The Sankofa student: chartering a transnational education.

Vaught, Seneca

Repatriation as Pedagogy

In recent years, several high profile philanthropic organizations have attempted to address socioeconomic, racial and academic challenges using innovative transnational approaches to education in the continent of Africa. Some programs such as the Baraka Program, funded by the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, sent troubled youth from inner-city youth Baltimore to rural Kenya in 2000 for education in a low-stress, minimum distraction, and race-neutral environment. Other models were based creating educational reform in Africa drawing from the cultural and educational context of the United States. For example, in 2007 Oprah Winfrey opened a school for girls in South Africa to develop leadership skills and provide an opportunity for a world-class education based on merit for some of Africa's most promising students. In 2009, the CNN series Black in America 2 showcased Malaak Compton-Rock's school program for inner-city youth called the Angel Rock Project (ARP). The project developed as a complementary program to enrich the learning of black students in the United States through service learning in the continent of Africa. (1)

Despite the good intentions of the benefactors of these programs, many questions remain about the role of these endeavors in their proper historical context and the pedagogical rationale for their existence. How does the persistence of these models reveal our understanding about race, education, and achievement in a global context? How do these recent initiatives compare to past strategies that used repatriation as a means of racial uplift? Are these programs any more effective than other schools where culturally relevant teaching is practiced? Are African and African American students better off when a global racial consciousness is introduced in the curriculum?

The primary goal of this article is to compare recurrent themes in transnational educational ventures for African Americans in Africa today to their long-term historical counterparts. In order to address this question, this research focuses on three phases of Afro-American transnational initiatives: (1) the 18th and 19th century projects in Sierra Leone and Liberia efforts largely led by whites (2) the early 20th century efforts largely led by blacks (3) recent efforts of the post-civil rights. Each phase seeks to interpret the historical and racial context of these initiatives, the role of education in these processes, and recurrent themes that those seeking to replicate past models face today.

African American students continue to face unique historical and cultural challenges in American educational systems. In addition to the specter of race, complex interactions of class, ethnicity, geography, and gender have further complicated assessing the expectations and perceptions of black students in educational institutions. The proposed reasons for this disparity have been varied. Some have posited the historical and generational trauma of slavery and the legacy of segregated schools as a serious factor influencing self-perception and academic achievement among black students. Others blame the disparate educational outcomes on a lack of discipline and initiative among black students and a support network from parents. They point to a "culture of poverty" or the primacy of a youth culture steeped in "cool pose" that substitute educational advancement for peer acceptance. (2)

The 18th Century Origins of Repatriation and the Re-Education of the Black Mind

In the late 18th century, black people in North America began to create and collaborate in multiple ventures to return to Africa. A few went in search of the land they left behind when they were forcibly transplanted during the slave trade. For the vast majority of those who had been born and raised outside of Africa, the decision to return to a continent unknown was a conscious acknowledgment of the hostile environment that they encountered in the New World. Many engaged in repatriation as process of liberation but equally as an educational venture, an experiment that would teach important lessons of "civilization," nation-building, and character development.

In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, the British engaged the first systematic policy to repatriate blacks to Africa. During the American Revolution, the British promised blacks who fought against the rebelling American colonists their freedom. After the British lost the war, many of these blacks relocated from the former American colonies to Nova Scotia. In 1786, Granville Sharp and humanitarian abolitionists supported by philanthropists and businessmen proposed a colony for free blacks in West Africa. The decision came in the context of evaluating the harsh conditions faced by the Loyalist element of blacks in North America and a growing population of free blacks in England. The decision to repatriate blacks stemmed from the 1772 Somerset decision by Lord Mansfield that effectively outlawed slavery in England. (3)

Together, Sharp's coalition devised a permanent policy to relocate blacks to Africa with a central mission to liberate, reform and educate. Prime candidates were drawn from three locations: some 400 of the "Black Poor" largely in the ghettos of London and hard-scrabble towns of the coast, some 1100 Loyalist veterans from the United States and Nova Scotia, and some 500 maroons from Jamaica. The first of these black settlers established Freetown in 1787. (4)

Sharp envisioned the process to be a Protestant experiment in moral education from the onset. As historian Arthur Porter has affirmed, education was inseparable from religious instruction in the colony. A central goal of moral instruction in the colony was to teach former slaves, maroons, and indigenous Africans the virtues of self-reliance and citizenship. Given that the repatriates had lost their African cultural heritage, they were then to be used educate the colony's citizens in Western concepts of religion and governance such as the ancient system of frankpledge. It was a system based in proportionality and with an emphasis on representative government, a tightly organized militia and free labor, collective work and responsibility, hospitality to strangers and immigrants, common land and agrarianism, limitations on individual land ownership, an eight-hour workday, and a progressive taxation and public service code. It is unclear exactly how much of Sharp's pedagogy was taught and implemented. (5)

Although the experiment was intended to be a humanitarian one, it was not left solely to the administration of the evangelical Utopians. The Sierra Leone Company was founded in 1791 with the purpose of ensuring this colony turned a profit. In 1807, the Sierra Leone colony was transferred to the British government as a colony of the state. The colony faced numerous challenges from the onset. Its settlers were established in the heart of slaving territory and not equipped with adequate resources or the necessary knowledge of the locale and indigenous inhabitants to thrive. The black setter colony was Anglophone and culturally Eurocentric but ethnically representative of a diverse population including blacks from the Caribbean, United States via Nova Scotia, and Londoners. The colony also included white settlers from England, some of who were married to the black voyageurs.

What unified all these settlers from different locations was a common theme of place they understood that the enterprise was an opportunity for them to escape their current conditions of servitude and to return to the land of their origin. Importantly, Christianity served as a cohesive cultural force that bound the black and white settlers together. It was a pervasive force that defined the mission of the colony rationale of the educational experience. Although the settlers came from different backgrounds it was there connection to Christian experience in the New World that largely formed their perspective on settlement.

Education played a prominent role in the lives of the repatriates. The educational institutions of the colony adapted the "Bell system," in which religion became the central focus of education and acculturation. The Bell System, also known as the Lancastrian Method and Monitorial Method, was an educational innovation credited to Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster. In this system, the headmaster placed gifted students in charge of less advanced ones. Students learned through teaching each other and the method effectively enforced a subconscious adherence to a chain of command. Discipline was maintained through public shaming of students who did not perform or conform to protocol. Pupils often recited the Ten Commandments, taught common prayers and recited the catechism. Initially this method proved to be a cohesive force but by the time the black settlers began to propagate in substantial numbers, their "Creole" offspring used Christianity and their affinity for Western culture to exploit economic and social conditions between themselves and the indigenous population. (6)

The colony was successful in that it did create a significant foothold of Christianity among the repatriates and was marginally effective as an abolitionist outpost. However, the long-term goals of education for citizenship and the utopian society envisioned by its evangelical followers were far from being accomplished. Differing from its American-based counterpart of Liberia to the Southeast, Sierra Leone was never meant to educate the repatriates to be leaders of an independent and autonomous state but rather an extension of British culture and ideals through black freedmen of West Africa.

