New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People's University

In the 1960s and ’70s—when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY—New York City’s classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women’s liberation. Conor Tomás Reed is part of the next generation of an insurgent CUNY movement nourished by these legacies. Highlighting the decolonial feminist metamorphosis that transformed our educational landscape, New York Liberation School explores how study and movement coalesced across classrooms and neighborhoods. Reed’s immersive and wide-ranging narrative brings us into the archives and up close to the stories of its participants in order to reactivate these vibrant struggles. The result is a radiant reclamation of collective history that charts a vision for liberating education and society today.