Desegregation has failed. Schools filled with black and brown students have become plantations of social control. Radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must help young people fashion an insurgency. This innovative book, written in the spirit of Paulo Freire, explains what such a rebellion means and how to create it: the tools and techniques needed to build social, cognitive, and political power.

Jay Gillen teaches English in a Baltimore public school and has worked with the Algebra Project since 1995, building math literacy among youth of color and youth experiencing poverty in US public schools.

In 1961, 16-year-old Brenda Travis was a youth leader of the NAACP branch in her hometown of McComb, Mississippi. She joined in the early stages of voter registration, and when the Freedom Rides and direct action reached McComb, she and two SNCC workers sat-in at the local bus station. That led to her first arrest and jailing, which resulted in her being expelled and leading a protest walkout from her high school. Thrown in jail for a second time, she was eventually released on the condition that she leave the state. Her poignant memoir describes what gave her the courage at such a young age to fight segregation, how the movement unfolded in Mississippi, and what happened after she was forced to leave her family, friends, and fellow activists. One of the civil rights workers who befriended her in McComb was the legendary activist Bob Moses, who contributed the Foreword to her book. A white educator and Vietnam war hero, J. Randall O’Brien, was deeply inspired by learning about her courage, and he contributed the Afterword.