Talking with Tim Eubanks of Austin Voices for Education and Youth
Tim Eubanks leads a team of ten Youth Mobilizers out of Garza Independence High School in Austin, Texas. The team employs activism and media to draw attention to what’s lacking in public education in Austin. Eubanks teaches the history of social movements in the United States—from the Civil Rights era to today—and the young people involved use the knowledge as a kick-off point for their own strategizing. In the 2005-2006 school year, the Youth Mobilizers took on the issue of high school redesign. To call for more student involvement in Austin’s redesign process, they created a documentary video, led a youth rally, and held an election forum for school board candidates.
WKCD: What do students do in the Youth Mobilizer program?
EUBANKS: The whole point is really a study of today. We look at the past to illuminate discussions today. Right now, in Austin, we have segregation. We have a situation where there are West Side schools and East Side schools. The poorest schools are either all Black or all Latino. We look at “how does segregation exist now?” What does it look like now? What does it mean now? What does it mean that Anderson High can be so different from Reagan High? How do all those things play out? One way to do that is to see this whole history of it, so we go back to this era of desegregation that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Our whole point is to make it more human, and to make the study of history the study of the present, the study of yourself and your friends and your family. What we’re looking at is ourselves. It’s really powerful. I was able to put together a curriculum that draws lessons from different social justice movements and then incorporate elements of poetry and music so that students can see themselves reflected in it. I’ve noticed that when I do it, the students are like, “Why was I never taught this?” It is really powerful for me to say, “Well, we’re sure going to be taught it now.”
We show students examples of how students have engaged in acts of civil disobedience in the past. The efforts of Rosa Parks. The efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The efforts of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. The efforts of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. We study the Freedom Rides of ’60, ’61, and ’62. We study the sit-in campaign of ’60. We study Mississippi Freedom summer of ’64. We look at Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives. It’s tying the idea of civil disobedience in with the idea of social movement and electoral politics.
The students wonder, “What is this thing called politics? What is this whole thing about politicians and about mayors and city councils? What on earth does it have to do with me?” People were never taught that, in this country, there’s a history of struggle. Through that struggle, that’s how we got to have the freedoms that we have. That relates to how long my hair can be, and that I can sit here and have dreadlocks. That we can express different political viewpoints.
The point is that they were never taught that what they can do, and what can happen to them, is a result of struggle. That struggle continues today. That’s negotiation. That’s back and forth. It reflects itself through music, reflects itself through art, and reflects itself through politics. And for high school students, the question is, “How can we get an education that’s real?”
WKCD: What is a “real” education, to you?
EUBANKS: For me, it’s discovering your voice, and discovering what factors are affecting you, affecting your family, and affecting your community. Education has to be personal, and it needs to be about you.
We study Tinker vs. Des Moines because that’s where we get a lot of our rights in school from, in 1965. The escalation of the Vietnam War had just begun. Many people wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, as a visual protest of it. The school district said, “You can’t wear a black armband to protest the Vietnam War in school,” because there was the idea of in loco parentis, that “in the absence of a parent,” the school was your parent. Which is, of course, still the idea in many schools. It also meant that you didn’t have any rights in school that school administrators did not deem you to have. It finally got to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court wrote the famous passage that said, “Students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.”
So we like to think about that a lot. To think, what would have happened had they not worn that black armband to school? What is the value of having rights within school, and what are the ways in which you can protect it? We also use that to say, a lot of times, just because a law is passed or a decision is made, it doesn’t mean that it’s real. People make that real within their own schools, their own institutions.
WKCD: Did Austin Voices participate in the student walkouts over the immigration debates of 2006?
EUBANKS: Yes. Many people said that students needed to be in class, that this was worsening students’ education, that this is a distraction, and that sort of thing. Really, just the opposite is true. When students are engaged on that level and are committed—even to the point of walking out of school—it enhances their education. It improves their critical thinking abilities and their ability to take on the future. A few years after the Los Angeles walkouts in 1968—which spread across the country from ’68 to ’71—enrollment in college for Latino youth who participated in the walkouts was enhanced dramatically.
The work is trying to take the pieces that they have in their lives right now, and see the evidence of this struggle. Then saying, “If there’s a struggle right now, what does that look like? How does that play out in schools, and what can we do to impact that struggle? What can we do to impact that debate happening right now in our schools?”
Well, here’s what we can do. Maybe we can have a youth-led school board candidate forum, where we can tell those candidates what the views of students are, because they’re not hearing them. Maybe we can have a rally, and through that rally, tell the community that it’s not acceptable for a third of students to be dropping out. What ways are we responsible for that, and what ways are administrators responsible for that? Maybe it’s through small group facilitation, bringing small groups of people together. Maybe it’s through high school redesign. We need to have a multimedia presentation, because we need to get our ideas and suggestions out there and inform others about what the district’s plans are.
WKCD: Tim, what in your life brought you to this work?
EUBANKS: I grew up knowing that my religion, cultural practices and race were
very different from those around me. I grew up in a Jehovah's Witness household, a fundamentalist Christian religion that rejects many of
the cultural practices of mainstream society. I was a black person in
rural South-Central Pennsylvania. My family moved there was to
confront racism, to confront the Klan burning crosses on yards of the
town's few black families. That move played out dramatically in my
own life as a seven-year-old. Before I moved there, I didn't know what
race was. I didn't really know that there were differences between people who had lighter skin and darker skin, that had not figured into
my consciousness. I figured it real quick once I moved to the town.
Those values of standing up for what you believe in, standing up for who you are, not being afraid to be different, of understanding what justice means within society, and that confrontation can be valuable, were very important to me in terms of my life trajectory.
