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Fugitive Pedagogy

Three-Sentence Summary

"Fugitive Pedagogy" by Jarvis R. Givens explores the history of Black education and the strategies developed by African American educators to resist racial oppression and promote intellectual liberation. The book highlights the role of secret schools and hidden curriculums in transmitting knowledge, values, and a sense of identity despite the hostile environment. It also examines how these clandestine educational practices influenced modern Black intellectual thought and processes.

Extended Summary

"Fugitive Pedagogy" is an in-depth examination of African American education's history, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. Jarvis R. Givens provides a detailed account of how Black teachers covertly educated their students during slavery, Jim Crow laws, and beyond. These teachers developed secret schools or "fugitive pedagogies" where they taught not only basic literacy but also Black pride, resistance, culture, history, and identity.

The book is structured chronologically starting with the era of slavery when teaching enslaved Africans was illegal. Yet, many slaves risked their lives to learn to read and write in secret schools run by courageous African American teachers who believed in the power of education as a tool for liberation.

During the Jim Crow era, these fugitive pedagogies continued to flourish despite segregation laws that mandated inferior education for Black students. Teachers subtly integrated lessons on civil rights, resistance strategies, and critical thinking into their curriculums. They taught their students about significant Black figures such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman who stood up against racial oppression.

Givens goes on to trace how these fugitive pedagogies influenced modern African American intellectual thought and processes by fostering a sense of shared heritage among Black students and instilling a strong sense of self-worth. The book concludes by calling for a renewed focus on the pedagogical strategies used by African American educators in the past as a blueprint for current and future education practices.

Key Points

The concept of "fugitive pedagogy" refers to covert educational practices developed by African American teachers during slavery and segregation to teach their students values of resistance, self-pride, culture, history, and identity.
These clandestine educational practices were instrumental in fostering a sense of shared heritage among Black students, instilling a strong sense of self-worth, and promoting intellectual liberation.
Jarvis R. Givens argues that the pedagogical strategies used by African American educators in the past should serve as a blueprint for current and future education practices.

Who Should Read

"Fugitive Pedagogy" is an ideal read for educators, historians, sociologists, researchers studying race relations or education policy, and anyone interested in the history of African American education. It provides valuable insights into how Black teachers have historically subverted oppressive systems to ensure their students' intellectual growth.

About the Author

Jarvis R. Givens is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests include race and racism in education, history of African American education, and critical theories of race.

