Academy will overcome drive to erase Black education

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”; Barack Obama wrote, “The Audacity of Hope.” Two more disparate writers may not be found, yet they both — a white, reclusive, female, poet, and a Black, male public servant — offer similar insights as to the resilience of hope.

As founder of The Academy SPS, and as its outgoing executive director, I, too, see the need for resilience that yields hope. The Academy SPS has encountered strong headwinds in the past few months that would have left a lesser organization in tatters. When people ask me how I’m doing, the pity implied, they expect for me to say that The Academy is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do face significant challenges: Our funding was rescinded and we are banned from recruiting students in the schools. Those two things alone could cause an organization, after 36 years of impactful service, to concede. But to be a nonprofit means to be strapped for funds, and with regard to recruiting students, my mother used to say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  Buy Photo

I am not being glib. Our mission is both serious and crucial, but anyone who knows their history knows that to be Black means to struggle. It also means not to give up, perhaps what was expected when those two roadblocks were placed in our way. Our historic tenacity as a people is cause for the attempted erasure of Black education in the U.S. The irony is that if we were not tenacious, there would be no need to try to dismantle a tiny organization using Civil Rights law as rationale. This edict has less to do with discriminating against white students (DOE words) than it has to do with the fear of confident, educated Black ones.

I am, nonetheless, hopeful. Hopeful that The Academy will persist and grow. Hopeful that a new executive director will bring vigor to the organization. Hopeful that students and parents will see the value in learning a history that will be suppressed if we — all of us — do not work to keep it alive.

Hope is fragile. “ … a thing with feathers.” It must also be bold — audacious — in order to persevere. Those of us in The Academy SPS are hopeful in the new year that with the coalescence of the community, we will continue to garner strong support, and soldier on.

Dr. Ruth White is founder and executive director of The Academy for Scholastic and Personal Success.