience. Most of the participating educators teach U.S. History, but other instructional duties include AP Human Geography, African American Studies, Civics/Government, Language Arts, Library and Museum Education, and Visual Communication. People of color and women made up a majority of attending teachers (61% and 78%, respectively); geographically, attendees hailed from 12 different states (56% from the Southeast and also from as far away as New York, California, Minnesota, and Washington State).

This racial and geographic diversity proved highly important to advancing exploration and expansion of institute themes, since attending K–12 educators were enthusiastic and frequently initiated discussions of content. They contributed their own knowledge of specific geographic mobility histories and injustices within their own communities along with their own family stories of driving and traveling while Black. This grounding of concepts within personal lived experiences aided critical storytelling and reflection key to enhancing the institute’s content. Educators also addressed the challenges (but also the necessities) of teaching about racism and antiracism in classrooms where such discussions are being curtailed by states and local school districts. Indeed, the weight of these restrictions is heavy and, in hindsight, organizers should have devoted more sessions to addressing strategies for teaching controversial content in the now highly surveilled classroom. Because discussion remained high throughout the workshop and played a meaningful role in building content understanding, organizers believe that future institutes should ensure that enough time is set aside for participating teachers to lend discussion, mutual support, and collaboration in developing content expertise and confidence.

Participating teachers were asked to identify their biggest “takeaway” in a post-institute assessment held on the final day of the workshop. Their responses were less about the specific historical facts they learned and more about appreciating in more general ways how the institute explored the humanity and richness of Black experiences, especially the complexity of responses to oppression often not found in curriculum standards. Educators saw great value in the workshop’s focus on oral history and critical use of maps, and indeed they wanted more opportunities to experiment with digital geo-humanities and story mapping. Highly encouraging was how much teachers felt transformed by the conceptual themes of mobility as racialized control and mobility as antiracist resistance. A participant noted, for example, that they now recognize “how much geographic mobility influences our [life] pathways and decisions.” Because a significant number of attending educators lacked an extensive background in geography, discussions of mobility in the context of Black place-(un)making took more time and effort, but it was judged in assessment as an innovative pedagogical theme. One teacher cited their major takeaway as gaining a “bigger understanding of what geography is and how it is used politically [for or against certain people’s interests].” Along these lines, a number of participants expressed interest in the displacing impacts of urban renewal and interstate highway building on Black places/communities, inspired in part by the institute’s fieldwork in Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee. An exciting expansion of our work would be developing a future summer institute that specifically addresses the resilience and resistance of Black communities of color in the face of the destructive impact of urban renewal, gentrification, and transportation planning. That institute should be done as a traveling field school that visits and learns from local communities in a number of U.S. cities.

Participating K–12 educators were asked to present pedagogical projects developed during the institute to illustrate how they might apply the themes of the workshop to their own classrooms. Some created new lesson ideas and educational materials, while others used institute content for expanding ideas already addressed within their classrooms. Because of the fast pace of the institute and the large amount of material covered, these projects were never envisioned as anything more than a starting point. Yet, from several of those projects emerged new ideas, case studies, and methods that have crystalized into frameworks important to teaching Black mobilities and geographies of movement more broadly: (1) sense of movement, (2) right to mobility, (3) bodily work of mobility, and (4) consequences of movement on well-being.

For example, a teacher of visual communication contributed a pedagogical strategy for helping explore “sense of movement,” or the feelings and meanings people attach to mobility. For their final project, students look at and respond to pictures associated with the consequential Selma to Montgomery civil rights march of 1965 and are asked to reflect on what mobility meant to marchers emotionally and politically and why their mobility was so fiercely contested. An educator in AP Human Geography and U.S. History filled important voids in institute content by exploring how America’s court system has historically limited or facilitated Black Americans’ “right to mobility,” which describes the power-laden nature of who gets to be mobile (or not) on their own terms. They devised a lesson leading students through an early Iowa Supreme Court Case (Montgomery v. Ralph, 1839) and how the migration of an enslaved man from Missouri to Iowa influenced the court’s decision to declare him a free person. Another participating teacher, in English language arts and social studies, expanded and improvised on the institute’s initial discussions of fugitive slave ads. Their lesson encourages students to reflect on the “bodily work of mobility,” a theme emphasizing the embodied practices and labor of moving to ensure one’s freedom and survival and has students rewrite slave advertisements from the perspective of the freedom-seeker rather than their enslaver. This exercise, which requires creativity and ­sensitivity, asks students to envision and consider what work, planning, and specific geographic journeys composed self-­emancipation. Finally, an educator of African American and Virginia history brought a needed global focus to the “consequences of movement on well-being,” or how freedom of mobility (or lack thereof) shapes people’s welfare and place-based opportunities. For their final project, students learn about African Americans currently relocating abroad to move away and liberate themselves from the toxic effects of racism. Students map these ongoing mobility patterns, investigate why they occur, and reflect on the life of Black expats in the lands they now occupy.

Institute leaders are maintaining working connections with participating teachers. We plan to examine more fully in the future how this group of talented educators from across the United States has adopted, extended, and strategically reworked the institute’s major themes and content as they negotiate the learning needs of their classrooms and the highly charged political atmosphere within which they live, work, and teach.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Endowment for the Humanities.

Notes on contributors

Derek H. Alderman

Derek H. Alderman is a professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and founder of Tourism RESET, an organization that studies and challenges racial inequalities in travel, tourism, and geographic mobility. He is a cultural historical geographer interested in public memory, race, civil rights education, critical place naming and mapping studies, and politics of geographic mobility and travel, often in the context of the African American Freedom Struggle.

Ethan Bottone

Ethan Bottone is an assistant professor of geography in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at Northwest Missouri State University. His teaching and research explores human and cultural geography, focusing particularly on critical aspects of tourism.