Highlights

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities.² Black people's disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. None
Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass's master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to "running away with himself."¹ Stealing one's self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy-for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement. None
Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be "a means of escape," as Woodson wrote.
Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. None
Their subjectivities communicated embodied knowledge to their students: they were flesh-asformer-commodity: once property, now teaching as an act of self-possession.
Teaching for these formerly enslaved men was an act of unmaking the terms of their relation to the word and world. It challenged a knowledge system that marked them as beneath the threshold of human history and disrupted a social order that functioned on these antiblack ideas. None
McGuffey's did not discuss race in explicit fashion, yet racial ideas were operative even when hidden in plain sight. The absence of black or Native American people in the stories, poems, and illustrations mapped onto a larger political context where these groups were obscured within the official knowledge of schools, and one in which European and Euro-American "exploration and imperialism were assumed to be benevolent and inevitable. 30 While Africa appears three times in the reader, these are passages referring to elephants, giraffes, and coffee. Africa is a place where animals are found, where the coffee bean is indigenous, but there are no people there, no life, just a place brought into the known world through white exploration. An illustration depicting a coffee crop field also includes native Africans working; however, they are not mentioned in the narrative. They simply serve as props to a story about the exotic coffee bean. In discussing the giraffe, the primer takes care to note, "Le Vaillant (the celebrated French traveler and naturalist) was the first who gave us any exact account of the form and habits of the giraffe" based on his explorations in South Africa. None
Woodson was required to lean on the inherited practice of "communal literacy," just as he did when reading to his father-a practice he maintained through his early twenties. By reading to and for others, Woodson made it possible for those around him to engage with ideas and interact with the written word. Literacy was never primarily an individualized, antisocial endeavor in the context of black life; it was largely a social act at the center of black political struggle. Literacy acts held great cultural and political significance, derived from the time of slavery.35 Writing of communal literacy, one scholar notes: "Literacy education for African Americans was not an isolated or individualistic endeavor, but a communal one.... [Black] families viewed literacy as an inheritance that is passed on to strengthen future generations and [that gave] them opportunities in a hostile environment None
Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities.² Black people's disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. None
Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass's master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to "running away with himself."¹ Stealing one's self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy-for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement. None
Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be "a means of escape," as Woodson wrote.
Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. None
Their subjectivities communicated embodied knowledge to their students: they were flesh-asformer-commodity: once property, now teaching as an act of self-possession.
Teaching for these formerly enslaved men was an act of unmaking the terms of their relation to the word and world. It challenged a knowledge system that marked them as beneath the threshold of human history and disrupted a social order that functioned on these antiblack ideas. None
McGuffey's did not discuss race in explicit fashion, yet racial ideas were operative even when hidden in plain sight. The absence of black or Native American people in the stories, poems, and illustrations mapped onto a larger political context where these groups were obscured within the official knowledge of schools, and one in which European and Euro-American "exploration and imperialism were assumed to be benevolent and inevitable. 30 While Africa appears three times in the reader, these are passages referring to elephants, giraffes, and coffee. Africa is a place where animals are found, where the coffee bean is indigenous, but there are no people there, no life, just a place brought into the known world through white exploration. An illustration depicting a coffee crop field also includes native Africans working; however, they are not mentioned in the narrative. They simply serve as props to a story about the exotic coffee bean. In discussing the giraffe, the primer takes care to note, "Le Vaillant (the celebrated French traveler and naturalist) was the first who gave us any exact account of the form and habits of the giraffe" based on his explorations in South Africa. None
Woodson was required to lean on the inherited practice of "communal literacy," just as he did when reading to his father-a practice he maintained through his early twenties. By reading to and for others, Woodson made it possible for those around him to engage with ideas and interact with the written word. Literacy was never primarily an individualized, antisocial endeavor in the context of black life; it was largely a social act at the center of black political struggle. Literacy acts held great cultural and political significance, derived from the time of slavery.35 Writing of communal literacy, one scholar notes: "Literacy education for African Americans was not an isolated or individualistic endeavor, but a communal one.... [Black] families viewed literacy as an inheritance that is passed on to strengthen future generations and [that gave] them opportunities in a hostile environment None
How some of these slaves learned in spite of opposition makes a beautiful story. Knowing the value of learning as a means of escape and having longing for it, too, because it was forbidden, many slaves continued their education under adverse circumstances. —CARTER G. WOODSON, The Negro in Our History (1922) Location 86
Although focused on slavery, redress, and the historicity of what is lost and irrecoverable in the future, Best and Hartman introduce the idea of “two competing narratives of the fugitive’s identity.”5 Fugitive connotes the dual image of one who escapes enslavement or jailed confinement, which justifies one’s capture and even death at the hands of law enforcement. Location 117
Black education was a fugitive project from its inception—outlawed and defined as a criminal act regarding the slave population in the southern states and, at times, too, an object of suspicion and violent resistance in the North. Location 129
These teachers were “hidden provocateurs,” she argues, forced to keep their political ties underground because of their economic vulnerability as employees of the state and given their physical vulnerability as black people living under de jure segregation. Location 157
When it came to the pursuit of freedom through education, black people consistently deployed fugitive tactics. Enslaved people learned in secret places. During Jim Crow, black educators wore a mask of compliance in order to appease the white power structure, while simultaneously working to subvert it. Location 159