The American experience with repatriation as an educational endeavor in Liberia developed under slightly different circumstances than that of the British in Sierra Leone. American colonizationists looked at the British model for a pattern but unique differences in the American racial landscape and the persistence of widespread slavery characterized a different approach to repatriation in the United States. In 1816, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded by Robert Finley, a minister with an unmatched zeal to remove unwanted poor and free blacks from the United States. At its founding, the ACS pledged to "promote and execute a plan for colonizing, with their consent, the Free People of Colour, residing in our country, in Africa, or such other places as Congress shall deem expedient." Like its European counterpart, the society also sought to use the powers of missionary education to advance the virtues of Western civilization. (7)

Finley, also an educator, integrated a religious worldview into his pedagogical design. As a schoolteacher he taught that slavery as immoral, not only for the injustice it heaped on blacks but also for the indolence it fostered among whites. His approach to the ACS was founded on his philosophy of education and the idea of "expulsion." Finley's approach to expulsion was somewhat different from Granville Sharp's emphasis on extension. Whereas Sharp had come to view the black colony at Freetown as an extension of English morality, the ACS interpreted the project primarily as a means of ridding the states of the undesirables often characterized as "lazy, docile, primitive, and violent." (8) Expelling blacks from society would benefit America's society in two ways. First, it would be a lesson for blacks themselves in autonomy, and second, an exercise in social control over the growing freed-black populations and maintaining the predominance of a white America. (9)

Finley, a student of Jeremy Bentham, the apostle of utilitarianism and criminal punishment in England, easily appropriated the theorist's ideas for usage in the classroom and through the process of repatriation. Although many supported the ACS and Finley's plan to repatriate blacks for varying reasons (e.g. abolitionism, to eliminate competition from free blacks, to prevent racial intermarriage), Finley's policy and his pedagogical ideas stirred deeply embedded institutional and cultural prejudices that united people from opposing sides of the political spectrum. (10)

Most of the pro-black supporters of emigration saw it as an opportunity for Africans Americans to learn the virtues of independence on their own terms and to be liberated from the racial bigotry of American life. One such occasion presented itself in earliest days of the repatriation campaign. The first black to earn a degree from an American college and to create the first black newspaper in America became deeply involved in framing the pedagogical possibilities of repatriation. John B. Russwurm saw the mission of his and Samuel Cornish's newspaper, the Freedman's Journal in 1827 as two-fold according to William Brewer, for both protest but also to constructively engage the adversaries to black America. (11)

Initially the newspaper criticized the ACS in a battery of scathing rebukes but within a year, Russwurm reversed his position stating the impossibilities of gaining equal citizenship in America. Russwurm found himself and the newspaper bitterly opposed by recent allies, over the issue of colonization. Under the accusation of treachery, Russwurm approached an apprehensive ACS and persuaded them to appoint him as superintendent of schools in the Liberian project. (12)

Russwurm thought that education would play a very important role, if not central role, in the repatriation process. He though that the current approaches to education were insufficient to address the unique situational and historical context of the repatriates. In order to find a pedagogical framework more suited to the situation, he requested that the ACS allow him to visit several locations exploring radical pedagogies. The first of these visits took him to Charles C. Andrews, the controversial white headmaster of the New York African Free School to learn about successful pedagogies to engage the descendants of slaves.

The New York African Free School was established in 1787, to educate "the children of such persons that have been liberated from bondage" in a state where slavery still existed. (13) The school interested Russwurm because it was charged by its patron, the predominately white New York Manumission Society, with developing a practical approach to the challenges of the formerly enslaved upon abolition. Russwurm hoped to learn how to train former slaves or the "children of Africa" as Andrews referred to them about citizenship through the School's pedagogy of "mutual instruction." (14) The Free School used the Lancastrian method, allowing advanced pupils as young as 13 to run the entire class in the headmaster's absence. Andrews thought that the ignorance of blacks was a result of a hostile environment and not inherent or irremediable qualities, he wrote:

"Those who believe, or effect to believe, that the African race are so far inferior to the whites, as to be incapable of any considerable degree of mental improvement, would not require stronger testimony of the unsoundness of their opinions. And those who saw the interesting group, could not possibly have omitted to notice the vast difference in the appearance of those children, and those idle ones who are suffered to grow up uncultivated, unpolished, and heathenish in our streets; and who, for the want of care and instruction, are daily plunging in scenes of sloth, idleness, dissipation and crime, until they pass from step to step over the tread mill, into the state prison, and at last up to the gallows. We could plainly perceive that the effects of education were as visible upon the countenances of these black children, as they are on those of the whites ... their countenances beamed with intelligence, and the buoyancy of their spirits, and their apparent happiness, was the subject of universal remark." (15)

Russwurm left New York to visit Boston and learn what usefulness the Pestalozzian method might have in developing a school system for repatriates. For reasons unbeknownst to us, Russwurm decided that it would be best to replicate the Boston Free School System in Liberia. Fie may have thought the Boston Free School was a superior model because its founder Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss contemporary of Russwurm, was particularly concerned about the poor. He advanced methods of modern education in Switzerland to educate former serfs and the poor, drastically reducing illiteracy by an emphasis on using the familiar and the mother-tongue to develop competency in other languages and more difficult abstract ideas. (16) Carrying a varied knowledge of these pedagogical approaches and educational methods that were being employed to directly address the conditions of the quasi-free abroad and in Boston, Russwurm went to Liberia in 1829 to implement his lessons among the sons and daughters of Africa. (17)

While developing a school system for the colony, Russwurm studied African languages and lent his skills as a propagandist for the ACS as editor of the newspaper. Ironically, one of the greatest challenges Russwurm faced was not teaching the class but filling the colony. He found that one of the greatest challenges in the new colony was a lack of effective government and enough settlers to fill important roles, like the need for teachers. He turned to his publishing skills as a propagandist to promote the colony but to little avail. (18)

