Activist Angela Davis told activist Ericka Huggins that she remembered when they met, in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She met Huggins’s husband John when Davis joined the Black Panthers. She remembered when John was murdered. She had made sure that Huggins’s young daughter was in good hands when Huggins was arrested, and she was there when Huggins was released.
The connection between the two women was deep and strong. Both had been Black Panthers. Both had spent time in jail. And both had spent the past decades continuing to work for social justice.
On Wednesday night, in a Zoom talk hosted by Artspace — and filled to capacity — as part of its programming for “Revolution on Trial,” Davis and Huggins connected again, to talk about education.
The exhibition “Revolution on Trial” at Artspace — running through Oct. 17 — examines the legacy of New Haven’s Black Panther trials of 1970. Huggins was one of two Panther leaders, along with Bobby Seale, on trial in New Haven, charged with allegedly conspiring to murder falsely suspected party informer Alex Rackley. She spent two years in jail awaiting trial before the charges were dropped. This included time in solitary confinement.
“I taught myself to meditate as a means to survive incarceration and separation from my baby daughter,” Huggins wrote in her website’s bio. “From that time I’ve incorporated spiritual practice into my community work, as a speaker and facilitator, teaching as a tool for change — not only for myself, but for all people, no matter their age, race, gender, sexuality or culture.”
Her experience in jail informed the education work that followed. In 1973 she became the director of the Oakland Community School, an elementary school and child development center founded by the Panthers. “Working with a team of incredibly talented party members and local educators, a vision for the innovative curriculum for the school was written,” Huggins wrote. “This curriculum and the principles that inspired it became a model for and predecessor to the charter school movement.” Davis herself called it “a pioneering experiment in elementary education.”
“You have literally devoted your life to education,” Davis observed of Huggins. After decades of work, what did she believe was the importance of education?
Teaching How, Not What, To Think
“I think that education is so very important because when we are aware of the beauty of our very own humanity and the connectedness to all other human beings — when we’re taught this as little children, we don’t grow into people who do not care, who have broken empathy buttons,” Huggins said.
“We revel in humanity. That’s what I learned at Oakland Community School first, and I’ve seen it again and again and again, over the years,” from elementary school to post-graduate education.
A true education, she added, “teaches us our true place in this American society — our history as well.”
These were the ideas that motivated Oakland Community School. For Huggins, “the school was a place for healing for me” as well, she said. She could be with her daughter again, as she enrolled as a student. “The place was an oasis.”
This began with the school’s pedagogical approach, which held that “children should be taught how to think, not what to think. I think that’s a principle that should govern all learning,” Huggins said. “You didn’t want to control what kids were thinking.” The approach stimulated much conversation and self-reflection among the school’s faculty and staff. “What is it that we want this school to offer children?” Huggins recalled them asking one another and themselves.
For Huggins, the teaching and learning at OCS was a serious shift from her own elementary education in Washington, D.C. “I was told, ‘Jenkins, don’t sit like that. Don’t wear your hair like that. Don’t ask another question,’” Huggins said. “That was so hurtful to me as a young girl. I wanted to know everything!”
Fellow OCS teachers and staff, she said, “had the same experience of wanting to understand why the world works the way it does.” They also decided that “the children should be loved.” Teachers should get to know the children and their families, and should get to know the children as human beings.
“What was it that excited them about learning?” Huggins said. “The more you can understand a thing, the better able you are to work with it, navigate it, be with it, and so we decided that we wanted to children to learn how to think, not what.” Incorporating the children’s own passions and interests into the learning meant that teachers had more homework to do themselves. And “we kept asking for help” from the community, Huggins said — and they got it.
“Teaching children to think is a loving and therefore revolutionary thing to do,” Huggins said.
The Peace And Freedom Inside
The OCS day included meditation. Huggins had taught herself to meditate in solitary confinement “for a very crucial reason,” she said. “I could not bear the thought of seeing my baby daughter for one hour on a Saturday and falling apart during that hour.” She also couldn’t “stretch my body in the confined space” and asked for a book about yoga. The book suggested she “sit still a while” after doing the poses. She did, and began a meditation practice.
“I was able to think better of myself,” she said. While in jail, she was plagued by thoughts of how she had failed, particularly as a mother and sister. “Over the days I was able to sit with who I really am,” she said. “There is a place in me that is absolutely free. That was the first time in my life I had ever felt like that.” And it meant that “I was able to be present” for that hour with her daughter. “I can’t say that I loved the experience of being incarcerated, but I was able to be resilient, because I was taking care of the deepest part of myself, and coming to love her, just as she is.”
“We all have this innate place of peace inside us. And freedom,” Huggins said. She wanted to give that to her students. Some of them entered OCS in the third or fourth grade from other schools, “already feeling they weren’t good enough because they were Black or Brown.”
The school added a five-minute meditation for everybody after lunch. “We just called it sitting quietly and breathing,” Huggins said. “The youngest ones were able to take their naps without resisting. Their minds could rest, so their bodies could rest. The ones who were sad about the things going on in their lives,” she said, “could say, ‘I feel better. I can go home and support my mother.’” Years afterward, she found research showing that just a few minutes of meditation a day over time helped students excel on standardized tests. And when she encountered OCS graduates, it was one of the things they all remembered.
“They remember meditation. They remember the power of it,” Huggins said.
