Jitu weusi biography sample paper

Jitu Weusi, born and raised in Brooklyn and originally named Leslie Campbell, was an educator and educational activist.

As a teenager, he attended Brooklyn Technical High School in 1952 before transferring to Franklin K.

Lane. He later reflected that antiblack violence was common at Brooklyn Tech and seemed to be a cultural rite of passage for the white students, many of them first- or second-generation European immigrants.

After graduating from Long Island University Brooklyn, Campbell became a teacher at J.H.S.

35 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He worked alongside other politically active teachers to create a curriculum that centered African and African diaspora identity and connected those histories to “the current situation of the black man.” After attending the Black Power conference held in Newark, New Jersey in 1967, Weusi returned with a renewed energy to transform schools into “tools for molding our