Adult Literacy Reform Through a Womanist Lens

Abstract

This article explores nuances of power and powerlessness in adult literacy, pedagogy in the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, this article places Bernice Violanthe Robinson's adult, literacy reforms within the revolutionary framework of Highlander Folk, School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and shows how such reforms became a transformative force that helped give the vote to thousands of disenfranchised African Americans. The article examines Robinson's remarkable service and leadership in the context of womanist theory to address the range of African American women's lived experiences of the three interlocking systems that oppress them: race, class, and gender. Her work exemplified key principles of the womanist epistemology, emphasizing self-help, self-definition, and community mobilization within the African American community. The article also explores Robinson's body of work in adult literacy, which resonates with later adult learning theories of political consciousness. Finally, by examining contemporary uses for Robinson's work, I hope to show the importance of her unique contributions and draw her distinguished career away from the margins.

Black History in Adult Education in the United States: A Historical Review and Historiographical Critique

“…After a flourishing of historical writing about Black AE in the 1990s, the topic received sustained attention in the 21st century with most of the publications appearing in book chapters or in journals not listed on AAACE's online resource guide. Contributions have included a variety of subjects, such as the role of adult learning in cultivating resistance among enslaved people (Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022), discussions of Black women's market activity in the antebellum era (Smith, 2001), an article about a racially integrated college in Kentucky established in 1850 (Day et al, 2013), AE in the Harlem Renaissance (Johnson-Bailey, 2001, 2006), Black experiences dealing with the American Association for Adult Education (Guy & Brookfield, 2009), Anna Julia Cooper's work in AE in the 1930s and 1940s (Johnson, 2009), Bernice Robinson (Ntiri, 2014), Septima Clark and freedom schools (Baumgartner, 2005; Charron, 2009), Black women self-help and collective action (Nembhard, 2015), Black intellectual thought regarding AE (Grant et al, 2015), the 1968 Poor People's Campaign (Hamilton, 2013, 2016), Alain Locke (Nocera, 2018; Stewart, 2018), Black women and 20th century social movement learning (Roumell & James-Gallaway, 2021), labor organizing (Ross-Gordon & Alston, 2015), welfare reform (Alfred, 2006), and teaching (Chapman, 2015), racialized and gendered public history (Merriweather, 2020), treatments of race and disability history in 20th and 21st century HRD handbooks and textbooks (Bohonos & Johnson-Bailey, in press; Bohonos et al, in press), several chapters in an edited collection of 20th century adult educator biographies (Issac-Savage, 2021; Johnson-Bailey, 2021; Merriweather, 2021; Ntiri, 2021), and Black military education (Harris, 2018, 2022; White, 2012). These recent works have done much to enhance the field's understanding of its history, but also leaves a gap relative to our understandings of Black AE from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century.…”

Searching for Black Freedom in the South

“…Yet, while Black Americans were striving to rise up after the many years of dehumanization through American slavery, White Americans and the Jim Crow South aimed to stop all efforts by any means necessary. Thus, a new fight began for civil rights and freedom, in which education was at F SEARCHING FOR BLACK FREEDOM 2 the core (Anderson, 1988;Ntiri, 2014). Voter disenfranchisement was one of the ways that dominant group members sought to continue to oppress Black people and has continued to suppress civic engagement practices of Black people.…”

“…However, as education continued to be the tool for freedom, education for adults became a tool used in the fight for the civil right to vote (Kates, 2006;Rachal, 2000). At the center of the struggle for voters' rights were Black women who organized and educated the Black community on their civic rights to have a say in how the United States operates (Ntiri, 2014;Rosser-Mims, 2018). This same use of adult education to foster voter literacy and combat voter disenfranchisement was spearheaded once again by Black women during the November 2020 and January 2021 elections.…”

Adult literacy and its discontents: rethinking social justice issues in adult literacy

“…the post-racial era. In a recent article on the literacy predicament of African Americans (Ntiri, 2009), several serious impediments were presented as central to the continuing discourse on America's adult literacy dysfunctionality within the context of racism and social justice. The three most salient remain incarceration, urban residential segregation and intergenerational illiteracy.…”

“…Many educational scholars and recent assessment studies point to several structural and social impediments to literacy acquisition (Ladson-Billings, 2009;Ntiri 2009;National Commission on Adult Literacy, 2008;Ogbu,1995). They include weak government educational policies, the inequities in resource availability, limited and fragmented formal education, limited outlook on social and economic future, and other key internal and external variables associated with living in poor conditions in post-industrial urban communities (Ntiri, 2013;National Commission on Adult Literacy 2008). Another scholar (Sacerdote, 2005) highlighted three reasons for this continuing legacy: a) the direct effect of slavery; b) the effects of being black in a society with racist institutions; and c) the effects of living in the south.…”