ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to conceptualize the meaning of fugitivity as an analytic with a utilitarian bearing on how we might interpret Black education as a historical, political endeavor; aims to speak pointedly about the ways in which Black teachers have necessarily inhabited a fugitive stance within the American school. It argues that the competing discourses of the Common School Movement, abolitionism, and anti-Black educational policies converged and informed a shared ethic/rationale amongst Black Americans that education and freedom were inextricably bound. As Black education developed from emancipation to Jim Crow, African American teachers often discerned an incongruence between their vested interests in education as a freedom-seeking project and their political and economic realities within the American educational landscape. The chapter also argues that the enslaved person stealing away to gain literacy represents the quintessential persona at heart of Black education, a project that dwells on the question of freedom and has historically required a fugitive disposition toward dominant schooling norms.
