Vernacular Insurrections : Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-literacies Studies (9781438446370) by Kynard Carmen

Author:Kynard, Carmen [Kynard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438446370
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2013-03-22T05:00:00+00:00

(Re)Placing: “Shut Em Down, Shut Em, Shut Em Down”

This section of my chapter sits at a strange kind of crossroads. On the one hand, it is a regurgitation of a historical narrative that is so obvious to me that crafting this kind of oral history seems to run the risk of redundantly stating the obvious. And yet, outside of folk who have taught and fought for basic writing and composition studies at CUNY, folk seem to not really know the knitty gritty of the story or why understanding (basic writing at) CUNY is so critical. To add yet another complicated layer: when the story of basic writing at CUNY is told, there is rarely anything there that I can call an intellectually and politically informed knowledge of Black Freedom struggles. When I go outside of composition studies, educational historians and others know the history of black student protest at CUNY but seem to make very little, if any, connection to actual classrooms, much less to writing classrooms and the study of writing as a discipline. It's just a mess all around but you have to enter the fray in some kind of way, so this section is, at its heart, my own feeble attempt to talk about the same thing that's always been said but in a fundamentally different way.

The major site of protests and uprisings for black and Puerto Rican students was the campus of City College of New York (CCNY), the oldest and most famous of all of the fifteen two- and four-year colleges that then made up CUNY.42 My narrative, historical description of these student protests at City College comes largely from Lavin, Alba, and Silberstein and Karabel.43 Although these authors do not analyze this moment with a critical sociohistorical lens, especially as it relates to Puerto Rican and African American Freedom struggles within the contexts of the Young Lords Party, Black Power, or Civil Rights movements, they richly present the details of what happened. I turn to their texts for insight into what happened because as one defendant of Shaughnessy's work has argued, no rereading of Errors and Expectations can occur unless one situates it in the “landscape of place.”44 It is time that African American and Puerto Rican students' protests/demands not be continually relegated to a peripheral footnote in the field for traveling that “landscape of place.”

While the population of New York City remained constant during the 1960s, about 700,000 Puerto Ricans and African Americans replaced the number of whites who had left the city.45 Although Puerto Rican and African American students comprised 13 percent of graduating high school seniors, they comprised a combined 5 percent of the CUNY student population. In 1966, black and Puerto Rican activists, including Shirley Chisholm, Percy Sutton, Charles Rangel, Basil Paterson, and Anthony Travia, pressed the state legislature to pass a bill that would bring in more than just its then one hundred black and Puerto Rican students at CUNY.46 Chisholm herself, in her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, calls the bill one of the highlights of her career as the first African American congresswoman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.