The multicultural and multiracial context of nineteenth century America provided for a diversity of opinions on the usefulness of the repatriation. Conflicting views on the best route for racial advancement offered differing opinions on the lessons that Liberia and Sierra Leone could teach African American abroad. These divisions often developed deeper fractures within already troubled alliances of blacks and their progressive white allies. One such example was in the reaction of William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison characterized the colonization experiment as not only counterproductive but an evil tantamount to slavery in his 1832 Thoughts on African Colonization. Particularly Garrison thought that the colonization insistence that through teaching indigenous Africans, they black Americans could be extollers of virtue was problematic. For Garrison the problem of education were not that it was abroad but in the intentions of its promoters who were using it to delay emancipation and to exile free blacks. (19)

Echoing Garrsion's sentiments, the vast majority of free blacks living in the United States did not wish to be repatriated. The ACS faced tremendous challenges in reaching the quotas needed to make this colony self-sustaining. Those who were readily recruited were often characterized by one of two characteristics: a desire to spread Christianity or an atavistic desire to counter American racialism. In February of 1829, the ship Harriet, which was to become the Liberian equivalent of the Mayflower, deposited settlers on the coast of Liberia. The colony there would struggle with disease and tense relations between the Americo-Liberians, recaptives, and the indigenous population. (20)

By the time the Commonwealth of Liberia declared independence in 1847 and the ACS supported it unanimously; the outcome of the educational goal of the black nationhood seemed to promising. The colonists had learned and rapidly replicated an American brand of Christianity that was to become a defining characteristic of the Liberian colony in a way that it never had been in the founding of the United States. Christian schools were established to promote Christian ideals and equally important, American culture among both the settlers and the indigenous population. (21)

Many of Russwurm's pupils came of age in Liberia during the Roye Administration from 1870-1871. As Carl Patrick Burrowes argues in Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, Russwurm's influence as the editor of the The Liberian Herald and former governor of Maryland in Africa had a longstanding effect on the development of the colony long after his death. The paper served an important role of educating the colonists of developments but also played a key role in educating the continent. During the late nineteenth century, among indigenous Africans the concept of race was largely absent. All the while, rapidly evolving Western ideas about the meaning of blackness were activity shaping the continent's destiny. This reality, for Russurm provided an opportunity to educate the African masses on the possibilities for an "African identity" that until that point had only existed in the mind of the West.

The Herald also served as a propaganda tool for new recruitment. One recruit who was reached by the paper was Edward J. Roye. Roye was born in Newark, Ohio, educated at Ohio University in Athens and had emigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the ACS in 1846. Roye rose in prominence in Liberian politics from speaker of the House to the fifth president of Liberia in 1870. Education served a key role in his administration, as he wanted to expand the construction of schools in Liberia. He was deeply influenced by Russwurm's work but also by the educational reforms established during the Reconstruction era in the United States. Many of the leaders were well-educated and would be considered technocrats by today's standards. However, the Roye administration failed because of serious political opposition rooted in a variety other issues from the call for a national bank, increasing foreign debt and perhaps most shockingly to African Americans, allegation of colorism. Those who hoped the African American repatriates and their offspring could learn the science of nation-building and apply their experience with injustice in creating a country of equality would be sorely disappointed. The colonists faced problems from the outset in clearly communicating and adjudicating a fair process to settle in the land. Through the 1930s, the Americo-Liberians engaged in an expansion to the hinterland, assimilating and alienating indigenous ethnic groups in the process. The faulty precedent for such misguided appropriations and interactions in part stemmed from notions of manifest destiny and colonial education central to the settlement's founding. (22)

Ultimately, if the intended result of this transnational education experiment was to teach repatriated blacks to become citizens, the Americo-Liberians failed miserably. Not only did they fail to overcome the psychological complex of racism, they perpetuated it and created deeper divisions of their own. By the early 20th century, the Americo-Liberians had effectively created a caste society, not only amongst themselves but between the indigenous population. In a cruel lesson of irony, the transnational school had taught Americo-Liberians how to synthesize the American dogma of racial inequality, and unfortunately they had excelled in this assignment.

Repatriation and Black Education in the Twentieth Century

Following the American Civil War, the challenge of educating blacks changed to a more complex dilemma, one that combined a lack of access to education with the absence of the proper type of education. Carter G. Woodson, a black Harvard educated scholar suggested that during the post-war era, the Freedman's Bureau, though well-intentioned, failed to meet the educational needs of newly freed blacks. Through the 1870s, former Confederates like Thomas Muldrop Logan spoke on the necessity of industrial education among blacks to maintain the preceding social hierarchy. (23)

Black and white educators, consciously and unconsciously, Woodson argued were maintaining a pedagogy of mis-education. African Americans lacked control over their own education, those who were educated failed to learn how to make a living as professional education was discouraged, and those who were liberally educated often lacked the proper political education to best benefit and lead the masses. By "mis-education" Woodson referred to a mindset that was contrary to the self-interest and development of the black community in the United States. Education, Woodson argued, needed to be culturally relevant, although he did not use that term, to address the economic and social dilemmas that the black community faced. (24)

When Woodson wrote Mis-Education of the Negro in 1933, the United States was largely a segregated society. Education was viewed as a privileged commodity and black people viewed the attainment of education, as remedial as it were, a precious opportunity. Woodson recognized that a 'mainstream' education was not the solution to resolving socio-economic inequalities. Woodson and a host of other black educators realized that not only did American society pose serious obstacles preventing the peaceful assimilation of blacks but also that educational institutions themselves were skewed to create black graduates who were actually detrimental to the cause of racial advancement. He conceived and popularized the notion that black history, could be used as a psychological curriculum to redeem the descendants of slaves from an inferiority complex and to equip them for autonomy in a racially hostile society. Woodson's promulgation of black history laid the framework for action in another development in transnational education--the Garvey era. (25)

The rise of Marcus Garvey in the early 20th century pointed to a new era in transnational education. Garvey came to the United States in 1915 to glean knowledge from the black educational architect Booker T. Washington at his world renowned Tuskegee Institute. Garvey never met Washington, who died shortly before he arrived, but Garvey ended up creating the largest black transnational enterprise in history when he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The association embraced a transnational approach to education that was far more radical than what Woodson had articulated but deeply rooted in the pragmatism of a Washingtonian approach. The UNIA preached the concept of negritude and devised a physical relocation of blacks from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

Repatriation was to be the culmination of a reeducation of black Americans exploited throughout the diaspora. Garvey authored dozens of tracts and several books that outlined his radical pedagogy of transnational education. Apparently adopting lessons learned in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Garvey chided his followers, "It will be useless, as stated before for bombastic Negroes to leave America and the West Indies to go to Africa, thinking they will have privileged positions to inflict upon the race that bastard aristocracy that they have tried to maintain in this Western world at the expense of the masses. Africa shall develop an aristocracy of its own, but it shall be based upon service and loyalty to race." (26)

Garvey brought together both the educational philosophy of Washington and a resurgent Pan-African ideal in the era of European imperialism. He argued for a practical education with a pragmatic emphasis, encompassed by a philosophy of cultural pride. Education, in his assessment, was "the medium by which people are prepared for the creation of their own particular civilization, and the advancement and glory of their own race." (27) To this end, Garvey proposed a transnational education project of his own. Differing from the 19th century attempt of repatriation of blacks to Liberia, Garvey proposed a similar feat but this one to be engineered solely by the black masses of the diaspora themselves.

