Rooted in the initial struggle of community members who staged a successful hunger strike to secure a high school in their Chicago neighborhood, David Omotoso Stovall's Born Out of Struggle focuses on his first-hand participation in the process to help design the school. Offering important lessons about how to remain accountable to communities while designing a curriculum with a social justice agenda, Stovall explores the use of critical race theory to encourage its practitioners to spend less time with abstract theories and engage more with communities that make a concerted effort to change their conditions. Stovall provides concrete examples of how to navigate the constraints of working with centralized bureaucracies in education and apply them to real-world situations.

David Omotoso Stovall is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is coeditor (with William Ayers and Therese Quinn) of Handbook of Social Justice in Education.

Foreword
Patricia Maria Buenrostro and Carolina Gaete

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Responsibility to the Word: Into the Work of Putting Our Theories to Practice

1. Hunger Strike: History, Community Struggle, and Political Gamesmanship

2. To Create a School: Uneasy Partnerships with the Central Office

3. Counterstory as Praxis: Confronting Success and Failure on the Design Team

4. Paper Proposals Do Not Equal Real Life: Race Praxis and High School Creation

5. Educational Debt Relief: Classroom Struggles, Critical Race Praxis, and the Politics of School

6. Struggle, Failure, and Reflection in the First Cycle (2003-2009): Practical Lessons in Creating a School

7. Always on the Run: School Struggle in Perpetuity

Epilogue
Glossary of Acronyms
Bibliography
Index