Long before he became a pioneer in the push for parental school choice, Howard Fuller suffered the blows of police batons during protests over the mistreatment of Black students during desegregation in Cleveland, hung out with freedom fighters in Mozambique, and sat at the helm of a radical university that followed the Black revolutionist philosophy of Malcolm X.
In Pan-Africanist circles during the 1960s, he was known as Owusu, or “one who clears the way for others”—a name that would in many ways foretell his activism and advocacy on behalf of poor Black families in the realm of public education.
As leader of the North Carolina-based Malcolm X Liberation University, he irreverently referred to himself as the “H.N.I.C.,” a colloquial acronym from the Black experience that stands for “Head N—– In Charge,” but later became known as the school’s “Mwalimu,” a Swahili word for “teacher.” He and his comrades didn’t shy away from keeping guns in the trunk for their protection while driving the back roads of North Carolina given the racially charged atmosphere at the time.
” I had no philosophical opposition to guns or to using them, if necessary,” Fuller wrote. “So, my traveling companions and I all bought rifles and carried them with us wherever we went.” Such are just a few of the more interesting facts contained in Fuller’s recently-released memoir, titled No Struggle, No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Education Reform.
The book recounts Fuller’s education and evolution—from growing up in the Hillside Housing Projects in Milwaukee to becoming superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. From being a star athlete who navigated the social awkwardness associated with taking a “Trailblazer” scholarship to integrate a virtually all-White college in Wisconsin in the late 1950s, to once calling for a majority-Black school district in Milwaukee in the 1980s.
It delves into the political intricacies that gave birth to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 1989—a catalytic event that Fuller helped orchestrate and that he characterizes as a “monumental victory” for the nation’s parental choice movement.
