Episode 38 of the Doin' The Work podcast is a conversation with Garland Jaggers, MSW, a co-founder of the National Association of Black Social Workers, and Dr. Denise McLane-Davison, NABSW's founding archivist. I'm genuinely honored that both of them came on the show, and I keep coming back to this conversation.
Here's the history: in 1968, 55 days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a group of Black social workers walked into a national social work conference, took over the stage, issued their demands, walked out, and built their own organization. The demands were straightforward. Black practitioners should be able to name their own problems, center their own expertise, and define their own solutions. They were done waiting for institutions that had repeatedly failed to hear them.
What strikes me every time I return to this episode is how directly Mr. Jaggers and Dr. McLane-Davison connect 1968 to now. The issues that drove the founding of NABSW—who gets to name the problem, who is treated as the expert, whose communities are surveilled and pathologized rather than supported—are the same issues many of us are navigating in practice today.
They talk about NABSW's positions on transracial adoption, family preservation, and licensing. They talk about the centering of Black expertise in research, curriculum, and practice. They talk about what liberation actually means in the context of social work and what it looks like to build institutions that are truly for and by the community. And they talk about what it costs—professionally and personally—to do this work over decades.
If you practice from a social justice or anti-oppressive framework, or if you're trying to figure out what that actually looks like, this conversation is worth your time. So much of what we're grappling with now has already been named, theorized, and organized around. We just haven't always been taught that.
Listen to Episode 38
What comes up for you when you hear this history?
What does it bring up about your own practice?
What are your thoughts/reflections? Join the community and engage in our discussions.
Here's the history: in 1968, 55 days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a group of Black social workers walked into a national social work conference, took over the stage, issued their demands, walked out, and built their own organization. The demands were straightforward. Black practitioners should be able to name their own problems, center their own expertise, and define their own solutions. They were done waiting for institutions that had repeatedly failed to hear them.
What strikes me every time I return to this episode is how directly Mr. Jaggers and Dr. McLane-Davison connect 1968 to now. The issues that drove the founding of NABSW—who gets to name the problem, who is treated as the expert, whose communities are surveilled and pathologized rather than supported—are the same issues many of us are navigating in practice today.
They talk about NABSW's positions on transracial adoption, family preservation, and licensing. They talk about the centering of Black expertise in research, curriculum, and practice. They talk about what liberation actually means in the context of social work and what it looks like to build institutions that are truly for and by the community. And they talk about what it costs—professionally and personally—to do this work over decades.
If you practice from a social justice or anti-oppressive framework, or if you're trying to figure out what that actually looks like, this conversation is worth your time. So much of what we're grappling with now has already been named, theorized, and organized around. We just haven't always been taught that.
Listen to Episode 38
What comes up for you when you hear this history?
What does it bring up about your own practice?
What are your thoughts/reflections? Join the community and engage in our discussions.
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