In 1919, Garvey started the Black Star Line to relocate blacks to Africa. He began selling shares to members of the UNIA and within the year had raised more than half a million dollars. In 1921, the UNIA developed a commission to further investigate the feasibility of settlement in Liberia and sent agents to Africa to meet with Liberian leadership-- ironically the same month that Garvey applied for American citizenship. He had learned from previous mistakes of the Liberian colonists, so he thought and it appears that Garvey's attempt to hold citizenship in the United States and build states abroad was a significant part of a transnational educational narrative. Ultimately, Garvey's transnational endeavor came to an end in April of 1922, when the FBI investigated his Black Star Line and arrested him for mail fraud. Garvey was arrested and ultimately deported from the United States and in 1924 the Liberian government refused to issue visas to UNIA members seeking repatriation.

Garvey's venture failed for several reasons. First, he failed to anticipate the opposition to such a widespread movement by American authorities. Although he was endorsed readily by the Ku Klux Klan, his less than rigorous approach to bookkeeping and sloppiness of his planning made him an easy target for racists embedded in the federal government. While we do not know what would have happened if the mass numbers that Garvey inspired began a mass repatriation to Africa, we do know that he was able to inspire large numbers of blacks in the Americas to return to Africa. This in itself was a major accomplishment considering the numerous and previous failed attempts to do so. Garvey succeeded in getting black Americans, for the first time in history, to passionately engage the possibility of Africa. To do this he mounted an unprecedented propaganda campaign that built the framework for renewed appeals of repatriation in the 20th century.

Prominent Africans also sought transnational educational ventures to address dilemmas of racial oppression. For example, in 1935 Kwame Nkrumah left Gold Coast (Ghana) for the United States. He came to seek an education at the historically black Lincoln University located in Pennsylvania. The institution, formerly known as the Ashmum Institute, played an important role in transnational education. Before being renamed after Abraham Lincoln, the school was founded in 1854 and named after Jehudi Ashmum, the missionary and governor of Liberia from 1824-1828.

While in the United States, Nkrumah became educated on the similarities and differences of racial oppression in the African Diaspora. These experiences, some believe, propelled him into a more radical consciousness when he traveled to London from 1945-1947 and eventually to Ghana to start the Convention People's Party. Nkrumah attempted to use his globally-centered education in the African Diaspora to transform Ghana into a hub of Pan-African activity. One Nkrumah's most significant legacies was that he succeeded among African-Americans in creating an image of an independent Ghana as a transnational hub for the African Diaspora and established a precedent that have characterized Ghana's diaspora policy well through the present. Between 1957 and 1966, dozens of black intelligentsia and activists visited Nkrumah's Ghana. The culmination of these visits was the repatriation of W.E.B. Du Bois there shortly before his death in 1963. (28)

Nkrumah's foray into transnational education was a successful endeavor. While Nkrumah's critics often emphasize his shortcomings in post-independence politics and economic development, his educational experiences abroad empowered him to envision a united Africa unified with a global diaspora when few deemed it possible. Nkrumah's dream would never have been imagined without his broader educational experiences that transcended and transgressed ethnic and geographical borders. Despite Nkrumah's shortcoming to achieve a united Africa, from the 1960s well into the 1990s, hundreds of African Americans relocated to Ghana to pursue better economic and educational opportunities unrestrained by the context of American racism.

The Rise of Black Studies Pan-African Pedagogy in the Post-Civil Rights Era

During the years immediately following World War II, African Americans renewed full-scale movements for inclusion in educational institutions across the nation. In much of the South, schools remained segregated under the now infamous policy of 'separate but equal.' Blacks fought for inclusion based on the idea of a melting pot democracy that came into vogue during these years. This led to a series of court cases that challenged the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson and culminated in the two Brown v. Board of Education decisions that legally dismantled the racial divide in public education. With the death knells of a segregated educational system tolling, many blacks came to disregard the concept of culturally relevant transnational models of education.

Some pointed towards an integrated society as the end to race-consciousness in the classroom and in society only to encounter new hierarchies, obstacles, barriers, attitudes, and animosities that made the educational experience far from equal. Through the 1960s, educators continued to point to disparities in schooling and job placement. Some detractors argued that these were evidence of the inherent inferiority of blacks, other pointed to institutional cultures and teacher prejudices as a root of these problems.

Considering these challenges, many blacks in the era of integration opted to return or remain in historically black colleges and universities and returned to learn from Africa in new ways. Some scenarios actually pointed to a resegregation taking place in suburban America making the educational system more segregated following the civil rights movement than it had been during the protest. African Americans turned to new strategies to confront new and old problems in the classroom.

Educational experiments in culturally relevant teaching, like the 1968 Ocean-Hill Brownsville School in New York City, embarked on a targeted approach to a historical problem. The educators developed community-based approaches to confront the so-called achievement gap encountered by black and Latino students. The school turned towards a culturally relevant curriculum and community control in an effort to improve student outcomes. While some argued that the students benefited from increased participation of the parents, historians and educators have struggled ever since to interpret the usefulness of the experiment. Despite the effectiveness of the program, innovations like these reframed what form an African-centered education could be in elementary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. (29)

From the first Black Studies program at San Francisco State in 1968, the very presence of these programs on American college campuses was a challenge to established American academic traditions, programs, and cultural paradigms. It is no understatement to say that the development of these programs was not welcomed and in many instances the very goal that these programs sought to achieve for its black students of intellectual autonomy and affirmation of self-worth were undermined by a hostile environment. One of the architects of the Black studies movement at San Francisco State, Nathan Hare suggested that the role of Black studies programs were to address social problems and to train leaders to return to their communities and resolve these issues. While many early programs adopted such lofty goals, within a decade these programs began to broadly incorporate other aims.

