Appreciating this “accident of history” and his own fortuitous position as both a Harvard-trained philosopher of mathematics and accomplished organizer on a national scale, Bob Moses began the Algebra Project in 1982. The Algebra Project works explicitly in the tradition of Ella Baker, helping teachers, parents, and students develop a consensus about how young people in poverty should be brought up, and working to create structures through which young people and their families can organize themselves to get what they need. We formulate this goal as helping young people fashion their own insurgency, an insurgency that will be even more disruptive than SNCC’s, insofar as ending Jim Crow education is more radical than voting.
In the Baltimore Algebra Project, we have spent fifteen years building a student organization that uses math literacy as an organizing tool. High school students and recent graduates run their own non-profit business from an off-campus office, using SNCC as a model for collective decision-making. Public schools and after-school agencies contract with the students for peer-to-peer math literacy services based at the schools, and other non-profits are increasingly hiring Baltimore Algebra Project youth to teach their organizations to be more youth-governed. Over ten years, Baltimore high school students and recent graduates, nearly all black, have earned millions of dollars through their producer co-op. And doing math—tutoring, running summer math programs and after-school study groups, organizing peer teaching in classrooms—creates an economic base for the young people to do political work, too. The relatively lucrative and marketable business of math subsidizes student committees that advance organizing goals.
The political work is of three kinds. First, there is the students’ work in running their own organization. They have developed a culture and mechanisms of self-governance that fit their needs and that are sound enough to earn the respect of customers and investors outside the organization. Second, the same students have led or joined concrete campaigns around their material conditions—transportation, youth incarceration, school funding—and have won major victories. Third, they are learning about building coalitions with other organizations at both the local and national levels, gradually developing an awareness of the larger world and larger strategic issues, and learning how to pass that larger awareness on to new generations of youth coming up.
The purpose of this book is not, however, to tell that story in detail. It is rather to lay out an understanding of young people’s roles and of the teacher/organizer role that makes the story of youth organizing possible. It is about a way of seeing and talking about our experiences in schools of poverty that lets us do our work without being demoralized or forced out.
People who see Baltimore Algebra Project youth operating in public contexts are often startled. Depending on the observer’s perspective, they can be either pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised. But in either case, the surprise comes from the young people’s clear and conscious refusal of the role of “prop.” They step into history as persons, and observers find themselves required to re-act to their humanity, to figure out what relation they are going to have with these forceful young people. At the root of the Baker/Moses organizing tradition is the conviction that every human being is a person who can decide to step into history, which is an act that puts you into dynamic relation with other persons, and that makes human arrangements different from what they would have been without you. Things, props, mere objects, play no such role in history.
The second major tradition I use in this book is a tradition of verbal study that goes under the heading “rhetoric,” and for which my principal authorities are Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. The word “rhetoric” has unfortunately narrowed in common use to describe verbal tricks deployed to bias or twist public opinion in ways that distract attention from “logic” and “facts.” But in the tradition represented by Burke and Ellison, “rhetoric” refers to any use of speech designed “to induce action in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Logic, by this tradition, is not opposed to rhetoric, but is a part of rhetoric. Sometimes the arguments we make to induce action in others are strictly logical arguments. More often our appeals are directed at least in part toward the emotions of a listener, or are intended to help an audience identify our argument with someone they admire or with the type of person they would like to become. This rhetorical tradition treats our susceptibility to various forms of persuasion as one of the key facts about human beings: we are a species that responds not only to logic, but to emotion and to both conscious and unconscious identifications as well. There are traditions in many cultures that treasure thinking and teaching about how to use these various means to induce action in others through the use of verbal or other symbols, and especially about how to induce right action, action that tends toward the common good.
The field of rhetoric interpreted in this way is vast. But I am interested in it for a relatively specific purpose: in what ways do people in schools—young and old—seek to induce action in others through the use of symbols (that is both through language and through nonverbal symbolic action)? We are looking at this, following Burke and Ellison, from many points of view: not only how teachers or administrators speak and act so that the students will be persuaded to act in certain ways; but also how the students speak and act to induce actions in each other and in the teachers and administrators as well.
An approach through this rhetorical tradition is intended to systematically undo the bad effects of literalism in thinking about schools. To the literal-minded, a lesson on writing an essay or on DNA is simply about writing an essay or DNA. The state assigns certain “content” to be “taught” and the teacher then “delivers” the content. But to a student of rhetoric, these lessons are complex symbolic acts in contexts rich with meaning, saturated with the purposes of both the teachers and the students and with the purposes of people far from the classroom who have induced the students and teachers to participate in the lesson in the first place.
Any page of Ellison’s great novel, Invisible Man, is an exercise in this kind of rhetorical study. To Ellison, surviving as black people in America requires cleverness about how things are not what they seem, about how the contexts of language and history complicate any literal-minded interpretations of things, and make us vulnerable to real dangers if we ignore their complexities. The narrator of Invisible Man is constantly discovering that there is no meaning independent of context, that the world, as he puts it, is less “solid” than he thought, though he nevertheless holds onto the search for right interpretations because he will die without them.
In a traumatic scene, his college president, Dr. Bledsoe, expels him from the school, saying:
“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think—except men like me. I tell them; that’s my life telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn’t it? Well that’s the way it is. It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn’t make it and I know I can’t change it. But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
He was looking me in the eye now, his voice charged and sincere, as though uttering a confession, a fantastic revelation which I could neither believe nor deny. Cold drops of sweat moved at a glacier’s pace down my spine....
“A man gets old winning his place, son. So you go ahead, go tell your story; match your truth against my truth. The broader truth.”8
Ellison’s narrator stops paying attention. “I no longer listened, nor saw more than the play of light upon the metallic disks of his glasses, which now seemed to float within the disgusting sea of his words. Truth, truth, what was truth? Nobody I knew, not even my own mother, would believe me if I tried to tell them. Nor would I tomorrow, I thought, nor would I.”9
The meanings