1978
M.E.A.R.C. and Uhuru Sasa Shule Youth Flyers.
Notes: Examples of grassroots efforts to provide alternative education and social institutions for young Black people. Although different organizations – who had some membership and audience overlap – these efforts are responding to the disastrous conditions and outcomes for Black students in the nation’s public schools.
M.E.A.R.C. (Muslim Educational Action and Resource Committee) was perhaps the first of the many organizations started by the crew of activist sisters Umi rolled with. It was established circa 1975 and led by Aliyah Abdul-Karim and Kareemah Abdul-Kareem. As new Muslims who were active in the movement work of the time, the activities of M.E.A.R.C., from dawah lectures and lunches to fashion shows and youth groups, were part of their program of Islamic learning, radical study, and unceasing movement building. Uhuru Sasa Shule was an African-centered school established by The East. The East was a cultural and educational center for people of African descent founded in 1969 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, NY. Uhuru Sasa Shule emerged from the Black power and cultural nationalist movements for Black self-determination and the movement for community control of schools, especially in Ocean Hill-Brownsville of the 1960s. Although it closed in the mid-1980s, for many Uhuru Sasa Shule remains “an inspiring model of how a village can educate and raise its own, free of bureaucracy and anti-blackness in the classroom.”