This chapter explores the contested histories of adult community education and development per se, from post-slavery experiences in the US through to post-colonial experiences in Africa and elsewhere. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive review, the chapter's aim is far more modest – to identify common threads that interweave with the themes of cultural wars, the development of critical consciousness and decolonisation, with a particular focus on the threads that have relevance for more recent debates about community education and development in practice.

The previous chapter challenged a number of assumptions about whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is correspondingly devalued as a result. This chapter explores additional questions about whose interests are actually being served when people's knowledge is enhanced through community education and development projects and programmes. Is the aim to build communities’ resilience to cope with the challenges that face them, promoting self-reliance and individual advancement within the confines of their contemporary situations? Or do the aims go further, to enable them to address the underlying structural causes of their problems? To what extent have community education programmes been designed to safeguard the interests of the status quo? And how far have they been designed and delivered in more challenging ways within the context of strategies for decolonisation?

These questions have already been posed in previous chapters in relation to the contributions of Paulo Freire and others in different contexts. Here, the focus is upon projects and programmes in the post-Civil War context in the US and the post-Second World War context in Britain's African colonies. The final section reflects on potential connections with more recent initiatives to address the challenges of the legacies of Black migration from the South to the cities of the North in the US and Black and Asian migrations to Britain following the Second World War.

Community education and development in the US, post-slavery: from Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois and beyond

Slavery was formally ended in the US in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. But early hopes for racial justice were soon dashed. Racial segregation and structural inequalities were re-enforced in the post-Reconstruction Southern states, including re-enforcement via mob violence in the form of lynchings. This situation continued right up to the Civil Rights Movement's challenges to segregation from the mid-20th century onwards.