INTRODUCTION

[I]t should be clear to all of us here, as it is certainly clear to our brothers and sisters at San Francisco State, at UCLA, and elsewhere, that fissures or breaks are not enough. To obtain a relevant, real education, we shall have to either topple the university or set up our own.
                                          —Toni Cade Bambara,
                                      Realizing the Dream of a Black University(1969)

Instant coffee is the hallmark of current rhetoric. But we do have time. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouths don’t win the war. It don’t even win the people. Neither does haste, urgency, and stretch-out-now insistence. Not all speed is movement.
                                          —Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,”
                                      The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970)

THE “TONI CADE BAMBARA SCHOOL OF ORGANIZING” is alive and ubiquitous, even if to many, Bambara’s name may be unfamiliar.[1] Throughout her life, Bambara acted as a writer, teacher, and filmmaker bridging social movements and shaping our present potential for collective justice. In New York City, New Jersey, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, as well as on travels throughout the world—moving within and against universities, coalitions, and conditions—Toni Cade Bambara was a walking counter-institution. We invite readers to learn about her enduring interventions as a community scribe, activist pedagogue, and cultural worker through the materials gathered in this project.

Bambara’s archives at Spelman College brim with the rebellious, loving energy of her teaching, writing, organizing, and friendships. The few letters kept in her archive reflect the enduring value of these connections. For example, in a 1973 note from an occasional twenty- year exchange with the elder poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Bambara is told, “dear remarkable rich-minded golden-penned Toni… Thank you for knowing me, thank you for thinking the best of me.” Brooks is referring to Bambara’s reverent New York Times review of her memoir Report from Part One, and is grateful to Bambara for supporting her move away from commercial publishers to the Black independent Broadside Press, without commenting on the ironies of seeing the younger writer gain greater access to mainstream venues. In a 1980 letter from novelist Octavia Butler, she solicits Bambara to contribute a story for a Black science fiction anthology called Black Futures; though it never came to be, this correspondence opens up speculative possibilities for how their writing lives could have intertwined. In a 1987 postcard to novelist, poet, and essayist Ishmael Reed, Bambara asks for issues of his co-edited Yardbird Reader—a key 1970s independent journal presenting a radical multi-ethnic vision of the US that grew out of Reed’s early association with UMBRA—a precursor to the Black Arts movement—for a course she was developing on Contemporary American Literatures. Ongoing heartfelt correspondence with Tom Dent, another key UMBRA figure with whom she worked in Atlanta, reveals numerous projects that remain unknown outside the archive or through exchanges with other friends.

When researching her archives and reading her publications, it is clear that Bambara believed her mission in life went beyond writing. Teaching and community work were a cornerstone of her activism and the backbone of her existence. Bambara was always teaching, and learning from her elders, peers, and students—seemingly, everyone she encountered. In a 1981 letter to June Jordan—during a few intense years when at least 28 Black children, teens, and adults were mysteriously killed in Atlanta—Bambara describes how a chance dialogue can lead to action:

Cab driver Blood drove me home from airport and we talked about [the situation] here. Another blood missing. Exchanging theories and what not. After $4.90 on the meter I said let’s set up a self-defense studio and gather up all the vets and martial arts folks and folks with heart to spare. He turned off the meter. We stopped for coffee. One of them real old timey young brothers raised by daddy and uncle and older men who hunt and have gold teeth and know how to swing a hammer and take pride in planing a door so it travels smoothly over carpet. Talks real slow and careful like and making every syllable count. So I’ve got several of the Farrakhan guards throwing out the net, and he’s called back already to say he’s invited some vets to his house for dinner tonight to talk things over.[2]

In another letter to Jordan from that year, Bambara explains the contours of what would become her novel Those Bones Are Not My Child, a city-memoir of the Atlanta murders:

What I am doing is putting [the Atlanta situation] in a national and international context of attack and mobilization. What I am doing is ‘inventing’ some characters (composites faction? [sic]) who play out the drama of a missing youth (composite) against the backdrop of the actual shit (documentary) with wide speculation—drugs, porno, etc.—linking Atlanta with cities where our children are hazarded by all sorts of corruption— linking too with infant formula in Third World etc… Lots of references within the script about cops, Klan, ritual murder, etc.[3]

Regardless of geographical location, her pedagogy writ large was animated by Black (inter)nationalism in forming intellectual, spiritual, and physical solidarity with oppressed, or as she called them, “downpressed” people across the globe.

Growing up on 151st St. between Amsterdam and Broadway until the age of ten, Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, acted as a “community scribe” for adults by drafting verbal agreements and meeting minutes for neighborhood organizers, running tips to local journalists, and transcribing letters to loved ones. This responsibility to document, interpret, and serve a collectivity provided an ethical anchor to her writing approach.[4] In the essay “Working At It in Five Parts,” published here for the first time, she recalls an extensive network of street educators who shaped the teacher-activist she would become. Here we can see the thematic trails she left throughout her life that could demonstrate to her readers and students how to navigate the complexities of geography, family, motherhood, social movements, the creative process, and mortality.