The physical and intellectual acts by black teachers and students explicitly critiqued and negated white supremacy and antiblack protocols of domination, but they often did so in discreet or partially concealed fashion. Location 185
“insurgent intellectual networks” Location 198
The vulnerability of black teachers as a professional group had long been a sharp reality, and it continued to be the case after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century. Location 229
Fugitive Pedagogy talks pointedly, in a more interpretive sense, about black education at the level of experience. Black people’s political clarity meant they understood their teaching and learning to be perpetually taking place under persecution, even as they created learning experiences of joy and empowerment. Location 235
Fugitive Pedagogy asks: What has been the nature of black people’s relationship to the American School? And how have they worked to enact their own visions of teaching and learning within this structural context? Location 283
Fugitivity—and fugitive pedagogy in particular—is the metanarrative of black educational history. It is a social and rhetorical frame by which we might interpret black Americans’ pursuit to enact humanizing and affirming practices of teaching and learning. Location 300
The first proscription of this kind emerged as early as the Slave Code of 1740, enacted in response to the Stono Slave Rebellion, which—it is key to note—preceded the American Revolution. Location 304
The criminality of black learning was a psychosocial reality. According to Frederick Douglass’s master: a slave having learned to read and write was a slave “running away with himself”: stealing oneself, not just stealing away to the North or stealing away to Jesus but stealing away to one’s own imagination, seeking respite in independent thought. The theft of one’s mind was directly relational to, perhaps even a precondition for, the theft of one’s body. For these reasons, enslaved people who could read and write were branded as “objects of suspicion,” marked as black-fugitive-learning-flesh. Location 328
“The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”51 Location 372
As Fred Moten aptly notes, and I paraphrase: escape is an activity; it’s not an achievement. Location 393
The work of black teachers and students, therefore, demanded a fugitive relationship to the American School. Even as their work was being carried out in the formal structure of the American School, it could be fundamentally set against it. Location 476
black people have always been hyperaware of their bodies in relation to schooling: first in their physical exclusion and later through their racially confined educational experiences through segregation. Location 504
black people have perpetually had to exist within yet against the American School given their violent conscription into its symbolic and structural order. Location 596
The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Location 624
Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Location 626
Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities.2 Location 630
The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature. Location 636
They were situated between black attempts to put their dreams of freedom into practice and the realities of white restrictions imposed on their attempts to know the world and themselves otherwise. Location 770
Teaching for these formerly enslaved men was an act of unmaking the terms of their relation to the word and world. Location 786
While Africa appears three times in the reader, these are passages referring to elephants, giraffes, and coffee. Africa is a place where animals are found, where the coffee bean is indigenous, but there are no people there, no life, just a place brought into the known world through white exploration. Location 836
Literacy was never primarily an individualized, antisocial endeavor in the context of black life; it was largely a social act at the center of black political struggle. Location 872
Literacy acts held great cultural and political significance, derived from the time of slavery. Location 873
How some of these slaves learned in spite of opposition makes a beautiful story. Knowing the value of learning as a means of escape and having longing for it, too, because it was forbidden, many slaves continued their education under adverse circumstances. —CARTER G. WOODSON, The Negro in Our History (1922) Location 86
Although focused on slavery, redress, and the historicity of what is lost and irrecoverable in the future, Best and Hartman introduce the idea of “two competing narratives of the fugitive’s identity.”5 Fugitive connotes the dual image of one who escapes enslavement or jailed confinement, which justifies one’s capture and even death at the hands of law enforcement. Location 117
Black education was a fugitive project from its inception—outlawed and defined as a criminal act regarding the slave population in the southern states and, at times, too, an object of suspicion and violent resistance in the North. Location 129
These teachers were “hidden provocateurs,” she argues, forced to keep their political ties underground because of their economic vulnerability as employees of the state and given their physical vulnerability as black people living under de jure segregation. Location 157
When it came to the pursuit of freedom through education, black people consistently deployed fugitive tactics. Enslaved people learned in secret places. During Jim Crow, black educators wore a mask of compliance in order to appease the white power structure, while simultaneously working to subvert it. Location 159
The physical and intellectual acts by black teachers and students explicitly critiqued and negated white supremacy and antiblack protocols of domination, but they often did so in discreet or partially concealed fashion. Location 185
“insurgent intellectual networks” Location 198
The vulnerability of black teachers as a professional group had long been a sharp reality, and it continued to be the case after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century. Location 229
Fugitive Pedagogy talks pointedly, in a more interpretive sense, about black education at the level of experience. Black people’s political clarity meant they understood their teaching and learning to be perpetually taking place under persecution, even as they created learning experiences of joy and empowerment. Location 235
Fugitive Pedagogy asks: What has been the nature of black people’s relationship to the American School? And how have they worked to enact their own visions of teaching and learning within this structural context? Location 283
Fugitivity—and fugitive pedagogy in particular—is the metanarrative of black educational history. It is a social and rhetorical frame by which we might interpret black Americans’ pursuit to enact humanizing and affirming practices of teaching and learning. Location 300
The first proscription of this kind emerged as early as the Slave Code of 1740, enacted in response to the Stono Slave Rebellion, which—it is key to note—preceded the American Revolution. Location 304
The criminality of black learning was a psychosocial reality. According to Frederick Douglass’s master: a slave having learned to read and write was a slave “running away with himself”: stealing oneself, not just stealing away to the North or stealing away to Jesus but stealing away to one’s own imagination, seeking respite in independent thought. The theft of one’s mind was directly relational to, perhaps even a precondition for, the theft of one’s body. For these reasons, enslaved people who could read and write were branded as “objects of suspicion,” marked as black-fugitive-learning-flesh. Location 328