During the 1970s, some black studies advocates suggested that departments begin to advocate that white Americans were equally in need of education in Black studies and that the role of education in Black studies would benefit Whites as much as blacks. George Cox wrote of the need for positive educational approach in 1974, a pedagogy in which self-knowledge and critical reflection were central and closely followed by the desire for independence from the strictures of racial oppression. Some programs intentionally adopted the name "Pan-African Studies" to reflect a desire to reclaim and engage Africanity across the Diaspora. (30)

In response to developments like these in the overall climate of hostility to inclusion within the existing educational framework, other black scholars proposed the development of autonomous black cultural centers. Francis E. Dorsey suggested that a multifaceted approach including cultural centers and "empowerment zones" be implemented to address the series of historical social economic and educational issues facing the African-American community. (31) This concept readily embraces the notion that American spaces are so exclusive and so particularly hostile to any endeavor that seeks to benefit African-Americans as a specific cultural group. In recognition of this fact, African-Americans must carve out spaces of their own to create solutions to social problems. (32)

The rise of Afrocentrism in the 1980s and 1990s presented another attempt to "return to Africa" in intellectual spaces to address achievement gaps and socio-educational isolation by creating alternative curricula for black students. Molefi Asante, its chief architect and others argued that black students performed on par with whites when culturally relevant methods were used. Gerald Early located the birth of Afrocentrism in a stream of post-World War II intellectual strands, a gumbo of post-modernism, Marxist thought and deconstruction. He suggested that many attempts to create Afrocentric schools, "the black political equivalent of a Hebrew or Catholic school, is an understandable desperation arising from the fact that many black communities are so beset by social problems that they are ill-equipped to handle." (33) Critics argued that Afrocentrism was mythology in place of education and that it only exacerbated racial and educational disparities. (34) Others argued that culturally relevant models could prove a transforming element in the curriculum. (35)

The expansion of standardized testing during the 1990s suggested otherwise. In virtually every major index since they have been tallied, black students have underperformed in comparison to their White counterparts on standardized tests and suffer from what is referred to in the literature as an "achievement gap." The explanations for the differences proved to be more controversial than helpful. Charles Murray and Richard J. Hemstein published the Bell Curve in 1994, whose now infamous chapters 13 and 14, outlined a rationale for a genetic basis of racial intelligence. (36) The work was summarily discredited but the political capital it furnished deepened the culture war and provided opponents of public education the reasoning they needed to ignore longstanding inequalities in public school system.

In addition to the discredited genetic theories of Murray and Hemstein, low performance among African American students on standardized testing began to foster a whole bibliography on educational underachievement. Educational theorists proposed that everything from structural inequality, low expectation among teachers, tracking, and cultural discontinuity were among a host of other reasons for the disparity.

It is out of this desperate and turbulent history, both recent and distant, there have been numerous multicultural, multifaceted, African-centered transnational education projects to address these historical problems. In a twist of irony, philanthropists and educators have returned to a historic theme in African American history, the desire to return to Africa for redemption. Several recent experiments provide insight into new approaches to transnationalism and lessons readers can glean and apply.

United African Alliance Community Center

In 1970, Pete O'Neal and his partner Charlotte fled from the United States to Africa to escape a weapons conviction charge. In an era of simmering racial tensions, O'Neal had joined the Black Panther Party in Kansas. He was arrested for carrying guns across state lines and fled to Africa to escape being sent to jail. In the decades since, O'Neal and Charlotte have developed an impressive transnational program that has become the hub of study abroad groups and travelers in Tanzania. The name of this bold experiment is the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC). (37)

The UAACC performs an important function by illustrating the possibilities of transnational education in its most concrete form. The O'Neal model has evolved from a personal and sometimes African-American centered nationalistic approach to embrace a broader Pan-African and humanistic approach to the education of both African and African American youth. From computer classes in Arusha, student exchange programming with Kansas City, Missouri to hosting Africana Studies programs and coordinating community service projects, the UAACC's "Heal the Community" pedagogy has emphasized teaching social change through action. The O'Neals state, "We feel that our youth in America need to see youth from other communities, who are living their dreams ... who are creative and responsible members of their communities ... who have chosen a positive path in life." (38)

O'Neal faces significant challenges that his historical predecessors faced in his attempt replicate their models. Similar to African American settlements in West Africa, O'Neal faces constant hardship with securing water and battling malaria as well as finding adequate funding to maintain the complex. Unlike the Liberian enterprise, O'Neal has immersed himself completely in the culture and environment of Tanzania and facilitates the process among the students who come to visit him. In the documentary, A Panther in Africa, it becomes apparent that the education and redemption of O'Neal in this process is equally as important as the work that he performs on behalf of both Tanzanians and Americans abroad. (39)

The Baraka School

In 1996, the Baraka School in partnership with the Baltimore Public School System and the Abell Foundation, began an experiment to transplant young junior high school boys from the violent inner-city environs of Baltimore to Laikipia, Kenya. The purpose of the program was "to provide a safe environment where academics, social responsibility, and issues with authority would be addressed" by totally immersing at-risk pre-adolescent African American students in East Africa. (40)

The program was premised on consideration of previous back to Africa attempts that highlighted the significant disadvantage that blacks faced in achieving. Located about 150 miles from Nairobi under the shadows of Mount Kenya, in a way the program was a transnational approach to Facing Mount Kenya, the book penned by Jomo Kenyatta almost sixty years ago. Kenyatta, arguing for the relevance and primacy of Gikuyu traditionalism in a world displaced by Western imperialism, described a society in which education emphasized moral character in addition to the acquisition of knowledge. Similarly, the Baraka program curriculum included a rigorous, structured program in addition to extracurricular endeavors to educate the broader person. (41)

For a short term project, enlisting only 72 black students over a three year period, the results were stunning. According to the program evaluation, attendance was nearly 100% an improvement to the existing goals in Baltimore. While the students did not meet state goals for the Maryland Functional Test, they did experience a 21% and 15% cumulative pass increase in reading and math respectively. Unfortunately the major challenge that this program faced was security issues. Kenya encountered a brief period of instability leading up to and following the 2002 elections as a result to uncertainty in the security of the arrangement, the program abruptly ended in 2003. (42)

Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy

Before allegations of fraud, philanthropist-educator Greg Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute (CAI) sought to engage in nation-building through the development of schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, popularizing and reframing the efforts of a historical strain in back-to-Africa initiatives from nearly two hundred years ago. As we have seen, this model of transnational education, which more or less entails establishing Western-style schools abroad, has also been pursued by African American philanthropists and appropriated it to meet their own objectives and the unique needs of African American and African students. (43)

No black philanthropist transnational enterprises better encapsulates the humanitarian spirit of the back-to-Africa approach more than Oprah Winfrey and the development of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy (OWLA) in South Africa. One of the world's most influential figures and charismatic black leaders, Winfrey incorporated holistic aspects of education and developed a transformative twenty-first century educational model in much of the way that John Brown Russwurm, Granville Sharp, and Jehudi Ashmum aspired to during the nineteenth century. However, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy is a transnational educational experiment but one that works in a different manner than the others. The emphasis of the institution is the transformation of African girls in Africa through the generous 'remittances' of an African American, seeking to reconnect to Africa through her philanthropy. (44)

The Academy taps into the historical impulse of African Americans seeking to reconnect with the continent of Africa and its people. Oprah Winfrey became engaged with her connection to the African continent following a DNA test that linked her to Liberia. Some may suggest that it was this connection that resulted in her decision to build a school in Henley-on-Klip, South Africa to train girls to be leaders.

