Disciplines and Disruptions

WITHOUT A PRAYER: RELIGION AND RACE IN NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS. By Leslie Beth Ribovich. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Pp. vii + 241. Paperback, $30.00. With great clarity and archival precision, Leslie Ribovich explores how the co-construction of religion and race shaped American public education during the 1950s and 1960s. Where many previous studies have focused on the intersection of religion, race, and education in the US South, Ribovich instead takes us north to New York City. In addition to boasting the largest school system in the country, New York's religious and racial diversity—which had been enhanced by a host of African American, Puerto Rican, and Caribbean migrations—serves as a generative case study for illuminating debates surrounding the means and ends of US public education (4). As Ribovich argues, these debates about the purpose of education ultimately reflected “understandings of citizenship, belonging, and peoplehood—using religious and racial reasoning” (7). Teasing apart these dynamics, and with an eye toward both change over time and continuity, Without a Prayer examines how, even after Supreme Court rulings against prayer and Bible-reading in schools, religion persisted in schools because “understandings of religion were embedded in how public schools addressed race and their educational aims” (177). There are many entryways into discussing this text. Without a Prayer examines an impressively wide-ranging set of themes such as secularization, desegregation, religious education and government aid, students' spiritual formation, and religious and racial understandings of juvenile delinquency. However, this essay is inspired by a striking line that ends the sixth chapter of the book: “Education disciplines. Education disrupts. All of us who work and learn in educational institutions live in this paradox” (175). The tension between the disciplinary and disruptive aims of education emerges most notably in the final section of the book, focused on the “Purposes of Public Education.” In this section, Ribovich discusses critiques of American public education that occurred during efforts by Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers to decentralize the city's school system and exert greater control over the religious and racial formation of their students during the late 60s and into the early 70s. Through community control, Ribovich argues, Black New Yorkers engaged in “religious and racial worldmaking” and “reimagined what public education could do and whom it served” (13). Drawing on the theme of “disruption,” this essay highlights a few of the many insightful ways that Without a Prayer helpfully disrupts or further challenges scholarly approaches to the study of religion and education. Ribovich's text is an exciting contribution that disrupts narrow methods of studying religion and education, complicates approaches to the study of religion and social movements, and further unsettles limiting conceptions of Black religion. I come to Ribovich's work as someone in the midst of a sprawling research project that examines debates about religion, race, and the purpose of education in the context of African international students and higher education in the US during the twentieth century. Locating archival material for such a project has been an exciting journey that has provided me with more historical sources than I would have imagined when I first conceptualized the project. Yet, despite the joys of this research, the process has also been incredibly frustrating at times. It was not until reading Ribovich's book that I fully understood why. As she writes, “Archival institutions are organized much like our siloed understanding of education, religion, and race” (179). It is easy to assume, for example, that while an archive dedicated to Board of Education records can tell us something about education and race, only a denominational archive can tell us something about religion. In my attempt to retrace the steps of West Africans in the US who pursued African self-determination through higher education, I, too, have been tempted to make this mistake. I have scoured collections in governmental, educational, and philanthropic institutions, each organized in ways that can obscure how the historical actors I study lived at the intersection of these institutions. The educational, religious, and racial content of students' lives are not as easy to categorize as archives suggest. Ribovich explains her strategy for overcoming the siloed organization of archival collections. Scholars must be willing to disrupt traditional approaches to engaging with religion and education archives. This entails, for example, being open to finding “race” in sources typically reserved for telling us something about “religion” and being open to finding “religion” in sources typically reserved for telling us something about “race.” Ribovich does this successfully, in part, by adopting a capacious understanding of “religion.” She attends to how parents, teachers, members of the school board, and the local community variously imagined “religion” and its purpose in relation to public education. Doing so allows her to understand how New Yorkers understood the role of religion in education, even when more obvious mentions of religion, such as responses to Supreme Court rulings on religion in schools, evaporated from archival records. Moreover, one set of New Yorkers who do not receive enough attention in Ribovich's text is the students who were caught in the crosshairs of debates concerning religion, race, and public education. This text could have been strengthened by attending to the experiences of students in schools, even as doing so would have posed yet another methodological challenge of how to locate and incorporate the perspectives of children using historical sources. Including more student voices where possible would have further added to our understanding of larger communal discussions about education. In any case, this text, which is a work of both American religious history and the history of education in the US, is a blueprint for how scholars might bring these academic disciplines into deeper and more sustained conversation. Without a Prayer is also helpful for disrupting and rethinking our approach to studying social movements. Echoing interventions made by historians like Barbara Dianne Savage and Keisha Blain, Ribovich adds to scholarly disruptions of the historiography of religion and the Civil Rights movement, which previously privileged the contributions of male activists. Where scholars have more recently examined the religious and racial activism of Black women educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Helen Burroughs, Without a Prayer joins the chorus by introducing readers to historical actors such as schoolteacher Edwina Chavers Johnson, whose educational advocacy challenged the so-called “Judeo-Christianity” of New York public schools. This text suggests that studies of the religious and educational contributions of Black women have just scratched the surface. Animated by the desire to curate spaces for Black students in public schools to see themselves within US history, Chavers Johnson joined community control efforts in protest of the dominant curriculum in public schools, which deified the nation's so-called founding fathers and papered over the significance of Black Americans in the US. In doing so, she crafted teaching guides based on canons from which Black students could connect their present and future to the past contributions of notable African Americans like Phyllis Wheatley and Gwendolyn Brooks. Rather than limiting serious study of Black history to 1 month, Chavers Johnson's guides demonstrated that Black history could and should be taught throughout the year. Indeed, Ribovich argues, by “ritually memorializing ancestors” through the study of Black history, “the public school proved a significant space for conveying a sacred race history” (154–155). Ribovich's invocation of historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp's notion of “sacred race history” (2010) also recalls how African Americans have historically adopted religio-racial approaches to rethinking Black “sacred time and divine histories” as discussed in historian Judith Weisenfeld's study of early twentieth-century new religious movements in the urban North (2016). Ribovich's discussion of Chaver Johnson's efforts thus raises questions about how public school education involved an intersection of not only religion and race, but also gender. This text's examination of Chavers Johnson's historical work points to yet another way in which African American women's labor has transformed Black religious and social life. Where religious studies scholar Judith Casselberry writes of Black women's spiritual, emotional, aesthetic, and intimate labor in churches, Ribovich invites us to consider how forms of historical and educational labor through acts of teaching, documenting, and remembering open a window onto Black women's contributions to Black life in US schools.1 Ribovich also helps us reconceive social movements by breaking us out of a success versus failure analytical binary. The text shifts our interpretation of community control from one of failure to a moment of “complex negotiations and possibilities” (6). Indeed, debates about community control represented a period in which “people asked differed questions about old institutions to produce new futures” (175). Just as scholars have increasingly troubled the accommodation versus resistance paradigm in studies of Black social movements, Ribovich suggests that we might more productively understanding grassroots social movements like those around community control as a set of experimental “improvisations” that draw our attention to the various strategies African Americans employed to remake social and political worlds, even if those efforts did not completely achieve a movement's desired ends (179). Ribovich's emphasis on the experimental nature of Black education during this period finds good company alongside historian Kwasi Konadu's findings in his study of community control in New York during this period (2009). With greater interpretive dexterity, and by paying closer attention to the role of religion in community control, we are better able to grasp how African Americans experimented with practices of self-determination through educational advocacy. Finally, Without a Prayer productively disrupts limited notions of “Black religion” through its discussion of a broad repertoire of Black religious and moral sources that African American advocates of community control drew from to make their case for self-determination. For example, Black community control advocates found inspiration in Black liberation theology, Catholicism, and humanism. This text's attention to the breadth of Black religious expression and educational advocacy is a helpful supplement to works like historian Russell Rickford's We Are an African People (2016), which also analyzes community control in New York during the 1960s. While Rickford argues that the “movement's churchly tone of moral indignation gave way to naked scorn for the White establishment” (2016, 28), Ribovich suggests that: (1) the movement involved more than the “churchly” voices of Black Christians and (2) religion continued to play an integral role in political organizing around African American education well into the 60s and even the 70s. For example, though not discussed in Ribovich's work, the ongoing practice of African diasporic religions in places like South Carolina's Oyotunji Village spurred the formation of schools designed to provide Black students with an education that gave Black communities authority over (re)shaping the educational futures of their children (Hucks 2012, 207). One of the ways in which some community control advocates employed religion was by critiquing the “coloniality” of US education, which historically excluded Black students and alienated them from the knowledge production of their African ancestors. I found this discourse around “coloniality” to be fascinating and thought it could have received even more attention in Ribovich's analysis, given the prominence of this rhetoric in the commentary of some of the book's historical subjects. For example, Columbia professor Preston Wilcox made a Black humanist argument for voluntarily separate Black education as a remedy to the coloniality of US education. As Ribovich writes, “Wilcox sought Black agency without divinity” and encouraged Black communities to save and educate themselves (163). Wilcox argued that the local school board represented a “colonial structure,” and such circumstances required Black people to proactively reimagine what a different kind of education could look like for their communities (164). Further discussion regarding coloniality in the context of race, education, and freedom could provide one way of extending Sylvester Johnson's work on the intersection of colonialism, democracy, and freedom in African American religious history (2015). Interrogating this discourse around “coloniality” might have also further clarified Ribovich's claim that African Americans such as Wilcox envisioned struggles for Black education as a religious and Pan-Africanist endeavor. In the book's discussion of African American racial, religious, and educational worldmaking, I was struck by how some community control advocates lamented that one of the key aspects of the “miseducation” of African Americans in the US was their “de-Africanization,” in the words of Chavers Johnson or, in the words of Wilcox, the lack of a “figurative Africanization” (164). In addition to the Black nationalist orientation of schools like Uhuru Sasa Shule with their attention to the Seven Principles of Blackness, I wondered whether there were other ways in which Black New Yorkers might have viewed Africa as key to African American self-determination through education. For example, I am curious to know whether their critiques of the internal colonization of Black education in the US might have extended to similar critiques of colonial education and its afterlives in Africa during this period. In short, were African American references to Africa in relation to Black education largely symbolic or something more? From my initial readings, it seems that the Pan-Africanist sensibilities of those like Johnson and Wilcox were largely centered on Black figures and events from the US context, but perhaps there were other ways in which community control activists saw their struggles for education as connected to Black communities abroad. On the whole, Without a Prayer is an excellent study of the disciplinary and disruptive features of education. This work is valuable not only for its analytical and historical interventions, but also for its implicit invitation for readers to consider how religion and race may inform their own pedagogical practices or ideas about the purposes of education. We need not look far to recognize that struggles continue to take place over efforts to expand or limit the educational self-determination of underrepresented communities throughout the US. As many of us, all of us, grapple with the changing landscape of religion and education in the US, this text is a helpful reminder: “Education disciplines. Education disrupts. All of us who work and learn in educational institutions live in this paradox” (175)

CLARITY · Prayer · Racism · Religious education · Supreme court · Philippine History and Culture

• African American Religions, 1500–2000

  Open Access•Sylvester A Johnson•African American Religions,…•2015

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