'To reshape and redefine our world': African American political organizing for education in Chicago, 1968-1988

This dissertation investigates historical transformations in Black political organizing in Chicago around inequities in public education from 1968 to 1988. By analyzing Black Chicagoans' efforts to improve education and the racial politics of educational policy, this study illuminates historic shifts in Black political consciousness and the changing character and focus of Black politics more generally in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement: from integration to community control and institutional autonomy, from large-scale mass mobilizations to local community-based organizing, and eventually to forming coalitions to forge entrees into electoral politics, which transformed African Americans' relationship to the Chicago Democratic Machine.;Although often portrayed as an era of demobilization, this dissertation reframes this period as a moment when Black political activity shifted to new terrains of conflict. The movement for school reform illustrates just such a transformation, one embracing both continuities and discontinuities in political organizing strategies and ideological understandings of education, as people with diverse political perspectives and strategies within Black communities struggled to put their ideas into action. This project documents and analyzes these changes through studies of three such efforts: 1. The Chicago Urban League's community-based and citywide integration projects; 2. The Institute of Positive Education's development of an independent African-centered school and institution; and 3. The Woodlawn Experimental Schools Project's efforts to achieve community control of schools. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, these types of local political mobilizations laid the groundwork and developed an ideological infrastructure, and activist base, for the resurgence of larger political mobilizations in the last decades of the 20th century, most notably in the citywide organizing to elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago, and in the Chicago School Reform movement culminating in the passage of the Chicago School Reform Act in 1988.;This social history utilizes archival research and oral histories to analyze the ways that African Americans mobilized politically to address the unequal education of Black children in Chicago's public schools. Constructing this historical context provides an analytic framework that challenges conceptualizations of school reform efforts as isolated events operating within discrete historical moments. Investigating political organizing within, and beyond, the institutional setting of public schools furthers understandings of the dynamic relationship between schools and communities. By analyzing changes in the ideological underpinnings--and substantive content--of Black organizing for education in Chicago, this project creates new understandings of the complexity of Black civic life and the range of political possibilities in urban America in the Post-Civil Rights era.