The school has faced challenges in recent years as some of its leaders have come under investigation for sexual harassment charges but the overarching ambition of the project and its significance as a transnational educational model remains. OWLA creatively engages themes in the educational research, whether intentionally or not, such recent works by Linda Darling-Hammond that suggest residency models may offer unique benefits to both students and teachers. Those seeking to replicate this model on this scale will face significant challenges. The academy was built at a cost of $40 million dollars, so few will be able to match its scale but a rising black interest continues as other entertainers, churches and organizations follow suit in developing similar ventures. Also as numerous critics have noted, is privatization the proper channel to address the widespread and long neglected structural problems plaguing educational achievement and development in the African Diaspora. (45)

Conclusion

New York African Free School headmaster Charles C. Andrews' reflections in 1830 have an eerie parallel today. For many Blacks, especially those of the inner-city, Andrews' observation that a whole generation of black students are "for the want of care and instruction, are daily plunging in scenes of sloth, idleness, dissipation and crime, until they pass from step to step over the tread mill, into the state prison, and at last up to the gallows" is an unwelcome and resounding prophecy. At the dawn of the 21st century, Americans are still grappling with how to face these conditions and are still looking toward radical pedagogies that directly engage race in the United States and abroad.

Despite the promising prospects of Africana Studies in educational policy and the long-strain of intellectual interest in the African continent for the racial redemption of Black Americans, few contemporary scholars have engineered an educational policy for African Americans that seriously consider repatriation. Most scholarship deals with the debate between scholars on the impact of race on educational achievement, the achievement gap itself, and diversity in the curriculum but laypersons inside and outside of the ivory tower have been actively involved in developing innovative pedagogies to address these disparities in black education and self-worth.

The historical questions of diaspora grounded in identity, place and belonging and remain at the center of many 21st century repatriation projects as prominently as they did in the 19th and 20th century. As Ben Shiller's discussion of repatriate letters reveals, the American identity of black Americans abroad becomes much more complex, revealing significant questions about assumptions of race and the ability to simplify identity in a global world. (46) As more African immigrants come to the United States, they too face the prospects of underachievement. Growing numbers of African immigrants are also opting for repatriation as a method to deal with the racial inequality and cultural issues endemic of the American educational system. (47)

Current discussions on globalization have reframed many old debates on the importance of multiculturalism to students and teachers, regardless of race and ethnicity. In a well-established text entitled International Perspectives on Intercultural Education, Cushner has illustrated the benefits and challenges of intercultural approaches to teaching around the world, complicating the traditional discussion of multiculturalism but offering few strategies for the racial pariahs of urban America. (48) To be fair, Cushner's work was not written to address this question specifically but hints at solutions that are currently being explored. An interesting phenomenon that complements Cushner's emphasis on interculturalism today (or interaction between cultures) is the resurgence of transnationalism. As the world witnessed the rise of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars who had grown accustomed to discussing culture in regional saw new trends of migration, technological innovation, and economic growth make borders less relevant. Regardless of location, the emphasis on the connection of people and ideas across borders became more important than the borders themselves. (49) Using a discourse traditionally applied to workers and immigrants in developed nations, one can find interesting historical parallels as well as possibilities for black disadvantaged students today.

In a transnational framework, educators have developed an international component of education that physically removes students from a hostile environment and transplants them into a foreign one. The approach differs from simply international or multicultural approaches because the student is physically removed from his or her native environment, relocated to a foreign environment and reintroduced into a different cultural consciousness and context for learning. Additionally, there is an implicit understanding that the student is engaged in retracing or reconnecting with a cultural heritage, whether real or imagined, while maintaining a utilitarian connection to his or her point of disembarkation.

While some would argue that the concept of transnationalism is useful only to migrant workers, who come to the United States or other Western countries and maintain ties to a distant home often via remittances or seasonal migrations, the concept of transnationalism poses some interesting potential in conceptualizing students of the African American Diaspora. As Templeton has argued, transnationalism differs from transmigration because it emphasizes nation-building in more than one location. (50) Scholars of Africa and the African Diaspora like Michael Gomez have long regarded the discipline of Africana Studies as the "quintessential imagined community" illustrating how scholars must constitute new meanings of identity, place and belonging intellectually and culturally difficult terrain. Gomez has proposed the great commission of the discipline, "Africa, once lost, has yet to be recovered; whereas America, as an ideal, has yet to become home." (51) The disciplinary challenges of Africana Studies in the intellectual sphere resonate on an emotional and cultural level for African American students in Africa, confirm the usefulness of this paradigm in a variety of ways that are historically, pedagogically, and theoretically significant.

I recently came across an article in the Herald Sun by Paul Scott entitled "Back-to-Africa: Hatin on Black History." Scott discussed the challenges that Afrocentric scholars encounter when attempting to educate black students of the hip-hop generation. Most of these challenges stem from socioeconomic structural issues, well beyond the control of the teacher and are seldom countered in the classroom, yet the desire to invent, rediscover, and apply non-traditional models is still consistently challenged by "traditional models" that have proved themselves conspicuously and consistently ineffective.

In African American History Reconsidered, Pero Dagbovie addressed a lack of interest among black undergraduates in African American Studies, suggesting, Instead of chastising the millennial hip-hop generation for their lack of historicity and their disconnect from African American history, professors of history and African American studies should develop new and refreshing strategies for stimulating their students' interest in the African American past ... How have those of us black historians of the hip-hop generation fashioned a historical delivery, methodology, pedagogy, and consciousness that enables our contemporaries and students to best understand the complex contours of African American history? (52)

This article has argued that proponents of transnational educational experiments hoped to transform their repatriated pupils through a dynamic transnational consciousness; it is incumbent that educators learn from their successes as well as their failures. Above all, we must strive to 'decarcerate' the learning environment and reduce threats to engaged and integrated learning, reserving the autonomy to decide which formats work best for our students. The concept of culturally relevant teaching can and should be expanded to include these new and innovative models of transnational education. Consistent themes underscoring the exceptional experience of blacks in America and abroad from the antebellum to the present behooves educators to make reforms holistic in nature, addressing the broader factors that influence the learning environment. The incorporation of historical consciousness in educational reform emphasizes that we must continuously reassess and implement elements from previous models, not just within the last five years based on isolated testing. Rather, we must consider the long-term trajectory that only an in-depth historical analysis of the issue can provide.

