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The 2016 Charles H. Thompson lecture invokes the radical transformative power and possibilities of education research in the Black Liberation tradition of study, struggle and returning what we learn to the people. In this lecture Dr. Joyce Elaine King delineates the African philosophical and epistemological roots of this tradition in the works of historical Black educators and theoreticians as well as scholar activists today whose inquiries also challenge the myth of "objectivity" in social science research. This eurocratic paradigm, which admonishes us to be "objective, " often creates role conflict and alienates us from our people. Instead, the Black Liberation tradition in education as well as research favors partisan scientific inquiry and praxis in the interest of equity, racial justice and human freedom. The lecture examined these issues in Black education and research in the U.S. and the African Diaspora in keeping with the aims of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent.
Keywords: Africana/Black Studies, Critical Africana Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Black Liberation pedagogy, Black Education Research
Dedicated to the memory of Septima Clark (1898-1987), Ella J. Baker (1903-1986), Bernice V. Robinson (1914-1994), Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), Josina Machel (1945-1971), and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (1935-2016).
INTRODUCTION
In The Art of Clear Thinking Rudolph Flesch (1951), who also wrote, Why Johnny Can't Read, quotes the British novelist E. M. Forster: "Unless we remember, we cannot understand." I would say, unless we "re-member" (King, Swartz et al., 2014)-reconnecting what we have been permitted to know only in fragmented and distorted ways, if at all-that is to say, unless we recover from what Cheikh Anta Diop (1991) described as our collective "historical and cultural amnesia," we can neither understand or think for ourselves. Carter G. Woodson, who is remembered as "the Father of Black History," understood this necessity as our responsibility to "think Black" (Hine, 1986, p. 409). Extending the thirty-seventh Annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture, this article examines the radical transformative power and possibilities of education research in the Black Liberation tradition of returning what we learn to the people. I situate this ethos, which is a fundamental tenet of Africana/Black Studies theorizing and African philosophy, within the aims of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent. The article...