History

The Baltimore Algebra Project, Inc. (BAP) is a unique organization that addresses the country’s history of racial oppression as it affects young people in Baltimore through educational injustice and resulting economic and political disempowerment.

Our community has been devastated over decades by problems like red-lining in housing, legal and de facto segregation in education and employment, horrible inequities in health care and nutrition, and state violence through police and prisons.

BAP gets at the root of these issues by teaching young people through working with their peers that they can take action on their own behalf and effect major aspects of their lives.

Methodology

Our methodology comes directly from Ella Baker and Bob Moses, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Bob Moses sometimes works directly with our leadership and has indirectly taught all of us to make decisions for ourselves and take control of our own lives. Using the principles of the Algebra Project, we develop math literacy work to create an economic base for organizing against oppression.

Our young people, completely under youth supervision, have earned millions of dollars through teaching math and student self-advocacy in the BAP. These earnings give us the time and space to do organizing work, such as shutting down the construction of a $100 million youth jail in 2009-12 and organizing huge street actions against police violence in 2015.

We address the root causes of racial inequality because young black people are not really considered to be politically important, but the action of the BAP forces our interests to be taken into account by people at the highest levels of government, and galvanizes our peers and community to also stand up and make demands.

Goals

Our goal is for a combination of education, economic empowerment through knowledge work, and tough, person-to-person organizing to lead to real power for young people in Baltimore and across the country.

As a part of our, BAP’s, organizing strategy, we propose to use the National Student Bill of Rights (NSBR) as a framework for youth to work through to relate to the police accountability work on both the city level as well as the school system level.

It is through this frame that issues of education and educational gaps in poor and impoverished communities can be linked together for the political growth of the student involved in present and future political demonstrations.

This is a key function in the organizing of student because of the obscure and often not apparent link between poor educational conditions, the dysfunctional nature of partially developed and educated citizens and the excessive policing of those people, often being described as hyper-militaristic.