In November, nearly 1,000 educators, advocates, and allies attended the Center for Black Educator Development’s now-annual Black Men in Education Convening — BMEC 2023 in Philadelphia. Once again, it was a powerful and inspiring demonstration of the energy, determination, and talent that Black educators possess.
It is desperately needed because Black educators transform lives. And the great news is that there is interest. The Center for Black Educator Development raised almost $3 million dollars through our Future Black Teachers of Excellence Fund to keep up with the demand of our Black high school students who participate in our Career and Technical Education courses through our school district partnerships across the country.
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Thanks to researchers like Dr Ivory Toldson and others, we know that Black men who attend HBCUs list education among their top career choices. What deters them is often the deep racially based structures that serve as deep historical and entrenched barriers to leading classrooms of their own.
Research shows students benefit from higher graduation rates, reduced dropout rates, fewer disciplinary issues, more positive views of schooling, and better test scores when students have Black or Brown teachers.
Yet, Black men account for about 2% of teachers. Black teachers, overall, comprise just 7% of all teachers. In our public school system, which is enrolled by primarily Black and Brown students, this mismatch is plainly unacceptable, an outrage even.
And it’s been an outrage for generations. All of us who are fortunate enough to call ourselves Black educators have always known it.
Malcolm knew it. The Black Panther Party knew it too.
At the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the organization founded upon his return from his pilgrimage to Mecca and stay in West Africa, Brother Malcolm put Black education and Black educators in his historic remarks.
“Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights,” he said. “It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self-respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.”
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But in decrying policies that Black America faces today, the failure of school integration, and the lack of resources compared to White schools, Malcolm also called out the absolutely critical role that Black educators, leaders, pedagogy, and curriculum have to play in the wellbeing and success of Black children.
“What do we want?” he asked the crowd. “We want Afro-American principals to head these schools. We want Afro-American teachers in these schools. Meaning we want black principals and black teachers with some textbooks about black people. We want textbooks written by Afro-Americans that are acceptable to our people before they can be used in these schools.”
The absence of Black educators from the classrooms full of Black children, as he observed, was a first-order issue in the education of Black children.
“Principals and teachers fail to understand the nature of the problems with which they work and as a result, they cannot do the job of teaching our children,” he said. “They don’t understand us, nor do they understand our problems; they don’t.”
The lack of cultural competency of teachers remains a high priority issue. Still today, a large majority — more than 6 in 10–of teacher prep grads — say they feel unprepared to teach in classrooms where Black and Brown students are the majority.
Malcolm’s demands in 1964 for Black children to receive an education that was both culturally fluent and affirming of their racial identity were mirrored two years later in the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program.
Point 5 from the Program stated:
“We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in society and the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.”
This “knowledge of self” was an empowering and critical demand for both the BPP and Malcolm X. As Malcolm also observed, Black children weren’t learning their true history.
“When we send our children to school in this country they learn nothing about us other than that we used to be cotton pickers,” he argued. “Every little child going to school thinks his grandfather was a cotton picker. Why, your grandfather was Nat Turner; your grandfather was Toussaint L’Ouverture; your grandfather was Hannibal. Your grandfather was some of the greatest black people who walked on this earth. It was your grandfather’s hands who forged civilization and it was your grandmother’s hands who rocked the cradle of civilization. But the textbooks tell our children nothing about the great contributions of Afro Americans to the growth and development of this country.”
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Malcolm offered an aspirational and optimistic vision of what Black education could and should look like, as well as the transformative role that Black educators had to play in making that vision real. Similarly, the BPP’s 10th point shows what could have been, what could still be, if we embrace, elevate, and empower Black educators and children in our public schools.
“We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology,” it stated. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
As Black educators, we must also seek to build our own forms of empowerment. Black education is a justice that remains delayed and thereby denied. We can only access a just education if we — as Black teachers, principals, and communities — claim our agency and fight for the preservation of it for our students.
Sharif El-Mekki is the founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Black Educator Development. The Center’s mission is to build the Black Teacher Pipeline to achieve educational equity and racial justice. El-Mekki is a nationally-recognized principal and U.S. Department of Education Principal Ambassador Fellow. He’s also a blogger on Phillys7thWard, a member of the 8 Black Hands podcast, and serves on several boards and committees focused on educational and racial justice.