Before the founding of the United States, enslaved Africans advocated literacy as a method of emancipation. During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, blacks were at the forefront of the debates on the establishment of public schools in the South. In fact, a wealth of ideas about the role of education in American freedom and progress emerged from African American civic, political, and religious communities and was informed by the complexity of the Black experience in America. Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, the most dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. African-American thought and activism regarding education burgeoned from traditional academic disciplines, such as philosophy and art, mathematics and the natural sciences, and history and psychology; from the Black church as well as from grassroot political, social, cultural, and educational activism, with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity.

Contributions by: A.A Akom, Ojeya Cruz Banks, Eric A. Hurley, Karen A. Johnson, Judith King-Calnek, Daniel Perlstein, Sabrina Ross