Across all these themes, her focus on the power of language—the folk origins of language amongst the people and its ideological uses by the state and other structures—remains central, and we still have much to learn from her thinking. Her analysis, for example, of the usage of single words by UMBRA poet Lorenzo Thomas and novelist Toni Morrison, then extends into a discussion of her own place in the world, who her audience might potentially be, and how, because of the complexities of imperialism, colonialism and market forces, “I am necessarily preoccupied with language tasks.” This allowed her to gain a unique perspective, to “understand that the world is big, that the actual and potential audience for Black writing is wide. People in Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, Brazil, the Caribbean, New Hebrides, the Continent, all over are interested in knowing how we in the belly of the beast are faring, what we are doing, how we see things.” Among significant early junctures on this path, Bambara mentions “Speaker’s Corner” and “Michaux’s Book Store.” The “Corner” on 135th St. and Lenox Avenue served as an “outdoor university,” teaching people how to deliver incisive arguments, compel audiences spanning ideological spectrums, make rhetorical room for call-and-response, and above all, be intellectually relevant to others outside oneself.[5] And “Professor” Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore—a “House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda”—cultivated yet another autonomous lecture space outside it, dubbed Harlem Square or African Square, signaling how Black studies were meant to circulate off the page as much as on it.

In another text, published here for the first time, “Puerto Ricans (Spoken Version),” comprised of notes Bambara assembled for a voice-over in Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s 1994 film, Brincando el Charco, we witness first-hand Bambara’s urge to make greater sense of new experiences, as the 1940s-1950s mass migration of Puerto Ricans into New York City alongside Black residents redefined cultural belonging—making a Black-white racism paradigm more prismatic.[6] The new neighbors—some who looked different and some “who looked just like us”—arrived without “any winter clothes” and narrow job prospects in a city that retained little of the migration uplift promised by Operation Bootstrap. Puerto Rican children who only spoke Spanish were placed in learning disability schools or under-resourced segregated schools with Black children. Soon, Black and Puerto Rican neighbors began to work together in local organizing campaigns. Bambara’s intimate and first-hand knowledge of these studies-on-the-streets, and her mentorship in youth by “insubordinates, dissidents, iconoclasts, oppositionists, change agents, radicals, and revolutionaries” propelled the formation of her later activist community and City College of New York pedagogical efforts.[7] Her attention to these multi-ethnic dimensions of Harlem helped shape her aims to create studies that related Black people’s histories to those of their neighbors and co-workers also struggling against institutional and interpersonal racism in the United States in a more global anti-colonial context.

After undergraduate studies at Queens College in the late 1950s (where Lorenzo Thomas was a classmate and early collaborator), then a Master’s Program at City College in the early 1960s, Bambara began to teach in 1965 at the age of 26 in City College’s Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) Program. This educational access pilot project—created at City College in 1965, and then extended through community pressure to all CUNY senior colleges in 1967— aimed to prepare a cohort of Black and Puerto Rican high-school students for college studies by providing non-credit preparatory courses, study stipends, and social-work counseling, as well as financial support throughout their time in college. Within a few years, SEEK would become a nucleus for counteracting the institutional inequalities entrenched in City College’s admissions, curriculum, value systems, and relationship to the surrounding Harlem area.

By the late 1960s, Bambara—deeply familiarized with CUNY and citywide politics—was seen as an approachable militant faculty member by increasingly radicalized students who prepared the grounds for intensifying campus protests. In the archival materials, we also see vivid traces of Bambara’s relationships with other members of the extraordinary teaching cohort, which included Aijaz Ahmad, Barbara Christian, Addison Gayle, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymond Patterson, Adrienne Rich, and Mina Shaughnessy.

Bambara welcomed Jordan by walking her to her first day of teaching with the advice, “Anything you have to give, just give it to them… They’ll be grateful for it.” [8] Lorde’s 1971 poem “Dear Toni Instead of a Letter of Congratulations Upon Your Book and Your Daughter Whom You Are Raising To Be A Correct Little Sister” also recounts their time at City College together. Bambara’s response to this poem still beams from the archives. She writes, “tryin to think of a really balanced way to say thank you for the stunning poem… I mean stunning. So just wow, Audre, it’s a fantastic poem. Overwhelmed, Toni”

Documents from the City College period show Bambara’s early insistence on a form of mentorship and cooperative spirit that was no-bullshit, strategic, visionary, receptive, and jocular. Through departmental reports, newspaper articles, and public letters to students, Bambara elevated the stakes of learning and expanded the avenues of struggle, planting the seeds for a much longer inter- generational project of political consciousness and social liberation. By evaluating the students’ oral, written, and activist work, Bambara distinguished between literacy and competence, an assessment that SEEK educators would later popularize to demonstrate how writing acuity reflected only one facet of students’ intelligence. Bambara and her colleagues modeled an anti-authoritarian position as teachers with “very little academic distance” from their students, which provided the interpretive space to explore their curiosities and make demands upon higher education together. In a summer 1968 SEEK report published here, Bambara weighs the significance of SEEK students’ interest in autonomous “experimental college” projects such as the Free University and Liberation School that appeared alongside, or at times even within and against, formal universities at the time. She anticipates that these immediate forms of counter-education “now taking place in universities all over the world” could clarify the students’ visions for alternative learning inside intransigent institutions. After all, to “establish a ‘real’ college within the mock college” could upend the legitimacy of the pre-existing college structure itself.