“The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”51 Location 372
As Fred Moten aptly notes, and I paraphrase: escape is an activity; it’s not an achievement. Location 393
The work of black teachers and students, therefore, demanded a fugitive relationship to the American School. Even as their work was being carried out in the formal structure of the American School, it could be fundamentally set against it. Location 476
black people have always been hyperaware of their bodies in relation to schooling: first in their physical exclusion and later through their racially confined educational experiences through segregation. Location 504
black people have perpetually had to exist within yet against the American School given their violent conscription into its symbolic and structural order. Location 596
The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Location 624
Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Location 626
Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities.2 Location 630
The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature. Location 636
They were situated between black attempts to put their dreams of freedom into practice and the realities of white restrictions imposed on their attempts to know the world and themselves otherwise. Location 770
Teaching for these formerly enslaved men was an act of unmaking the terms of their relation to the word and world. Location 786
While Africa appears three times in the reader, these are passages referring to elephants, giraffes, and coffee. Africa is a place where animals are found, where the coffee bean is indigenous, but there are no people there, no life, just a place brought into the known world through white exploration. Location 836
Literacy was never primarily an individualized, antisocial endeavor in the context of black life; it was largely a social act at the center of black political struggle. Location 872
Literacy acts held great cultural and political significance, derived from the time of slavery. Location 873---
How some of these slaves learned in spite of opposition makes a beautiful story. Knowing the value of learning as a means of escape and having longing for it, too, because it was forbidden, many slaves continued their education under adverse circumstances. —CARTER G. WOODSON, The Negro in Our History (1922) Location 86
Although focused on slavery, redress, and the historicity of what is lost and irrecoverable in the future, Best and Hartman introduce the idea of “two competing narratives of the fugitive’s identity.”5 Fugitive connotes the dual image of one who escapes enslavement or jailed confinement, which justifies one’s capture and even death at the hands of law enforcement. Location 117
Black education was a fugitive project from its inception—outlawed and defined as a criminal act regarding the slave population in the southern states and, at times, too, an object of suspicion and violent resistance in the North. Location 129
These teachers were “hidden provocateurs,” she argues, forced to keep their political ties underground because of their economic vulnerability as employees of the state and given their physical vulnerability as black people living under de jure segregation. Location 157
When it came to the pursuit of freedom through education, black people consistently deployed fugitive tactics. Enslaved people learned in secret places. During Jim Crow, black educators wore a mask of compliance in order to appease the white power structure, while simultaneously working to subvert it. Location 159
The physical and intellectual acts by black teachers and students explicitly critiqued and negated white supremacy and antiblack protocols of domination, but they often did so in discreet or partially concealed fashion. Location 185
“insurgent intellectual networks” Location 198
The vulnerability of black teachers as a professional group had long been a sharp reality, and it continued to be the case after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century. Location 229
Fugitive Pedagogy talks pointedly, in a more interpretive sense, about black education at the level of experience. Black people’s political clarity meant they understood their teaching and learning to be perpetually taking place under persecution, even as they created learning experiences of joy and empowerment. Location 235
Fugitive Pedagogy asks: What has been the nature of black people’s relationship to the American School? And how have they worked to enact their own visions of teaching and learning within this structural context? Location 283
Fugitivity—and fugitive pedagogy in particular—is the metanarrative of black educational history. It is a social and rhetorical frame by which we might interpret black Americans’ pursuit to enact humanizing and affirming practices of teaching and learning. Location 300
The first proscription of this kind emerged as early as the Slave Code of 1740, enacted in response to the Stono Slave Rebellion, which—it is key to note—preceded the American Revolution. Location 304
The criminality of black learning was a psychosocial reality. According to Frederick Douglass’s master: a slave having learned to read and write was a slave “running away with himself”: stealing oneself, not just stealing away to the North or stealing away to Jesus but stealing away to one’s own imagination, seeking respite in independent thought. The theft of one’s mind was directly relational to, perhaps even a precondition for, the theft of one’s body. For these reasons, enslaved people who could read and write were branded as “objects of suspicion,” marked as black-fugitive-learning-flesh. Location 328
“The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”51 Location 372
As Fred Moten aptly notes, and I paraphrase: escape is an activity; it’s not an achievement. Location 393
The work of black teachers and students, therefore, demanded a fugitive relationship to the American School. Even as their work was being carried out in the formal structure of the American School, it could be fundamentally set against it. Location 476
black people have always been hyperaware of their bodies in relation to schooling: first in their physical exclusion and later through their racially confined educational experiences through segregation. Location 504
black people have perpetually had to exist within yet against the American School given their violent conscription into its symbolic and structural order. Location 596
The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Location 624
Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Location 626
Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities.2 Location 630
The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature. Location 636
They were situated between black attempts to put their dreams of freedom into practice and the realities of white restrictions imposed on their attempts to know the world and themselves otherwise. Location 770
Teaching for these formerly enslaved men was an act of unmaking the terms of their relation to the word and world. Location 786
While Africa appears three times in the reader, these are passages referring to elephants, giraffes, and coffee. Africa is a place where animals are found, where the coffee bean is indigenous, but there are no people there, no life, just a place brought into the known world through white exploration. Location 836
Literacy was never primarily an individualized, antisocial endeavor in the context of black life; it was largely a social act at the center of black political struggle. Location 872
Literacy acts held great cultural and political significance, derived from the time of slavery. Location 873