Jitu Brown, Journey for Justice Alliance.
Jitu Brown is a community organizer who serves as national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, a grassroots education advocacy group. Brown has been an education activist for the past twenty-six years. Beginning as a volunteer with youth programs on Chicago’s South Side, he became a board member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in 1993. We spoke by phone in early November.
Q: How did you become an activist?
Jitu Brown: I’m from the South Side of Chicago, educated in the Chicago public schools. I sort of flamed out playing college football and was in the music industry. I had the choice of either signing with MCA Records as a solo artist or doing what was pulling at my spirit, which was community work. And I made the best decision of my life. I left the music industry and I started volunteering with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, doing youth program work.
Doing that work, I got a real view of the inequity, so I began convening parents in the neighborhood around the conditions in our schools. The things I was seeing were far worse than when I was in school on the South Side. So I asked the question: Why is schooling for these children worse than it was for me? That began the process.
Q: How did that process play out?
Brown: In 2012, I helped form this new group called the Journey for Justice Alliance, which is thriving today in twenty-five cities across the country as well as five provinces in South Africa. We are fighting for education equity and against the school privatization movement.
Journey for Justice started after I received a phone call from an organizer in New York named Zakiyah Ansari, who at that time was with the Brooklyn Education Collaborative. She was just explaining to me, “I feel all alone out here.” I said so do I. So we began to reach out to folks that we knew around the country and people felt the same way.
We decided to do a “freedom ride” to Washington, D.C., to confront [then Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan around the impact of “race to the top” in our communities. We had thirteen cities ready to go. We came up with the name, “Journey for Justice,” and it wasn’t even an organization at first. We mobilized about 2,500 people to travel to Washington, D.C., to the U.S. Department of Education, then we did a march of about 5,000 people from the U.S. Department of Labor to the U.S. Department of Education, and after that we decided to become a network. Our first national action forced the U.S. Department of Education to hold a community hearing. So we have won some national victories.
Q: What impact did the election of Donald Trump have on your work?
Brown: After the election of Donald Trump, we realized that the privatization initiatives, which were horrible under President Obama, were going to accelerate under Betsy DeVos. That’s what moved us to launch the #WeChoose campaign. We reached out to other national networks, such as Network for Public Education, Save Our Schools, Moral Mondays, the NAACP, and groups like this around the country and said, “Can we unite around a common education platform?”
And the response was yes. And so we are in the throes of that campaign right now. We are encouraging people to build local, multiracial coalitions around their local education platform that makes elected officials terrified to sell us out. We are working together around a shared education platform that lifts everybody’s issues to the forefront. So that’s a different type of coalition.
Our motto in the #WeChoose campaign is that Donald Trump does not run our neighborhoods.
Our motto in the #WeChoose campaign is that Donald Trump does not run our neighborhoods. We have to win locally. We have to win school board races. We have to win school by school. Winning victories to build that muscle, so we can wage the national fight.
Q: Journey for Justice has looked at school closing issues and how they disproportionately affect African American and Latinx students. Explain more about that.
Brown: In Chicago, when we were hit with the notion of school closings in 2003-2004, we knew this was not about public education. Because while they were branding our schools as failing and trying to close our schools, affordable housing was also disappearing. Grocery stores for our constituents were disappearing. So what we were really looking at was manufactured state- sanctioned elimination of black families from neighborhoods.
School closings are really a gentrification issue. It is an issue of disinvesting in our basic quality-of-life institutions. School choice is an illusion in black and brown communities. We don’t have the choice of a great neighborhood school in safe walking distance of our homes. And in different cities, we campaign to stop schools from closing.
Q: How do you do that?
Brown: One of the tactics is to file Title VI civil rights complaints. We have filed complaints in more than a dozen cities. In one city, we had a finding in our favor, and in two cities there is still an active investigation. In the other cities, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education declined to investigate, although to us that does not indicate whether or not these were valid complaints, it is about the ineffectiveness of that particular department during the Obama Administration.
We have a problem in America toward race and racism, and unless we’re able to face it, we’ll never transform public education. We’ll always put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, as opposed to actually acknowledging, transforming, and healing communities that are so long neglected. This is really a human rights issue because in the United Nations [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] it says that education must be available for every child; it must be at an acceptable level, it must be adaptable, and it must be accessible.
Q: Tell us about the hunger strike you took to keep open Dyett High School in Chicago.
Brown: This was in Bronzeville, a historic African American community in the city of Chicago. It is the neighborhood that gave the world Sam Cooke, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, and Lou Rawls. This is a historic black community, but we’re ten minutes from downtown Chicago, right off the lakefront, so this is prime real estate. When schools began closing, this is one of the first communities that they attacked.
With sixty-six thousand people in the district, our last open enrollment neighborhood high school was Walter Dyett High School. We began to engage people in 2009, around a vision for what a pre-K-12 system of education in our neighborhood could be. But in 2012, the Chicago Public Schools system still voted to close the high school. We fought that tooth and nail.
We realized that, in order for us to win this, we had to make Rahm Emanuel the target and we had to go after what he cares about. He doesn’t care about his local reputation. He cares about his national image. So we began to target him over a period of a three-year campaign. As 2015 came along, we began to do things like sit-in outside his office in City Hall and bird-dog him at press conferences. We would come out with huge signs that said “Save Dyett.”
We chained ourselves to a statue directly outside of [Emanuel's] office. We began planning for our hunger strike six months before we started, and we were mentored by the mothers who did a nineteen-day hunger strike in 2001.
We chained ourselves to a statue directly outside of his office. We began planning for our hunger strike six months before we started, and we were mentored by the mothers who did a nineteen-day hunger strike in 2001 which resulted in the building of Little Village High School from the ground up. They told us what to expect, what to drink, security, all those things. So when Chicago Public Schools reneged on holding a community forum, we made the decision on August 17, 2015, to launch the hunger strike. It ended up lasting thirty-four days, and we won the reopening of Dyett as an open enrollment neighborhood school. It’s an art school now with sixteen million dollars in new investments.
Q: As you move forward, what do you want people to do?
Brown: If people want to participate in the #WeChoose campaign, they can go right to our website and register. We have coalition partners in more than thirty cities. I encourage people to come to our national conference, which is May 18 to 20, 2018, at Dyett High School. The theme of the conference is “We Choose: Education Equity, Not the Illusion of ‘School Choice.’ ”
And become a Journey for Justice member so you can receive our newsletters. When we do our national town halls, they will be televised, so people can call in their questions. We want people to get connected to this movement that’s starting to emerge.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.