Ericka Huggins, the director of the Oakland Community School, was one of the major reasons why the Oakland Community School incorporated the learning needs of disabled students into their pedagogy and practices. Huggins who attended college to become a teacher had goals of opening a school for disabled children because of her interactions with Theophilis, or T.

Ericka Huggins

- Overarching Pedagogy
- View on Grade Levels
- Universal Design
- Standardized and IQ Testing

The Oakland Community School's Pedagogy

- Using disability as a symbol that oppressive violence has occurred
- Examples: Sierra Club, The Black Panther
- Alternatives

How Social Justice Movements Use Disability

- Oakland Community School Pedagogy
- Ericka Huggins, Oakland Community School director

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The Oakland Community School was opened in 1973 by the Black Panther Party as a tuition-free, not-for-profit, and community-organized elementary school for children ages two through twelve. The Oakland Community School was an outgrowth of some of the Black Panther Party's other educational endeavors including the Intercommunal Youth Institute. The Oakland Community School was widely regarded as a successful endeavor and was used as a training space for local educators. The school was also in very high demand and often had waiting lists for entry. The Oakland Community School closed its doors in 1982 in alignment with the formal end of the Black Panther Party.

What was the Oakland Community School?

The theory of Black Disability Politics refers to disability politics expressed through text, speech, ideological platforms, or activist work by Black cultural workers (individuals whose work directly responds to and influences culture). It encompasses how Black individuals engage in Disability Justice and Disability Politics, and it can be understood as an integral intersection of both the Disability Justice movement and the Black liberation movement.

Theory of Black Disability Politics

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

The Oakland Community School was founded in part as a challenge to the idea that some youth were "uneducable." Many of the students who came to Oakland Community School had been expelled from Oakland Public Schools or were labeled as uneducable by teachers or school officials. 

The Oakland Community School as a Response to Oakland Public Schools

Oakland Community School as a Site of Black Disability Politics

1. Intersectional but Race Centered
2. Not Necessarily Based in Disability Identity
3. Contextualized and Historicized
4. Holistic

Four Common Qualities of Black Disability Politics

- What was the Black Panther Party?
- Views of the Black Panther Party in early and later years?
- "The Black Panther" - The Black Panther Party
- The 504 Sit-In
- Oakland Community School
-Mental and Carceral Institutions

The Black Panther Part as an Example of Black Disability Politics

By placing Black children in disability specific classrooms under the label of uneducable Oakland Public Schools made a space where disability was racialized, due to uneducable being used to make receiving a lack of culturally competent education into a disability, and how racialization can be disabiling since placing Black students in an underfunded education environment (the disability specific classrooms) caused them to fall behind their peers because of the lack of resources.

Uneducable as a site of Racializing Disability

- The History of the National Black Women's Health Project
- Black Feminist Health Activism

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