Learning to Struggle, Learning to Govern: How Black Youth Marshaled Education to Navigate Urban Transformations in the Motor City, 1967-1972

Abstract

This article examines the role of nontraditional education in Black youth’s efforts to navigate postwar transformations in Detroit, Michigan. While historians have debated the role of social movements in contestations over urban space, there is still a great deal to learn about the place of education and the young people who would inherit the city in these movements. Marshaling the analytical frameworks of social history and intellectual history, this article demonstrates that the use of education as a tool for political struggle was a practice that crossed institutional boundaries, from community-led political education to university partnerships to school-sponsored seminars. The nature of cities, with their expansive bureaucracies and vibrant political life, required and made possible educational projects that traversed institutional contexts. Within the city landscape, high school and out-of-school youth, academics, and labor radicals collectively reimagined the function of education in transforming urban spaces.