Education For All

I continue my visualization of Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem using AI. I’m using Leonardo AI for this sequence. This scene is derived from Chapter 16. Here, Griggs is talking about the effort of Black Americans to educate themselves. While the history of the secret organization in Imperio sketches back to the republic's founding, the real history of African Americans striving for education is as complex and dangerous.

Preventing slaves from learning was an important tool for slave owners. A lack of information made it harder for black Americans to plan for escape and find out about their world. Nonetheless, they did learn, creating the constant fear of black education undermining the white power structure that continues to shape public discourse to the present day.

The struggle over diversity, equity, and inclusion comes down to the ways black and brown people have analyzed the way society operates, recognizing that race (their race) has an impact on their outcomes and many white people denying it. The struggle over data at the core of this long-term debate can be recovered from the very beginning of our national experience. It is one way many Afrofuturist novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often hinge on knowledge acquisition. In Imperio, this process is literally and figuratively institutionalized through the secret society created by black people. In real life, these “secret” societies are not really secret. From churches to HBCUs to Black Twitter, the effort to create spaces to reflect, learn, and act is central to the black experience.