Howard Fuller’s new memoir, No Struggle, No Progress, tells the inspiring story of how a boy in the Jim Crow South became the larger-than-life education leader we know today. There is much to take away from Fuller’s trailblazing career. A former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and current distinguished education professor at Marquette University, Fuller has done as much as anyone to place the issue of education at the center of the civil rights movement. His own upbringing in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the daily injustice he saw in his own neighborhood reinforced his belief that “education offers the best route out of poverty for individuals.” After graduating from Montana’s Carroll College, Fuller worked as a community organizer in North Carolina. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s he led marches and at one point founded his own Afrocentric college, Malcolm X Liberation University, but a 1971 journey to Africa challenged his vision of pan-African solidarity. Seeing firsthand the continent’s social and economic inequality, as well as with the grim realities of actual warfare, led him to rethink his assumptions about what the American civil rights movement really meant. Dr. Fuller, who became closely associated with school choice and vouchers, now warns us “to be careful not to get committed to any particular strategy or tactic to the point that we ignore the purpose for our actions,” and his commitment to the nation’s neediest students has never wavered. It’s these qualities that make Howard Fuller one of the nation’s most respected and influential education reformers. His hard-earned message should resonate with those who follow in his steps: Without struggle, there is no progress.
SOURCE: Howard Fuller, “No Struggle No Progress: A Warrior s Life from Black Power to Education Reform,” Marquette University Press, 2014.