Finally, these paradigms all suggest the importance of teaching black students that they are citizens of the world. This should be a fundamental component of every Africana studies curriculum. Practitioners must develop and use educational projects not to colonize, which in times past have led to a settler "I-thou" mindset and caused tremendous problems among the first and second wave of black repatriates. Rather, we must emphasize the need for collaborative work that recognizes the need for continental Africans and those abroad to work on equal terms, toward mutually awarding goals.

Far too often, this vision has been written off as a Pan-African pipe dream but as these recent experiments suggest, a great amount of hope remains in careful and conscientiously executed ventures. In the last twenty years, we have witnessed a variety of other immigrant groups capitalize on the possibilities of a world where borders will increasingly play a less significant role. Generations of immigrants in America have harnessed the economic and cultural benefits of a revived transnationalism. How much more so is time to put a theory of transnational education into practice among African American students of this country who have so many lessons to learn from the mother of all humanity?

(1) Malaak Compton-Rock, If It Takes a Village, Build One: How I Found Meaning Through a Life of Service and 100+ Ways You Can Too (Crown Archetype, 2010); "Winfrey Says She Wants to Nurture Kids," The Washington Post, January 3, 2007, sec. Arts & Living, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp dyn/content/article/2007/01 /03/AR2007010301020.html; Andrew Goldstein, "Baraka School: An African Experiment," October 1, 2000, http://www.time.eom/time/nation/article/0,8599,56364,00.html. A prominent example is Helping Africa by Establishing Schools at Home and Abroad, Inc. (HABESHA) founded in 2002 by Cashawn Meyers who sponsors projects in Ghana and Ethiopia.

(2) The publication of a widely read and heavily criticized article by Forbes blogger Gene Marks entitled, "If I Were a Poor Black Kid," resurfaced popular misconceptions rooted in Ruby Payne's "culture of poverty" thesis and renewed the debate among scholars, activists, and educators. See Gene Marks, "If I Were A Poor Black Kid," Forbes, December 12, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poorblack-kid/. On the "culture of poverty," see Ruby K. Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty (aha! Process, Incorporated, 2005). On black youth masculine culture see Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (Touchstone, 1993), 46-47.

(3) For general discussions of the British attempts to repatriate blacks to Africa, see Simon Schama, Rough Crossings : Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: Ecco, 2006); Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815 1860 (UPNE, 2006); Daniel J. Paracka, The Athens of West Africa: A History of International Education at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone (Psychology Press, 2003).

(4) Paracka, The Athens of West Africa, 19-21; C. Magbaily Fyle, The History of Sierra Leone : a Concise Introduction (London: Evans, 1981), 34; Akintola J. G Wyse, The Krio of Sierra Leone: an Interpretive History (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991).

(5) Arthur T Porter, "Religious Affiliation in Freetown, Sierra Leone," Africa 23, no. 01 (1953): 4-6; Granville Sharp, A Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (until Better Shall Be Proposed) for the Intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, Near Sierra Leona. (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 18-21; Schama, Rough Crossings, 190-191,210-211.

(6) Porter, "Religious Affiliation in Freetown, Sierra Leone," 6-11; Frank J Klingberg, "British Humanitarianism at Codrington," The Journal of Negro History 23, no. 4 (1938): 477; K. L. Little, "The Significance of the West African Creole for Africanist and Afro-American Studies," African Affairs 49, no. 197 (October 1, 1950): 308-319; Bengt G. M. Sundkler, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 187-188. On the monitorial method see, Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, The Practical Parts of Lancaster's Improvements and Bell's Experiment (University Press, 1932).

(7) Archibald Alexander, A History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa (W.S. Martien, 1846), 88-89. For a detailed history of the American Colonization Society see Early Lee Fox, The American Colonization Society 1817-1840 (University of Michigan Library, 2009).

(8) Christopher Castiglia, "Pedagogical Discipline and the Creation of White Citizenship: John Witherspoon, Robert Finley, and the Colonization Society," Early American Literature 33, no. 2 (January 1, 1998): 192, doi: 10.2307/25057120.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Ibid., 195.

(11) William M. Brewer, "John B. Russwurm," The Journal of Negro History 13, no. 4 (October 1, 1928): 413-422, doi:10.2307/2713842; Philip S. Foner, "John Browne Russwurm, a Document," The Journal of Negro Histoiy 54, no. 4 (October 1, 1969): 393-395, doi: 10.2307/2716732; Winston James, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm : the Life and Writings of a pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

(12) Carl Patrick Burrowes, "Caught in the Crosswinds of the Atlantic: John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851), Freedom's Journal and African Colonization," Journalism History 37, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 136-137.

(13) Charles C. Andrews, The History of the New-York African Free-schools: From Their Establishment in 1787, to the Present Time; Embracing a Period of More Than Forty Years (M. Day, 1830), 11.

(14) Ibid., 35. For an excellent discussion of rationale and aims of the New York African Free School see John L Rury, "The New York African Free School, 1827-1836: Conflict over Community Control of Black Education.," Phylon 44, no. 3 (1983): 187-97.

(15) Andrews, The History of the New- York African Free-schools, 45-46.

(16) Dieter Jedan, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Pestalozzian Method of Language Teaching (P. Lang, 1981); Lucille M. Schultz, "Pestalozzi's Mark on Nineteenth-Century Composition Instruction: Ideas Not in Words, but in Things," Rhetoric Review 14, no. 1 (October 1, 1995): 23-43, doi: 10.2307/465659.

(17) Brewer, "John B. Russwurm," 415-416; James, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm, 54.

(18) Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 68.

(19) William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the Resolutions, Addresses and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color (Garrison and Knapp, 1832), 29-32. Also see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, Thus (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 7273 and 77-78.

(20) Lamin O Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 214-215.

(21) M. B. Akpan, "Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia, 1841-1964," Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Etudes Africaines 7, no. 2 (January 1, 1973): 220, doi: 10.2307/483540. On the future role of religion and religious education in Liberia, see George J. Hill, "Intimate Relationships: Secret Affairs of Church and State in the United States and Liberia, 19251947," Diplomatic History 31, no. 3 (June 2007): 465-503, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7709.12007.00628.x.

(22) On the transnational role of food and marriage in forging a Liberian identity, see William E. Allen, "Liberia and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century: Convergence and Effects," History in Africa: A Journal of Method 37 (September 2010): 7-49. One the question of infraracial conflict, see Godfrey Mwakikagile, Relations Between Africans and African Americans : Misconceptions, Myths and Realities (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2007), 29.

