Jitu Brown
“I believe that in order to achieve a world that courageously confronts and defeats racism, we must have zero tolerance for all expressions of white supremacy and redefine ourselves and our communities. ”
Jitu Brown is the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, a network of grassroots organisations in over 30 U.S. cities organising for community-driven school improvement, and was formerly the education organiser for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO). Jitu started volunteering with KOCO in 1991, became a board member in 1993 and for several years served as the organisation’s board president; he joined the staff as education organiser in 2006. He has organised in the Kenwood Oakland neighbourhood for over 22 years, bringing community voices to the table on school issues. He helped develop the Mid-South Education Association, a grassroots advocacy group made up of administrators, parents, teachers, young people and local school council members to meet the needs of schools in the area. In 2015, Jitu was an organiser of and participant in the historic Dyett High School Hunger Strike in Chicago, which lasted for 34 gruelling days and resulted in the re-opening of Dyett as an open-enrollment, neighbourhood school with over $16 million in new investments. For 10 years, Jitu taught African American History at St. Leonard’s Adult High School, the only accredited high school in the U.S. that exclusively serves formerly incarcerated people. Jitu has taken youth leaders from KOCO to the United Nations, to the Passamaquoddy Native American reservation in Maine and to the U.N. Conference on Racism in South Africa. He has been published in the national education magazine Rethinking Schools, The Washington Post and The New York Times, and has appeared in Ebony Magazine and on talk shows including MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” and “The Ed Show,” Al Jazeera America, WBEZ’s “Community Voices,” “Democracy Now” and CLTV’s “Gerard McClendon Live.” Jitu is a Public Voices Fellow for the Ford Foundation’s OpEd Project.