With this in mind, this panel refocuses our attention on the often understudied and interstitial space that exists between Black and Native educational traditions in the face of White settler colonialism of the 19th century. Setting the panel in motion, Oxendine commences our discussion with the history of how the conditions of chronic educational underfunding in Robeson County, North Carolina, unintentionally deepen the relationship between Black and Native educators, which subsequently developed transformative and liberatory pedagogies that otherwise would not have been produced. Next, Sourie meditates on the tensions of building Black educational systems for self-determined Black free towns on dispossessed Native lands in Oklahoma, which is intensified in the context of the complex racial regimes of Black enslavement in Indian territory. Shifting our attention to the Great Plains landscape, Almore historicizes the educational spaces created by Black and Native teachers in South Dakota despite the domineering technologies of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism that collide within the reservation classroom and chronicles how Black and Native teachers developed pedagogical practices of co-implication, critical hope, and ancestral wisdom. Moving to the Western frontier, Wallace exhumes the legacy of the Elk Street Colored School for Black, Native, and Asian children in Stockton, California, to articulate how Black and Native educational solidarities disrupted the anti-black and anti-indigenous social and political fabric of the recently ratified “free” California.

Together, these papers indicate how education as an institution sought to stabilize the fraught conditions of unfreedom cast upon Black and Native subjects during the 19th century in the United States. Turning to the voices of the nation’s most vulnerable subjects within the archive, this panel reconfigures our understanding of how instructive the interwoven educational projects of Black and Native communities were in building and sustaining political resistance to White domination. Covering the legacy of Black and Native educational activism across diverse American geographic contexts (e.g., the South, Midwest, and West), “Schooling for Freedom” illuminates the capacity of Black and Native subjects to experiment with intercultural coalition building in educational spaces as a means of subverting broader domineering social processes of racialization and disenfranchisement imposed upon these communities.