A Pedagogy of the Street
 (A piece of my social biography)

Fillmore Street, San Francisco circa 1963

                                                                                            

Controversial Rhythm

The karma of the street

Says needs and takes

Sometimes we find peace

In beats and breaks

Put the bang in the back 
so the seats can shake

Rebel Cadillac music 
for the people's sake

- Common

I grew up in the vibrant rhythm of San Francisco's Fillmore District during the late 50's and early 60s.  This rhythm permeated home life, work life, and especially street life. Gospel music and words of liberation emanated from Third Baptist Church down the block from our house. On the corner of Fillmore and McAllister, James Brown's funk belted from the speakers outside the local record store and Fruit of Islam brothers splendid in red bow ties and immaculate suits chanted to us children as we walked to school: Good morning beautiful daughters and sons of Ethiopia! Go on to school, you stars of our bright future!  

Breakfast at the kitchen table of our tenement flat (the command center of any ghetto household): at one end, Charles Cornnelius James, my father, schooled us about escaping Jim Crow East Texas during the Depression.  He told us how as a 15 year-old self-taught car mechanic he drove a flathead Ford pickup through the Dust Bowl from Longview to Oakland.  At the other end of the table,  armed with a cigarette, The San Francisco Chronicle, and a cup of Hills Brothers coffee- Bette Yoriko Kikuchi,  my mother, anchored a running social commentary, teaching of the viciousness of Joe McCarthy and Bull Connor, and citing the heroism of Medgar Evers, Mohandas Gandhi, Lenny Bruce,  and Mario Savio. She described in detail the Kikuchi family's incarceration at the Gila River (Arizona) concentration camp in 1942-3. "I confronted my racist high school teacher because he was barely a page ahead of us! What nerve!" Unfortunately, agents of House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC) interrogated and harrassed the Kikuchis.  For 16 year-old Bette, this was a badge of courage. The whole experience made her particularly sensitive and outspoken about substandard education, the repression of free speech, and the need for people of color to stand up for themselves.

For most of their lives, my parents experienced state, institutional, and commercial power as a structure of overt and covert control and repression. The welfare system, police, public education, the church, and business world  blatantly and regularly reminded them of their second class status.

In my parents' formative years, neither Jim Crow Texas or the  Gila River Detention Center  allowed freedom of speech or asssembly. In both locations they experienced repression and intimidation. They were forced to accomodate what Paulo Freire called the culture of silence that has long been imposed upon working class people of color.

But they were not silent.

They designated 'liberated' spaces for community discourse: busy ghetto street corners, church basements, barbershops, and the kitchen table; they created codes and signals in spoken and physical language to obscure the complex and sometimes subversive content of their discourse from the agents of the status quo.


Hidden Names, Complex Fates

As a neighborhood child I was fascinated and intrigued by the complexity of adult conversations around our kitchen table, on our stoop,  on the streetcorner. These folks- mostly working people with more informal than formal education- debated, instructed, and reflected deeply on life, work, culture and the issues of the day. They reported the news to each other, about events out of Birmingham, Delano, and DC. They editorialized about the Marshall Plan and the GI Bill; they reviewed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Kind of Blue. They developed a grassroots discourse about history, politics, spirituality, and culture. Their dignity and intelligence contradicted the shabbiness of our flats and possessions.

Like many young people during those years, I was inspired by the skill and depth of folks like John Coltrane, Maya Angelou, and Cesar Chavez. I was particularly intrigued by the respect they commanded from people of power and privilege.

All of this taught me that working class people, despite our lack of means, possessed moral, intellectual, and aesthetic depth. Moreover, we had a unique vantage point from which we could critically analyze society- from our location on the rough edges of its contradictions.

Taking It To The Streets

You don't know me but I'm your people
I was raised in this living hell
you don't know my kind in your world
Fairly soon the time will tell

Doobie Brothers


I was angered by the censorship and repression of political discussion at the ghetto schools I attended during the 50s and 60s.  Talk of Brown v Board of Education or the Mississippi freedom rides one could hear at home or on the street. But school did not acknowledge these matters in conversation or curriculum. The authorities at Galileo High School- my working class, overcrowded alma mater- were terrified that local Civil Rights organizing, the Free Speech Movement, and antiwar activities would 'agitate' us into rebellion. In response they tried to inoculate the school, the students, and the curriculum from controversy.

Consequently, during the most dynamic period of grassroots participation in US history, the policy of urban, working class public schools like Galileo was to repress open discussion of issues, outlaw anything that looked like political activity, and expel those perceived to be ‘troublemakers.’

I was a kid who was challenged by my elders to read, be conscious, and speak truth to power. This was almost a mantra in the African American community at the time. But school and other authorities tempered and muted our young voices of color whenever they could.

However, they could not contain us in our own territory: the street. We occasionally adventured out into other Bay Area neighborhoods to experience the Beat Movement in North Beach, The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, the hippie counter culture in Haight-Ashbury, and the Antiwar Movement all over. On Upper Grant and Upper Telegraph Avenues we pressed our ears against the doors of smoky clubs, listening to beat poetry and jazz. On E 14th Street in Oakland we took in the exhortations of the Black Panther Party. We held dances at the Longshoremen's Hall, where earlier in the day our fathers and uncles strengthened labor unity. We wandered around the Haight amid the chants and chatter of the counter culture and peace movements. We sometimes held court at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown, our adolescent contribution to the emergence of ‘Asian Power,’ which would later peak with the mass action at the International Hotel.

Our making the street a 'liberated zone' terrified the so-called 'Establishment.' Ronald Reagan, Sam Yorty, and SI Hiyakawa reacted with contempt and violence. They demonized and attacked their own middle class children who abandoned anesthetizing suburbs, flocked to the cities, then challenged the contradictions of the so-called "Great Society."  But they were more alarmed about the emergent consciousness of alienated and mostly poor youth of color. Authorities were stunned by the young men of February One in North Carolina and the antiwar activities of Black students at  Mississippi’s Jackson State.  They were left breathless by the involvement of youth in the rise of the United Farmworkers, the fight for Ethnic Studies at SF State, and the emergence of the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets.

They sensed that we knew. They feared what we knew.

In our most coherent moments, we knew that we were the controversy.


Liberated Zone

I found my own voice and animation on corners and alleys “claimed” by us street kids in the manner that working class youth have done for many years.

Sometimes we raged in the ghetto rebellions inspired by  Detroit, Watts, and the assassination of MLK.

Sometimes we marched in robust mass demonstrations for peace and against the Vietnam War.

Sometimes we conducted our own 'culture circles' on the corner, probing, signifying, questioning the world and one another.

The street was our democratic space. It was the terrain of protest and improvisation, inventive and ingenious with culture, raw material, and spirituality. For the poor and working class, for people without property and access, it represents free territory, if only for sporadic moments. It was and is  the borderless location of spontaneous, unfettered, sometimes profane, sometimes profound
'popular' education.