Abstract

 Set in the context of a History of Art Education course in Spring 2021, this article presents archival research highlighting three educational programs in the Southeastern United States that centered art for activist purposes during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The programs include the Freedom Schools in Mississippi, the Urban Mythology Film Program in Georgia, and the Neighborhood Art Center, also in Georgia. The article contextualizes these programs as continuing a trajectory of Black Education as activism that existed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Amid pressing calls for racial justice then and now, we suggest these programs and their situatedness in history can be powerful resources for art educators with activist aims in the present. Therefore, we conclude the article with six lessons, culled from the three projects, for art education toward racial justice.

 

Keywords: archival research, Black education, art, activism, Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Arts, racial justice, art education

How to Cite:

Hanawalt, C., Novak, L., Hogrefe-Ribeiro, E. & Satterfield, A., (2024) “Black Education and Art as Activism in the Southeastern United States during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements: Archival Research toward Racial Justice”, Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education 41(1), 13-45. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jcrae.5987