Introduction: Confronting the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Journeys to Racial Justice Organizing -- The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Criminalization as Racial Domination and Control -- "Nationalizing local struggles:" Community Organizing and Social Justice Movements -- "There is no national without the local:" Building a National Movement Grounded in Local Organizing -- The Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse: Intergenerational Community Organizing in Mississippi -- Challenging Criminalization in Los Angeles: Building a Broad and Deep Movement to End the School to-Prison Pipeline -- From the Local to the State: Youth-led Organizing in Chicago -- The Movement Spreads: Organizing in Small Cities, Suburbs and the South -- The Movement Expands: Police-Free Schools, Black Girls Matter and restorative Justice -- Conclusion: Organizing and Movement-Building for Racial and Educational justice.
Summary:
"Willful Defiance documents how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country. The book begins in the Mississippi Delta where African American families named the school-to-prison pipeline and challenged anti-Black racism, exclusionary discipline policies that suspend and expel students of color at disproportionate rates, and policing practices that lead students into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The book examines organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles and Chicago, showing how groups led by parents and students of color built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by centering the participation of people most impacted by injustice and combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. It shows how an intersectional movement emerged as girls of color and gender nonconforming students asserted their voice, the movement won victories to remove or defund school police and sought to establish restorative justice alternatives to transform deep-seated and systemic racism in public schools and broader society. The book documents the struggle organizers waged to build a movement led by community groups accountable to people most impacted by injustice rather than Washington-based professional advocates. It offers a new model for federated movements that operate simultaneously at local, state and national levels, while primarily oriented to support local organizing, and reconceptualizes national racial and social justice movements as interconnected local struggles whose victories are lifted up and "nationalized" to transform racially inequitable policies at multiple levels"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.