Rooted Renewal

Reflections on the NEW Caucus Relaunch

Last week I received an email from Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus announcing their relaunch. The newsletter is solid, the social media presence promising, and tonight's monthly meeting is an exciting invitation to gather again in movement. NEW is re-introducing itself as the social justice caucus of the Newark Teachers Union (NTU), with renewed energy and visibility. For that, I feel gratitude and hope.

Through a book review of The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line by Steve Golin (2002), which the caucus studied last spring, the newsletter (N.E.W. VIEWS) nods to how important it is to study history, particularly the foundations of the NTU. And that is important. But there is more lineage to remember–the struggles and dynamics of forming the caucus, and of course the people who poured themselves into making NEW what it was and could still become.

Here, I offer a loving critique because I feel the need to stretch open a space for memory. When those aforementioned lineages are unacknowledged, it risks giving the impression that renewal begins from scratch. Relaunches are strongest when they remember their roots. What came before is not just history; it is compost, the ground that nourishes what grows now.

Black Feminist Leadership as Lens

In my dissertation and a subsequent journal article,¹ I recall moments that shaped my politicization within the caucus, including this one about the very beginnings of NEW Caucus:

At the meeting that we select me as chair, the discussion includes emphasis on how the chair and vice chair positions will mostly be in name. Decisions will continue to be made collectively and by consensus. Though I am honored to be selected as chair, I don’t feel the most qualified. Participating in our sessions on union history has grown my confidence in my political activism, but I wonder why Jose left. The internal racial dynamics of our group are lost on me. Should I have left too, in solidarity? Is my Black female face being used to bring viability to the caucus? I move forward with the caucus, determined to grow into the position, inspired to be as strong a union leader as Carole Graves.

This memory is tender for me. It holds both my doubts and my determination, my vulnerability and my growth. It reminds me that caucus work is never just organizational. It is personal, racialized, embodied, and historical.

In reflecting on NEW’s relaunch, I am guided by Black feminist thinkers whose work grounds my dissertation and my practice as an educator and scholar-activist. I wonder how their theorizing could be used to aerate the compost.

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2000), reminds us that Black feminist thought emerges from lived experience and collective struggle. She offers an epistemology that centers the knowledge produced by Black women as a resource for justice. Collins insists that leadership is not simply positional authority, but the weaving together of care, resistance, and knowledge forged in struggle.

Organizer and scholar Charlene Carruthers, in Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018), articulates how Black feminist leadership traditions draw power from collective visioning and radical inclusivity. For Carruthers, effective leadership is not charismatic individualism but a practice of cultivating shared responsibility and co-stewardship.

Historian Barbara Ransby, in Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (2018), traces how contemporary movements are shaped by decentralized, Black feminist leadership models. She highlights the orchestration of collective energy, rather than top-down command, as central to sustaining justice work across generations.

Scholar Melanie Acosta, in her article “The Paradox of Pedagogical Excellence Among Exemplary Black Women Educators” (2019), describes the leadership of Black women teachers as “an orchestration of a sophisticated pedagogy rooted in a struggle for justice and equity.” This framing holds deep resonance for me. Caucus leadership, like classroom leadership, is less about authority and more about cultivating a living pedagogy in which collective struggle itself becomes the teacher.

Taken together, these thinkers illuminate why I believe the caucus relaunch must be rooted in memory and accountability. Renewal without lineage risks becoming just another organizational refresh. Renewal informed by Black feminist leadership traditions, however, can cultivate practices that hold complexity, honor the past, and sustain collective struggle without burning us out.

Rooted Renewal

As NEW re-gathers tonight, I carry both hope and responsibility. Hope that this caucus will flourish in its new season. Responsibility to remind us that what we build now stands on ground seeded by many hands and hearts before.

The memory I shared above reminds me that caucus work has always been about more than bylaws and positions. It is about transformation–of our union, yes, but also of ourselves, of our relationships, of our teaching, and of our city. That is the intention I see in this relaunch. Not to erase what came before, but to compost it, to honor it, and to let it nourish the possibilities ahead.

My desire for NEW’s relaunch is this: to celebrate this moment as well as let it be an occasion to remember. To weave in the messy, complicated, inspiring histories of those who came before–even if only through gestures of acknowledgment and gratitude. Renewal without memory risks repetition. Renewal with roots can cultivate something sturdier.

1. See Becoming BlackWomanTeacher: An Autoethnographic Illumination of Teacher Leadership Development for Critical Democratic Public Education in Newark, NJ and “(Re)Forming Unions for Social Justice: A Critical Autoethnographic Inquiry into Racism, Democracy, and Teacher Leadership,” Critical Education (Special Issue: Contemporary Educator Movements: Transforming Unions, Schools, and Society in North America).