Texas HBCU Conference Series, Democracy Schools
***The above photo while blurry captures a historic moment — proclamation of America’s first state-level legislative caucus devoted to HBCUs, the Texas HBCU Legislative Caucus!
YEAR FOUR
Announcing…! Save the Date…!
Texas HBCU Conference Series, Democracy Schools, YEAR FOUR at Huston-Tillotson University, AUSTIN, TX, April 4-April 5 (Friday-Saturday), 2025
The Civic Power and Legacy of the HBCU and Black Educational History and Practice.
Conference Description
The Texas HBCU Conference Series, Democracy Schools is the historic gathering of students, faculty, and staff of Texas HBCUs and community partners that started in the spring of 2022 on the campus of Huston-Tillotson University (HT). The conference series, now in year four, emerges from the efforts of students in the campuswide leadership development and civic engagement initiative known as Public Leadership in Faith and Social Justice Traditions (Public Leadership).
The conference series speaks to the moment of democratic peril America today faces. The series seeks to reclaim and renew visions of American democracy rooted in civic capacity, community traditions and institutions. America as a bold responsive inclusive community is how we think of the tradition.
American democracy as a bold responsive inclusive community has deep roots in American history. The idea is woven into America’s founding documents and has inspired movements for freedom of enormous proportion, passion, talent, and energy often in unexpected places. Black communities and Black institutions, specifically, help retrieve the commitment. Bold responsive inclusive community is intimately bound up with the experience of African Americans. The Civil War, Reconstruction, Amendments 13, 14, 15, America’s HBCUs, Rosenwald schools and libraries, the American civil rights movement, all tell the story of bold responsive inclusive community and the advance of American democracy.
The work of scholars and professionals across disciplines and fields comes to the fore in the cultural view of democracy and citizenship that grounds the conference series. Scholars and professionals who learn to “let go” control and work with other citizens, rather than work “on” them or “for” them is the model of professional practice we call the “civic professional.” Civic professionals provide a form of leadership we call “strong meaningful citizenship.” Strong meaningful citizenship is a distinct leadership practice that is locally embedded, directed, and resourced, inclusive and ideas oriented. Leaders bring people together in and through community traditions and institutions (like colleges and universities) across differences that typically divide constituencies to build a world to live in that people believe in. People assemble great power working together this way. They become civic agents capable of contributing to solutions to public problems in meaningful ways. The practice of strong meaningful citizenship helps to build a civic culture in which citizens learn to become public, powerful people, and democracy comes to be understood as the work of everyone.
We call settings where civic professionals are formed “democracy schools.” Democracy schools and civic professionals have been central to the Black freedom movement from the beginning. HBCUs are powerful examples of democracy schools with deep roots in democratic movements and periods throughout American history. We mean to model and to spread democracy schools through the conference series. The conference series seeks to contribute to an American democratic renewal highlighting the role of Texas’ and America’s HBCUs.
Theme of the YEAR FOUR Conference
The theme of the year four conference is the civic power and legacy of the HBCU and Black educational history and practice. The theme highlights the enormous capacity, energy, and potential to contribute to building a shared future that people possess working together in democracy in and through civil society groups, organizations, and institutions. Civil society is the realm of society largely outside of formal government where people work together largely by choice, or voluntarily, rather than by command, dictate, or fiat. Note civil society also profoundly reflects and helps to shape government at the same time in circular fashion. In civil society, distinct cultural dynamics hold, including, in particular, a “civic” understanding of power. Power in civil society is understood to be collective and generative – power “with” and power “to,” not simply power “over,” or power as dominating. Cultural dynamics like these are the heart of Black theories of power as developed by nonviolent theorists and practitioners and educational philosophers like James Farmer, Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Johnson, Howard Thurman, and Anna Cooper. Furthermore, Black educational history and practice, nurtured in HBCUs, capture the dynamics in the understandings of personhood (what being a person is and means) the tradition embraces. Relational power is the heart of building Black civic institutions, like businesses and Rosenwald schools. Recovering the tradition of relational, generative, civic power in Black educational history and practice nurtured in HBCU is crucial in our time.
Personalist Philosophy and Theology
Personalism is a major foundation of nonviolent philosophy and a strong cultural view of democracy and citizenship. The tradition holds that the flourishing of the personality is the premise of a good society. Morehouse College, an HBCU, was a significant center for the development of personalist philosophy and theology in the US, as Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, and many of the leaders were educated there. The concept of human flourishing in the tradition developed at Morehouse over decades stressed “the sacred or otherwise inviolable dignity of persons…[and] promoted an educational process that activated the potential of individuals within and across diverse communities,” as the historian Kipten E. Jensen put it.
Interdisciplinary
Manifold contributions from across disciplines and fields are needed to explore the role of generative power in democracy and the understandings of the flourishing of persons in Black educational history and practice nurtured in HBCUs. The year four conference supports this effort. Also, the conference will explore the implications of Black educational history and practice nurtured in HBCUs for higher education more broadly in Texas and America today.
Submissions
Submissions from scholars and practitioners whose work incorporates conference purposes and themes are welcome. The cultural view of democracy and citizenship that grounds the conference series makes room for contributions from a variety of fields (literature, science, humanities and the arts, the media, and more). We invite submissions for conference panels, presenters, and discussants. We encourage submissions that include the active participation of students. Click here to submit a proposal for scholarly research. Click here to submit a proposal for innovative programs. Questions about submissions of scholarly research may be emailed to HBCU Conference Planning, Dr. Robert M. Ceresa rmceresa@htu.edu and Dr. Ronald E. Goodwin (regoodwin@pvamu.edu). We look forward to working with you
A New Peer Review Academic Journal
For scholars and practitioners who submit their work to the conference, a chance to publish in the new peer review academic journal with University of Texas Press, Freedom Schools: A Journal of Democracy and Community, is an opportunity we are excited to offer. Click here to access the journal. Freedom Schools elevates the distinctive voices of the HBCU in Texas and more broadly as well as scholars and scholar-practitioners from across the disciplines and institutions who recognize democracy as a politics/culture, a society, as well as a government requires leaders to think seriously about civic capacity building across the social life of a people and the role of institutions, including colleges, universities, and schools.
Check again soon for more updates.
