Education comes in many forms. From community altar building toolkits to political education events, these stories feature Black people teaching skills, lessons, recipes, and ways of being.
Education
Zenobia Thompson, a nurse at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, became a leader in the effort to keep the hospital from closing in 1977. Homer G. Phillips Hospital was the only hospital for black patients in St. Louis during segregation and still cared for primarily black patients after desegregation. It was also the first black teaching hospital west of the Mississippi river and by 1961 had taught that most black doctors and nurses in the world. Thompson organized campaigns to keep the hospital open, but despite her efforts, it was closed in 1979. Thompson continued her activism after the hospital’s closure and in 2019 was awarded the Lifetime Achiever in Healthcare Award and the Martin Luther King Award for her efforts.
In 1915 Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, began National Negro Health Week, with which he aimed to develop and extend helpful health activities in black communities. The campaign organized cleanup and sanitation committees, sermons on health from pastors, and speeches from physicians. Washington placed the most emphasis on good sanitation and hygiene practices to prevent the spread of disease. The National Negro Health week campaign eventually gained support from the U.S. Public Health Service and now is a nationwide black health program.
E. Kitch Childs was a therapist in Oakland, CA (until 1991) who practiced feminist therapy to combat the abuses black women faced in the US. She ran her private practice from her home to make patients feel more comfortable and preferred group therapy to create a sense of community for clients who had once been alienated. Her practice also operated on a sliding scale that went down to $0/hr so that she could see the most marginalized patients. Childs also advocated for the decriminalization of sex work and advocated against antisemitism. In the few years before she died, Childs lived in Europe where she advocated for the rights of women of color and the erasure of systematic racism with approaches that don’t hinge on eliciting guilt.
Black Disabled Creatives is an organization dedicated to pushing for the representation of black disabled-creators in society at large. They also act as a platform for these creatives, showcasing opportunities and providing a network of other disabled creators in industries ranging from marketing and advertising to film and entertainment. The group also provides resources such as information on arts organizations that focus on disabled creators, creative tools, and resources on web accessibility.
Dreaming Out Loud is a DC-based organization that seeks to rebuild community-based food systems in the predominantly black, urban areas of Washington, DC. DOL also offers entrepreneurship training and workforce development to combat food insecurity and establish financial stability. The organization has created a pipeline from community farming and food distribution to economic opportunity and community wealth with its practices.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was formed as a coalition of multiple civil rights groups SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC, and other groups. They were majorly active in the South, especially in Mississippi, and played a pivotal role in charting the future of the Mississippi movement. In 1965, COFO represented one of the largest single collections of civil rights workers working on the largest group of programs any civil rights drive in history had ever undertaken.
On December 1964, a leaflet went out to families in the Roxbury community, reading "DO YOU WANT 27 POUNDS OF FREE FOOD? COME TO A MEETING . . ." Thirty women showed up, and returned in a few days with 1500 signatures on a petition asking for the distribution of surplus food in Boston. Fifty mothers delivered the demand to Mayor Collins, who promised the food by March 1. The mayor failed to deliver.
Students of the Afro-American Society, Native Americans at Dartmouth group, and The Latino Forum spray painted the annual Winter Carnival ice sculpture in red and black to "make clear to the whole student body our dissatisfaction with the manner in which we, as minorities students at Dartmouth, are treated." The red and black paint symbolized "the unrecognized presence of other ethnic groups on this campus."
In the fall of 2015, Black students created a Black Lives Matter display in Collis Student Center, which featured shirts hung to represent the numerous Black lives lost to police brutality. This display was promptly defaced and torn down by other Dartmouth students soon after its enactment. The demolition of this exhibition spurred the larger Black Lives Matter protest on campus that followed soon after. The predominately Black group of 150 students held a protest demonstration in Baker-Berry Library in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to call out the defacement of the display.