Davis recalled how Bert Small, a doctor who worked with the Black Panther Party, “came to see me when I was in jail. When he brought a yoga book in to me, that was probably because he was inspired by you,” she said. Davis “experienced a great deal of depression and anxiety.” His suggestion of yoga helped her. “I probably have you to thank for that,” Davis said.
Huggins said that when she talks with Black and Brown teachers, “one of the things they say is that they’re despairing.” They are “depressed” or “rageful.” She sometimes suggests sitting and breathing.
“You mean it’s OK for an activist to take care of yourself?” Huggins recalled them saying. “I say, ‘you better take care of yourself … if you’re in it for the long haul, you have to take care of your mind, your body, your spirit.” She has also worked with prisoners whose “pride keeps them from showing emotions,” she said. Some prisoners have taken up meditation and tell Huggins, “‘I feel free. I feel like I’m important to myself. I feel like I’m of value.’ The women would say, ‘I feel beautiful for the first time.’ They were looking at all this power and greatness that exists inside every human being.”
Putting It Together
The combination of self-reflection and reaching out to connect with every kid allowed OCS to focus on the big problems of structural racism well before that became part of the national conversation — starting with the nature of school itself.
“It’s not the teachers. It’s not the leadership. Schools have been set up as warehousing for children,” Huggins said, historically with parents off to war or work. OCS teachers found themselves working with a wide variety of children, some of whom might be classified in other schools as performing below grade average or having learning disabilities, two labels that OCS faculty and staff had little use for. “We didn’t have any judgment about why they couldn’t read. Some of us had been those very children,” Huggins said. “We were looking at things structurally,” asked, “why can’t we do this differently?”
The approach was thus to find a connection to each student’s own strengths. “When they were inspired to learn to read, they did,” Huggins said. “It was all about acknowledging their immense intelligence, regardless of what they were told before they came to us.”
She recalled a young student who drew a sketch of Huggins’s hand from the back seat of a car. “He showed me his pencil drawing of my hand. It was like a photograph,” she said. “But he couldn’t read. He didn’t want to read because he felt ashamed.” So Huggins gave him a reason to read. “What if you and I took your drawings and we made a cartoon, and you told me what the captions are?” she said to him. “As a result of those cartoon strips we made, he wanted to learn to read.”
Huggins took much inspiration from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, perhaps best known for his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Other inspirations came much closer to home. “Our models were the little red schoolhouse,” Huggins said, of the sort that her own mother had attended. She didn’t want to teach students “lies .… Let’s teach them how the world really works, and it was more the structures of things.”
“I studied the old, historical Black church school movement,” she continued. Black churches had seen that public schools would not educate Black children, so they formed schools of their own. That was where Huggins’s mother had learned to read, write, and do math. OCS perhaps just took that a step further, in its intention to create thinkers.
Problems Persist
The thinking that made OCS a school ahead of its time resonated with the Zoom-capacity audience for the talk. In the question-and-answer period, a common theme emerged that the problems OCS sought to address in the education system persist today, from the structural racism that makes the educational system so unequal across the country, to problems with standardized tests, to figuring out how to nurture the next generation of critical thinkers and possibly social actors.
How can a teacher circumnavigate a school system that promotes a biased test? one questioner asked.
Huggins returned to her experience at OCS. At one point, she said, she ran an experiment and gave her students a test that was given to kids across Oakland’s school district. “Before we would go into a test,” she said, “we would tell them what a test is.” The concept was “not familiar to them at first,” so OCS teachers explained that “there are ways in which people want to learn about your intelligence … they want to ask some questions that really aren’t in the books that public school students have access to.”
She connected the test-taking to the students’ meditation. “After a while, when we were meditating every day, we would have them sit quietly and then take the test.” And “our children excelled for that school district,” Huggins said. “It meant something to me on principle.” The lesson she took away: Children will do well on tests if they don’t feel pressure from teachers and educators. “There are ways of moving through that without the stressors from outside and without the stressors from inside.”
Another question related to homeschooling; because of the pandemic, many parents were essentially homeschooling their kids even if they were still enrolled in school. In a child’s life, Huggins said, “the mom is the first teacher, and the dad is the second one…. We have to feel that way about ourselves.” She recalled that she had left college herself to join the Black Panther Party. When she got out of jail and began working at OCS, she saw many like herself that didn’t necessarily have the formal education that typical school jobs required, but did have “the lived experience of being Black and Brown children.” She urged people not to discount that.
A question about integrating schools led to a much broader discussion of the role of schools in larger society.“Education is so problematic in this country,” Davis said. “Simply integrating a school is not going to solve all of those problems…. We say schools, not jails, but then we realize that we can’t refer to education as it exists today as the alternative … education itself has to be transformed.”
“Why is it that we haven’t learned” from the experiences of smaller schools in the 1970s, Davis questioned. In “talking about systemic and structural racism as it expresses itself through state violence,” from police and prisons, “we can’t keep schools out of that conversation,” Davis said. Schools, she said, did as much to support structural racism as any other institution in American society.
And Huggins believed that schools could be reformed.
“If human beings set all of this up, then human beings can change it,” she said. The work would be hard. It involved getting more Black and Brown teachers into classrooms, and more education for White teachers. It involved changing approaches and perspectives, despite the schools’ many structural limitations.
“We have to do our own homework,” Huggins said. “If you teach at a public school, you already know you have to do a lot of digging…. If changes are going to happen, we have to begin the work of institutionalizing those changes right now.”
“I just feel like anything that isn’t working for our children, we have to speak up about it,” she said.