What follows is a walk through Dr. Joyce E. King's MGEA presentation on education in the Garvey tradition — her four principles, the biography behind them, the elders who shaped her thinking, and the charge she leaves with educators. Every image below is pulled directly from her original slides.
Use the map to jump to any of the four principles, or scroll straight through in order.
Destroy the old education
Garvey's starting point isn't a curriculum fix — it's demolition. Before anyone can be properly helped, the education that convinces a people they can't rise "because of their color" has to be destroyed first. Everything else in this presentation follows from that premise.
Prepare a people for their own civilization
Education here has a job: it readies a people to build their own civilization, not to be absorbed into someone else's. Advancement and glory of the race are the measures of success, not assimilation.
Form the whole person
"To approach your brother by the feeling of your own humanity is an education that softens the ills of the world and makes us kind indeed."
Intellect alone isn't the goal. Garvey ties real education to soul, vision, and feeling — including the discipline of self-regulation and the capacity for kindness.
Root it in a people's own history
The fourth principle is the practical mandate behind the other three: if the textbooks aren't rooted in a people's own history, the education isn't really theirs.
What she learned resisting miseducation
Dr. King's own path runs directly through the struggles her principles describe: growing up in Stockton, CA in the 1950s; a BA and PhD in Sociology from Stanford (1969 / 1974); heading the Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College; directing teacher education at Santa Clara University for twelve years; the 1992 California Curriculum Commission textbook struggle; and academic leadership roles at the University of New Orleans and Medgar Evers College.
The curriculum must change
The illustration says plainly what the data points imply: erasure isn't accidental. Someone is actively painting over "uncomfortable" history — which is exactly what Principle 4 is built to resist.
Influences in her life and work
- 01My Mother, Mrs. Mable Harrell King
- 06Professor Sylvia Wynter
- 02Professor St. Clair Drake
- 07Professor Vévé Clark
- 03Baba Asa Hilliard ("African Power — Return to the Source")
- 08Dr. Vincent Harding (Institute of the Black World)
- 04Dr. Adelaide Sanford — Queen Mother of Black Education
- 09Grace and Jimmy Boggs
- 05Dr. John Henrik Clarke
- 10Runoko Rashidi
Sylvia Wynter, on colonial miseducation
WYNTER
"As a colonial subject in Jamaica, I knew nothing about my own historical reality, except in negative terms... I knew what it was to experience a total abjection of being."
Wynter draws on Frantz Fanon's idea that colonial subjects can be made to want British identity while, in that very wanting, becoming anti-Black and anti-everything they existentially are.
Critical historical consciousness and agency: staying human
"To attack the roots of our mis-education, cultural annihilation, and economic subordination, we must undo the entrenched system of thought that has justified our predicament."
Dr. King names the task in her own words: transforming education for people of African ancestry means going beyond inclusion in what she calls "a burning house."
Carter G. Woodson, on the "wrong kind" of education
WOODSON
"Are these 'educated' persons actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or [will they] unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor?"
When educators really love Black children
"We remember our Ancestors to deepen our sense of identity, to seek to know, to clarify, to remember, to understand the ways our fathers and mothers carried on the struggle for integrity and freedom in their time."
We Be Lovin' Black Children
Dr. King co-edited both volumes — learning to be literate about the African diaspora across the USA, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa, England, and Jamaica.
Using our ancestors' wisdom to stay human
"When we take a global perspective on these issues, we're talking about preparing young people and teachers to realize that our struggle is a struggle for the benefit of humanity."
The presentation ends where it started — with Garvey's own frame: "All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African nation." A local struggle for better education, in service of a global one.