A Fuller Education, produced by a team of Emmy-Award winning filmmakers, tells Howard Fuller’s story from his beginnings in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was raised by his mother and grandmother, to the present day in Milwaukee. We hear from the colleagues and friends who know him best, such as Lisa Frazier Page, who co-wrote Fuller’s 2014 autobiography; Alan Borsuk, a Milwaukee-based journalist and friend; and Sam Carmen, the former executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association. We see Fuller on display in various settings as a young man, in middle age, and in his later years—angry, somber, defiant, discouraged, cynical, unrelenting, thoughtful, reasonable, calculatingly strategic and sometimes almost satisfied with what he has accomplished. One might be tempted to conclude there are many Howard Fullers, but as the film evolves it becomes apparent that these all are aspects of the same singular character.
Fuller’s lifelong journey on behalf of racial justice can be understood as a measure of America’s own incomplete journey. His childhood exposure to Southern segregation, racial violence, lynching, and a hostile public school system were for him early lessons on the penalties imposed by racism. He relates how his mother, a factory worker, had drummed into his head the value of education as a ticket to a better life. Decades before school choice became a form of political action, she sent her young boy to Catholic schools—first by scraping together money for preschool in the South, and later with the help of scholarship aid to attend St. Boniface’s elementary school after they moved to Milwaukee. Is it any wonder why the rebellious character at the center of the film conceives of school choice as a “rescue mission?”
At North Division High School, located in a Black community of Milwaukee, a teenage Howard got his first taste of public schooling and saw firsthand that segregation was not an entirely Southern disposition. Fuller proved himself to be a strong student and a gifted athlete. He became captain of a winning basketball team and was elected president of the student council. It was at North Division where the promising young upstart began to demonstrate leadership skills. It was also where a well-seasoned Fuller would later apply those skills and instigate a revolution in school governance that had a national impact.
Fuller’s talent on the basketball court, combined with his impressive academic record, won him a full scholarship to Carroll College, just outside Milwaukee. A photo displayed of him with his teammates reveals he was the only Black player on the squad. In fact, he was the only Black student on the entire campus; yet again, he was chosen as team captain and president of the student body. If not for the availability of a generous scholarship, Fuller would not have been there at all—perhaps not at any college, for that matter. His prodigious gifts could have been squandered like those of so many other capable Black men and women denied opportunities.
After Carroll, with the benefit of another scholarship, Fuller earned a master’s degree in social administration at Case Western University, where he studied community organizing. It was there in Cleveland that he began his work as an activist committed to improving public schools. Like many of his generation who admired Martin Luther King Jr. and mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP, he embraced a moderate political agenda involving non-violent protests, voter registration drives, fair housing initiatives, anti-poverty programs, and continued efforts to integrate schools.
I wish the film had more time to delve into Fuller’s activities from 1964, when he completed his graduate studies, to his return to Milwaukee in 1976. These years were formative and prepared him for a more consequential career ahead.
After Cleveland, Fuller spent a year in Chicago running a jobs program, then moved to North Carolina, where he remained for the next 11 years. By the time he got there, he had already begun to discover another path in the struggle for racial equality. The seed had been planted at a church meeting in Cleveland in 1964, where he heard a talk by Malcolm X about the future of the civil rights movement.
Ten minutes into the PBS documentary, a white-bearded Fuller looks into the camera to relate the life-changing experience he had listening to the Black Muslim leader’s famous “The Battle or the Bullet Speech,” where he was exposed to the language of Black Power, militant protest, and self-determination. These appeals became more meaningful to Fuller when he himself experienced beatings by the police and jail time for organizing activities that would disturb the racial order in the South.
In 1969, Fuller founded Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU) in Durham. It attracted students from a network of Pan African primary and secondary feeder schools who absorbed a revolutionary curriculum dedicated to the liberation of African people in America and around the world. Two years later, Fuller traveled to Africa to learn more about the colonial roots of racial oppression and became even more radicalized. Upon his return, he used contacts across the country to organize a march in Washington recognizing the anniversary of African Liberation Day.
