Black Mothers Forum (BMF) was founded in 2016 to combat institutional racism, including disproportionate discipline, unrepresentative curricula, and racial bullying in Phoenix-area schools. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted public education, the organization launched a network of microschools as outposts of this mission. These microschools were…

Racial discrimination has major implications for African American families and their young children. Considered to be an adverse childhood experience, persistent racial discrimination can lead to toxic stress, physiological changes in the body, and increased morbidity. In this article, the authors review how racial discrimination impacts the…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

Founded by mothers long concerned about the safety and welfare of their Black children, Black Mothers Forum (BMF) is an Arizona-based education advocacy group that responded to the COVID-19 crisis by launching two microschools for Black families in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2021. BMF partnered with Prenda, a well-known microschool provider, but…

"The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism" presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents,…

Black families and White families are affected by autism in different ways. Little scholarship acknowledges these differences, especially those communicated by Black fathers of students with autism. In this article, I share an evocative autoethnography which highlights how my cultural, familial, and occupational identities intersect and confound…

In light of contemporary school choice proposals and the 60th anniversary of the Southern Manifesto, the Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools crisis provides interesting historical discussion. Prince Edward County (PEC), a rural community in central Virginia, was one of five school districts represented in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of…

Literacy is one of the strongest predictors of adult success, yet one in four children are illiterate and 50% of adults cannot read a book that is written on an eighth grade level. Although African American children from low-income homes are three times more likely than White children to be poor, and at greater risk for illiteracy, this author is…

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor and cultural critic, has been so prolific as a writer that the idea of fitting his essential works into a single volume of a manageable size seems preposterous. It has been done, however, in the recently published "The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader." The Gates reader contains his favorite stories which…

Together, Samuel L. Myers Sr. and Jr. prove that the apple tree, when properly nurtured in the rich intellectual orchards of academia, will bear prime fruit that lands close to its roots. The Doctors Myers both earned bachelor's degrees from Morgan State University and then ventured to Boston for their Ph.D.s in economics. Though their specialties…

Strong, positive coparenting alliances play adaptive functions in a wide variety of family systems. For unmarried, expectant parents in nonromantic relationships, impediments to developing a positive coparenting alliance are formidable. However, these obstacles must be overcome if unmarried fathers are to stay engaged and coparent their child…

In their seminal work "Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences," Prendergast et al. (2009). point out that: "[t]he need for a plurality of methods that can be applied to individual research projects on the human condition has never had a stronger calling than it does now ... [p]oetic methods are qualitative and call for…

Educators often do not recognize biliteracy and bidialectalism in African American Language (AAL) speakers. Chronicling the experiences of twin four/five-year old AAL and emergent Standard English speakers, we discuss the importance of recognizing and building on the routines and identities of African American children and families. We present…

Mainstream education often misunderstands the ways that some rural black families display involvement in their children's lives. Teachers may tend to attribute children's academic struggles to what they perceived as a lack of care, concern, and involvement of the families. Such views could keep children from reaching and exceeding their potential,…

Using the lessons learned from mistakes made in their earlier clinical work with African American families, through the lens of Multicultural Counseling and Therapy theory, these culturally diverse practitioners use reflections from their counseling experiences to offer clinicians a people-responsive, diversity-sensitive framework and provide…