In Pursuit of Freedom: Summoning Lessons of Black and Native Educational Solidarities from the Elk Street School for Colored Children

In a depilated lot with overgrown grass and piles of broken concrete, there lays a monument in Stockton, California, embossed “Rev. Jeremiah Burke Sanderson and the Elk Street School.” Fading from public memory, the remains of what lies beneath that monument is a rich legacy of multicultural education built for Black, Native, and Asian students. Operated by Black anti-slavery abolitionists of the California Colored Convention, the Elk Street Colored School was a renowned boarding school that early Black and Native residents of California made special efforts to enroll their children in the 1860s. Drawing upon the archives from the California State Library, and the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, this paper argues that curricular innovation fostered in prepared and mobilized Black and Native youth to combat structural racism in 19th century California. Moreover, while misguided histories of education strove to depict Black and Native students as uneducable, the history of the Elk Street School illuminate the ways in which subversive and insurgent expression of Black and Native education via literacy, numeracy, and theorizing has been used as a portal to grasp towards fleeting notions of freedom, humanity, and otherwise world-building. Most notably, the founding teacher, abolitionist Rev. Jeremiah Burke Sanderson, worked as an advocate for Black and Native education by helping to professionalize the teaching force, building multiracial political capacity, and using education as a venue to reimagine political solidarities between Black and Native communities given their interconnected oppressions in California. Overall, the story of the Elk Street School for Colored Children generatively adds texture to the main script of Black, Native, and American education by expanding the canon westward to illuminate how Black and Native communities used education to refuse acceptance of the normed racial logic of inferiority and dispossession.