This vision and practice culminate in “Realizing the Dream of a Black University,” first published in the February 1969 issue of the campus newspaper Observation Post—two months before the April 1969 student strike—and reprinted here. Bambara passionately argues for students, faculty, staff, and community members to transform the university now, emboldening them to acknowledge and utilize the tools, knowledge, and expertise already at their disposal, instead of deferring to an imagined future standoff with distant administrators. Bambara portends of the campus environment, “an explosion is imminent,” advocating for City College and Harlem to combine forces to change the college. For Bambara, a “Black University” entailed a more expansive intellectual project than simply adding Black students, teachers, and courses. It meant disrupting disciplinary boundaries, identifying knowledge bases outside of the university that flourished inside poor multi-ethnic neighborhoods, and creating a partisan liberatory relationship to collective studies.

In another document published here for the first time, “Dear Bloods,” a memo that Bambara circulated to student organizers immediately after the strike, she minces few words to communicate that making “something out of nothing is so much better than blowing a fuse.” Bambara gives examples and contact information for Black women students initiating “counter-courses” on History, Literature, and Sociology, arguing that the “responsibility of getting that education rests with you in large part. Jumping up and down, foaming at the mouth, rattling coffee-cups and other weaponry don’t get it.” Because of her close proximity and the trust she built with these students, Bambara could critique their shortcomings while pushing for them to actualize demands directly.

Bambara’s landmark 1970 anthology, The Black Woman, acted as a new kind of Black, Puerto Rican, and Third World feminist studies open curriculum. In one of her two essays for the anthology, “On the Issue of Roles,” she lambasts heady misogynist elements of campus organizing at the time, and redefines the roles needed to engage in social change here at home—anticipating future women of color’s feminist analyses on social reproduction, care, and the need to counter strands of Black nationalism that perpetuate sexism. We can also see how the “Dear Bloods” memo’s terse mentorship expands to reach a national audience of Black and Third World students and community radicals.

Bambara refused to relegate the stories of people of color to “Special Topics” courses or minors because she believed that the stories of people of color were just as important to the social tapestry of America and the world. In her 1972 essay, “Black English,” Bambara writes, “In school we have focused on language as a noun, not on what or who is named, or on who is doing the naming… In school we do not emphasize the real function of language in our lives: how it operates in courts, in hospitals, in schools, in the media, how it operates to perpetuate a society, maintain a social order, to reflect biases, to transmit basic values.” [9] As an activist pedagogue, Bambara gave students the tools to see language as a verb, and to call out those who wield language as a discriminatory weapon. She challenged students to carefully investigate all the spaces they occupy (from the classroom to their homes), endowing her students with the courage and camaraderie to explore their own upbringings, ideologies and prejudices, instead of ignoring, dismissing, suppressing or transmitting them.

Bambara once said, “My job is to make revolution irresistible.” [10] At every turn, she found a way to bring learning to, and honor the intelligence of downpressed communities, whether through the characters in her fiction, or in her refusal to be hindered by institutional constraints. Bambara was a writer of “the movement,” serving as chronicler and conduit of multiple voices and actions. These forms of movement composition—willing clarity and direction towards liberation into existence through words and actions—kept Bambara responsive to an “authenticating audience” of her students, peers, and fellow insurgents in an extended inter-generational family. [11] Transforming society out there and in here, according to the wisdom acquired through many experiences, requires a patient radical vision beyond one protest, communiqué, revolutionary tradition, school, semester, year, decade, even lifetime. In realizing her dream of a “Black University,” the institution of Toni Cade Bambara is ours to construct and proliferate in all the spaces in which we work, love, and enact new freedoms together. We hope this selection can provide an entryway into the richness of her liberating vision.
                                          —Makeba Lavan & Conor Tomás Reed

[1] This name is respectfully borrowed from the forthcoming documentary by Toni Cade Bambara’s longtime collaborator, Louis Massiah, about her life.

[2] Typed letter from Toni Cade Bambara to June Jordan, dated “Feb. 1981,” with handwritten note at bottom: “Was originally mailed to you, June on 2/25.” June Jordan Papers, Box 28, Folder 12. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

[3] Ibid, undated but letter is from 1981.

[4] Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, (Vintage, 1999), 218.

[5] Ibid. 251.

[6] Also see Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s “Things that Toni Taught Me,” Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara (Temple University, 2007).

[7] Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, (Vintage, 1999), 174.

[8] June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” Civil Wars, (Beacon, 1981), 45.

[9] Toni Cade Bambara, “Black English,” Curriculum Approaches from a Black Perspective, (Black Child Development Institute, 1972), 78.

[10] Bambara, Toni Cade. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara.” By Kay Bonetti. Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Ed. Thabiti Lewis. (Jackson, University of Mississippi, 2012), 35.

[11] See Louis Massiah’s “The Authenticating Audience,” Feminist Wire, November 18, 2014.