We were told the classroom wasn’t built for us. September’s educators knew better: access was never given, it was engineered, one deliberately built structure at a time. From a Charleston Citizenship School in 1898 to a Bronx science classroom in the 2000s, Black educators have turned the classroom itself into the site of the fight. The system set the ceiling. They built the staircase.
In 1956, South Carolina fired Septima Clark, forty years into her teaching career, for refusing to quit the NAACP. She built the Citizenship Schools instead, a curriculum that taught literacy specifically so Black adults could clear the tests standing between them and a ballot, training more than 10,000 teachers who reached over 25,000 students directly. Nearly seven decades later, Tiffany Kirk looked at a Georgia incarceration rate running 31% above the national average and built Project Restart, a third option beyond the two the system offered people coming home from prison: relapse, or a minimum-wage shift with no way up. Same tool, same fight, a different wall.
In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South, one of the first full-length works of Black feminist theory, then spent the next 33 years proving her own argument by earning a PhD from the Sorbonne at 66. As principal of Washington DC’s only Black college-preparatory high school, she refused to let her students get tracked into a lesser curriculum. Christopher Emdin, a Bronx science teacher turned Columbia professor, refuses something related: the idea that his students need saving from their own culture to succeed. His reality pedagogy anchors the classroom in the brilliance students already carry, not a lesson plan built to erase it.
Whether it’s a 1898 Citizenship School or a 2020s reentry cohort, an 1901 principal’s office or a Bronx classroom built on hip-hop, the goal has always been the same. Access was never given. It was built, and rebuilt, by people the system assumed would wait for permission. This month, we meet the engineers who never asked.
