‘We bring in each other's wisdom’: liberatory praxis and political education for Black lives in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT

Education is a central aspect of social movements' ability to build individual and collective participation in political struggle. But, how do these processes of learning and consciousness take place? As Choudry (Choudry, A. 2015. Learning Activism: The intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements. University of Toronto Press) argues, it is important to examine the intellectual life of contemporary social movements, their various forms and pedagogies of learning and knowledge production. In this article, we examine the role of ‘political education' in the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) global network. Rather than create educational spaces separate from the movement itself, BLM Philadelphia organisers approach political education as deeply embedded within a radical organising culture that focuses on integrating abolitionist principles within movement activities. Through in-depth interviews with BLM organisers, we find that practices of political education are built into the fibre of organising where activists ‘bring in each other's wisdom', cultivating a radical and organic culture of community support and intergenerational knowledge-making. We hope these findings contribute to a more expansive understanding of ‘political education' within Black social movements, building on Choudry’s call to centre the knowledge production and intellectual biography of contemporary social movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movement learning
• Black social movements
• social movements
• non-formal learning
• activism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Quote from interview participant YahNé Ndgo

2 Organisers also use ‘Movement for Black Lives’ (M4BL) to refer to the collective struggle of established and nascent organizations that converges around police and prison abolition, political power building, and economic justice and reparations for Black communities, most recently articulated in the ‘Vision for Black Lives’ policy agenda for Black liberation (Movement for Black Lives 2022).

3 Quote from interview participant Josiah Green

4 With permission, we use the real names of BLM Philly activists in this article in line with important challenges to the ‘anti-citational’ politics of pseudonyms, which ‘create a false dichotomy between the field and academia’ and deny ‘recognition … .and intellectual credit’ to the contributions to knowledge production of non-academic interlocutors (Weiss 2021, para. 14).

5 The member organizations include Philly for REAL Justice, BLM Philly, Black Alliance for Peace, Black and Brown Workers Cooperative, Abolitionist Law Center, Human Rights Coalition, Mike Africa Jr. of The MOVE Organization, Mobilization for Mumia, International Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal, and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

6 The full platform can be read and viewed on the Black Philly Radical Collective website at www.blackphillyradicalcollective.com.

7 The Frank Rizzo statue, located prominently facing city hall, was a life-sized monument to the former mayor (1971–1979) and police commissioner (1967–1971), whose brutality towards Black community members was notorious. After years of Black-led organizing for its removal, the statue was a target of intensified protests at the outset of the 2020 Philadelphia uprising. It was removed in June 2020.

8 The name is a portmanteau of Juneteenth and the beloved, all-purpose Philly term, ‘jawn’. For an ethnographic account of the inaugural Jawnteenth, see Strong 2020.

9 Nanre Nafziger and Krystal Strong are co-conveners of this solidarity effort, which brought together dozens of grassroots organizers from Black social movements throughout the African Diaspora (Strong and Nafziger 2021; Strong et al. 2022b).

10 BLM10Plus, ‘Tell No Lies,’ 10 June 2021, accessed 16 June 2022, https://www.blmchapterstatement.com.