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
The Harlem Writers Guild was a collection of Black writers that would meet together to discuss constructive criticism of their works. The Guild allowed black writers to develop their crafts as well and was a vehicle to push for the publication and spread of black literary works that were marginalized in the larger literary world.
Stevie Wonder, as an avid supporter of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote his own version of the happy birthday song in tribute to MLK to support the push to make his birthday a national holiday. With a funky beat and lyrics commemorating Dr. King and his actions, the song came to stand as not only a birthday song but also as a civil rights anthem and song of hope for black people across the country.
In 1972, Florian Jenkins, a black artist was hired by Dartmouth College to paint a series of murals in the El Hajj Malik El Shabazz Temple. Jenkins designed the themes of each mural with Dartmouth students, taking into consideration the life of Malcolm X and the struggles that black people continue to face in life. The murals range in subject matter, from tributes to the vast indigenous cultures and traditions of Africa to images of people and events from Malcolm X’s life. The murals are a strong visual tribute to the radical black progression initiated by Malcolm X as well as the strong cultural heritage all black people hail from.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.
Urban Bush Women (UBW) began in 1984 to support artists, activists, and their communities via performance and community engagement. The organization uses dance to communicate stories of the African diaspora from a woman-centered perspective. UBW utilizes performance and artist development to celebrate the diasporic experience to foster community and build trusting relationships amongst people.
When he was a student at Howard University, the late Chadwick Boseman could not afford to cover his tuition in the midsummer program at the British American Drama Academy. Denzel Washington covered his tuition so that he was able to attend, and Chadwick Boseman later famously said that “There is no Black Panther without Denzel Washington.”
In July 2020, the Gertrude Robinson Network Group within the Society for Ethnomusicology began hosting “Wisdom Wednesdays,” monthly zoom gatherings featuring senior ethnomusicology scholars sharing knowledge from their lives and careers more junior scholars as well as graduate and undergraduate students. These monthly sessions serve as check ins for Black scholars in ethnomusicology, who are often isolated from each other in their own universities and organizations. Wisdom Wednesdays operate as a reunion of sorts, where people can come together and share stories before going out to face the day again.