Black Art in various forms has long been used by people in the African Diaspora to promote Black joy and Pro-Blackness yet it is often not included in language and literacy early childhood pedagogies to uplift Black children in North American schools. Likewise, many anti-racist early childhood research studies focus on the challenges faced by…

The antiblack past and present of institutions of higher education, more specifically community colleges, coupled with the resistance and perseverance of Black communities, has not only had a direct impact on Black student success, but also currently impacts the lived experiences of Black employees. To that end, the goal of this study was to…

In this theoretical and conceptual article, we consider how meaning-making, literacies, identities, power, privilege, and in/equities are entangled with/in non/human sociomaterial force relations. Inspired by Rose, we build theoretically on the philosophical principles of hip-hop--flow, rupture, layering, and sampling. Conceptually, we invite…

Black scholars across disciplines including literacy studies have theorized literacy practices and traditions that people of African descent employ towards healing. In response to Black rhetorical scholars' call for the discipline to examine Black diasporans' healing practices in charged sites of trauma such as the Pikworo Slave Camp in Ghana, I…

Africans are often misrepresented or under-represented in popular books and media. They are often presented as a single group of people; hence, other peoples' formed notion of Africans represents a single story (Adichie, 2009). This single story needs to change because it does not represent many Africans' lived experiences. The antidote to…

The focus of this study is the early music education of Charlie Gabriel who learned to play jazz as a child in New Orleans and went on to enjoy a successful, international performance career. The work is based on an oral history account where the primary data collection process was interview. The key issues that emerged from the oral history are…

This article utilizes Black girlhood as a framework in a critical multimodal qualitative inquiry to explore the complexities of representations of Black girls' hair, in picturebooks. Using a data corpus of 55 picturebooks published between 2010-2020, the authors analyzed the multimodal messages embedded in the initial introductions of Black girl…

As teachers in the US context, we have spent precious little time considering what it would mean to be prepared and ready for Black children. In such readiness, (re)cognition of the spirit and spirituality of Black people would be central in understanding and preparing for our children and families. This article asks the question: What would it…

This study explores the common barriers and shared visions for creating access to archival collections held by libraries at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). One of few reports that document the needs of HBCU libraries as they relate to archives and special collections. It is based on a series of online focus groups that author…

In this R. Freeman Butts Lecture, the authors engage this year's AESA theme, "Dreaming of Otherwise Worlds and Alternate Nows: Unsettling Colonialisms and Racism in the Social Foundations of Education," through a set of Black knowledge traditions and schools of thought and how these implicate our ideologies about education, specifically…

"Systemic racism" implies that racist policies are embedded in laws and institutions. That claim is patently false as evidenced by Americans having elected a biracial president for two terms and, more recently, a biracial vice president--not to mention blacks serving in the cabinet, in the highest ranks of the armed services, and in…

My dissertation explores the interdependent connection between African oral tradition and traditional African healing strategies found in storytelling in Chicago. In examining a nonprofit based in Chicago that offers cultural education through political resistance oral narratives (i.e. storytelling), my research examines how storytelling can…

In a time where diversity, equity and inclusion are huge buzz words in society, immigrants of African descent (IAD) in American higher education institutions (of all places) seem to still struggle with how they are identified. Black people and Black culture are not a monolith. Black people of foreign origin do not necessarily identify the same or…

In this article, the author shares research into five images by artists whose work responded to and helped shape the Black Power movement: Emory Douglas's "Don't Support the Greedy," Betye Saar's "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," Barbara Jones-Hogu's "Relate to Your Heritage," Elizabeth Catlett's "Malcolm X Speaks…

"Lift Every Voice and Sing," sometimes referred to as the Black National Anthem, has been sung everywhere from protests to concert halls in the United States for well over a century. The song's origins, however, come directly from the mind of educator James Weldon Johnson and the needs of his school community. This article recounts the…