I was recently in Hartford, Connecticut, at the invitation of Mama Gwen Samuel, an activist who works on behalf and with the community. I wasn’t prepared for what I was to encounter; callousness of Black bourgeois, disregard...
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is one of my favorite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes, but it leaves out a crucial point: the arc will not bend by itself. Someone has got to be...
The #SchoolToActivismPipeline is real. When Nasiha Thompson-King was given a temporary reprieve and allowed to continue playing basketball for Mastery Charter last February, mere days after a referee would not allow her to enter...
Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” According to a message I just received, some of our most prominent black leaders are about to put that saying into action on behalf...
Sharif El-Mekki doesn’t often roll up his pant leg to reveal the scars on his lower leg where the gangrene set in and almost forced doctors to amputate his lower leg. He doesn’t talk about the 12 excruciatingly painful...
The room is dimly lit when you enter, a short ramp leading you further into the darkness. Five prison cells await. Old. Wooden with iron bars and solid padlocks. Within, ghostly apparitions come into focus. Old women. Young...
I Started This School Year Talking About My History So My Students Could Discover Their Own Identity
I started this year with only two things on my mind: 1) helping my students develop positive racial identities and 2) building a community within a community. Last year, because of the events that happened in Charlottesville...
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”—Gloria Steinem Dear White People, Days ago, I, like many of you, watched in horror the vile display of bigotry and hatred, violence and terror that unfolded in...
I often describe myself as both an activist and a teacher. Why? Because I firmly believe that a quality education is a basic human right that has been historically and currently denied to so many students of color. And the things...
As a public school parent, I feel pressured to take a solemn oath of loyalty to free government schooling as if these schools are little temples of a high democratic order. I comply, mostly, uncomfortably, because whether I want...