(23) James D Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 27-28.

(24) Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Las Vegas, Nev.: IAP, 2010), http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defconl/misedne.html. On the radical pragmatism of Woodson, see Pero Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered, 1st Edition (University of Illinois Press, 2010), 96-97.

(25) Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Tribeca Books, 2013); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies : How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 29.

(26) Marcus M. Garvey, "Africa for the Africans," in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance: Featuring Over 120 Selections from the Political Writings & Arts of the Period, ed. Nathan I. Huggins (Oxford University Press, 1976), 37.

(27) Amy Jacques Garvey, More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1977), 5.

(28) On the role of colonial education abroad see, A. J. Stockwell, "Leaders, Dissidents and the Disappointed: Colonial Students in Britain as Empire Ended," Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 36, no. 3 (September 2008): 487-507, doi: 10.1080/03086530802318730; Marc Matera, "Colonial Subjects: Black Intellectuals and the Development of Colonial Studies in Britain," Journal of British Studies 49, no. 2 (April 2010): 388-418. On Nkrumah more specifically see Marika Sherwood, "Kwame Nkrumah: The London Years, 1945-47," Immigrants & Minorities 12, no. 3 (1993): 164-194, doi: 10.1080/02619288.1993.9974824. For the most extended discussion of African Americans in Ghana see Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 141-142.

(29) Subira Kifano, "Afrocentric Education in Supplementary Schools: Paradigm and Practice at the Mary McLeod Bethune Institute," The Journal of Negro Education no. 2 (1996): 209.

(30) George O. Cox, Education for the Black Race (African Heritage Studies Publishers, 1974), 145. Also see Johnnella E. Butler, Black Studies-- pedagogy and Revolution: a Study of Afro-American Studies and the Liberal Arts Tradition through the Discipline of Afro-American Literature (University Press of America, 1981).

(31) John W. Blassingame, New Perspectives on Black Studies,, First Edition (University of Illinois Press, 1971).

(32) Butler, Black Studies--pedagogy and Revolution; Blassingame, New Perspectives on Black Studies,.

(33) Gerald Early, "Afrocentrism: From Sensationalism to Measured Deliberation," The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education no. 5 (October 1, 1994): 86-87, doi: 10.2307/2962415; Amy J. Binder, "Why Do Some Curricular Challenges Work While Others Do Not? The Case of Three Afrocentric Challenges," Sociology of Education 73, no. 2 (April 2000): 69-91.

(34) Mary R Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: BasicBooks, 1996).

(35) Geoffrey Jahwara Giddings, "Infusion of Afrocentric Content into the School Curriculum: Toward an Effective Movement," Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 4 (March 1, 2001): 462-A82, doi: 10.2307/2668026.

(36) Richard J Hermstein and Charles A Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). Steven Fraser, The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (Basic Books, 1995); Stephen Jay Gould, "Curveball," The New Yorker, November 28, 1994, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html.

(37) Pete O'Neal et al., A Panther in Africa (New York, NY: Filmakers Library, 2004).

(38) Ibid.

(39) Ibid.

(40) Goldstein, "Baraka School: An African Experiment"; Mary E. Yakimowski, Carmen V. Russo, and Kimberly Clark-Adedoyin, "The Baraka School: An African Immersion Program for Middle-School Boys.," ERS Spectrum 21, no. 2 (2003): 22-26.

(41) Jomo Kenyatta and Bronislaw Malinowski, Facing Mount Kenya the Traditional Life of the Gikuyu (New York: Vintage books, 1965), 97-100, esp. 102-103.

(42) Yakimowski, Russo, and Clark-Adedoyin, "The Baraka School," 23-25; Jessica Anderson, "After Africa, Some Baraka School Alumni Soar While Others Struggle," The Washington Post, July 26, 2010, sec. Metro, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/07/25/AR2010072502662.html.

(43) On the Mortenson model and controversy see Greg Mortenson and David Olivier Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations--One School at a Time (Penguin, 2006); Greg Mortenson, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 1st ed. (Viking Adult, 2009); Jon Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortensen, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (Random House Digital, Inc., 2011).

(44) George B. Davis, Oprah Theology: A Comparative Analysis of Oprah Winfrey's Worldview of Christianity and Biblical Christianity (CrossBooks, 2011), 37-38; Robin Westen, Oprah Winfrey: A Biography of a Billionaire Talk Show Host (Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2013), 6-7.

(45) On the sexual impropriety charges, see Marti Parham, "Arrest Made In Abuse Case At Oprah Winfrey's South African School," Jet, November 19, 2007. On the residency model, see Linda Darling-Hammond, "A Future Worthy of Teaching for America: The Teaching Residency May Be One of the Most Important Reforms of Teacher Education, Ms. Darling-Hammond Asserts. If TFA Were to Adopt This Model, It Could Help Address the Teacher-Quality Problems in Our Urban Schools," Phi Delta Kappan 89, no. 10 (June 1, 2008): 730. On problem of the privatization of foreign aid to Africa see Bill Martin, "Waiting for Oprah & the New US Constituency for Africa," Review of African Political Economy 25, no. 75 (March 1, 1998): 11-13, doi: 10.2307/4006357. One the phenomenon of more African Americans returning to Africa see Teresa Watanabe, "Called Back to Africa by DNA," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/18/local/me-africa18.

(46) Ben Schiller, "US Slavery's Diaspora: Black Atlantic History at the Crossroads of 'Race', Enslavement, and Colonisation," Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 2 (June 2011): 209, doi: 10.1080/0144039X.2011.568232.

(47) Caroline H. Bledsoe and Papa Sow, "Back to Africa: Second Chances for the Children of West African Immigrants," Journal of Marriage & Family 73, no. 4 (August 2011): 747-8, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2011,00843.x.

(48) Kenneth Cushner, Sharon Brennan, and Association of Teacher Educators, Intercultural Student Teaching: a Bridge to Global Competence (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2007).

(49) Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters, Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Michelle Stephens, "Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas; Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s; Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic" American Literature 78, no. 3 (2006): 638-640; Stephen Castles, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2009).

(50) Gerald Home, "Toward a Transnational Research Agenda for African American History in the 21st Century," The Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (July 1, 2006): 288-303, doi: 10.2307/20064092; Michael Templeton, "Becoming Transnational and Becoming Machinery in Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seamen," Symploke no. 1/2 (2006): 272, doi: 10.2307/40550725.

(51) Michael A. Gomez, "Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies," Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 2 (November 1, 2004): 177, doi: 10.2307/4129300.

(52) Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered, 9.