Teaching the Children How to Fly

Black August is typically seen as a time for deep reflection for the adult. I have been sitting with this idea about where does the Black child fit within the historical, physical and spiritual narrative of Black August? That is not an easy question to answer because this country was created from stealing, killing, and erasing the narratives, stories, and histories of those who came before the colonization. To have such an origin story…it is why I will be forever grateful to be born Black and to have the cosmic task of working with Black children and families because our mere existence is a daily reminder of the power of prayer, spiritual protection, and radical love.

When I think about the Black political prisoners and freedom fighters we remember each Black August, I keep arriving at the same truth, their liberation could never fit inside the container of America because our vision of our liberation is too large. Freedom should be our birthright and this country has spent centuries writing laws to shrink it but you cannot legislate away a radiance you did not birth. Our ancestors’ blood has already paid the cost America has set for our freedom. Our bodies nourished the soil, laid the roads, built the buildings and gave the intellect that this nation still runs on. Black August is the season we remember those truths through the process of fasting, studying, and training.

As my mind works through the question I had at the beginning, “where does the Black child fit within the historical, physical and spiritual narrative of Black August?” I gathered people and their writings to sit with me as I spent days tugging at the edges of this question. I am grateful for the thinkers, artists, and truthtellers who committed enough to their calling to put their words, visions, and stories on the page. The ripple effect of obedience to one’s calling creates a lighted path for those who will walk behind you. I will introduce them one by one, not like an academic paper. I want to show you the folks I have been sitting with at my kitchen table during my early mornings writing sessions, while the children are still asleep and I can enjoy my coffee hot.

Black August was born in California prisons to honor George Jackson who was sent to prison at eighteen for a seventy-dollar gas-station robbery, given a sentence of one year to life, and he spent 11 consecutive years behind bars, most of those years were in solitary confinement, 23 and half hours a day, inside the California prison system. It was there he became a revolutionary thinker, a field marshal of the Black Panther Party, and one of the most disciplined minds of his generation. He was killed by guards at San Quentin in 1971, at twenty-nine years old, a week after finishing the book, Blood in my Eye. Jackson speaks about how a revolution should feel without using the lens of theory from a comfortable location, he was speaking from a place where humanity was stripped.

He had once admired a cold and ruthless revolutionary catechism, and he came to reject it because it was, in his words, “too cold, very much like the fascist psychology.” In its place he believed, “revolution should be love-inspired” (Jackson, 1972, p. 3). The revolution should be fueled by love of what America was built to deny. It is not about Black people having a list of grievances. It is about remembering and reclaiming ownership.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a historian with a focus on Black radical movements, has a similar sentiment. In his book, Freedom Dreams, he shares, "the catalyst for political engagement has never been misery, poverty, or oppression. People are drawn to social movements because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited" (p. 2). He is not being sentimental because suffering does not produce movements, the dream does. Kelley says his own politics has "more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off about the present," because "the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us" (p. 3). This tells me the freedom dream is not the reward waiting at the end of the struggle, it is the fuel. And if a child's imagination is where the map to the new world is drawn, then a room that feeds that imagination is not separate from the work of liberation. It is where the work begins. This is the method, not a feel-good philosophy because Black August continues to ask the most radical question, how do we keep the dream of the new world alive and within our grasp long enough to build it?

In Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival,” I share the first two stanzas of it because she is writing from the fullness of her identity as a Black mother and she is sharing a reality that many of us have to hold. She writes:

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours;

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive

(Lorde, 1978).

When I read her work, I feel that tug and the heaviness to not let the child’s dreams be shaped by the adult’s fear. Fear can be passed down so early that it feels like being born Black in America, fear is part of your inheritance. The work that we must do is to alchemize that fear and interrupt that transmission in order to bless our children with a future instead of a narrative of fear.

This brings me back to Blood in My Eye. In the preface, George’s father speaks about Jonathan, his brother, who was killed at 17. He said, “I taught him how to walk; I wanted to teach him how to fly” (Armstrong, 1972, p. xvi). That is the entire pedagogy of liberation in a single breath, spoken by a grieving father about a lost son. The only question that matters is whether we teach them to walk carefully within the confines of America about what is right and deserving of the Black body according to the laws of the land or teach them, from the very beginning, that they were made for the air.

To answer the question that Black August continues to ask each generation, how do we keep the dream of the new world alive and within our grasp long enough to build it? Discipline is my first response. Discipline is vital to any movement and it needs to be nurtured. Spirit alone is not enough and Jackson said it plainly to those who thought ideology, strategy or tactics were unnecessary. To think “being a warrior is quite enough,” he warned, is to end up “washing cars, or unclaimed bodies in the city-state’s morgue” because “without discipline or direction” the fighting spirit dissipates into nothing (Jackson, 1972, p. 3). I read this as a word to educators. When Black August calls us to fight, fast, and train, the training is not the incidental part; it is the part that lasts. For me, discipline is what gives love its direction. A nurtured child is not an undisciplined child. A nurtured child is one whose discipline grows from being in an environment that understands the holistic development of the individual with Black love and pride at its core.

This brings me right to the talk about place and the containers that we create within a structure. Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis work in a growing field called Black Geographies. This field of study believes that Black people have always made space and place, even where the district lines and county laws insisted we did not belong. Hawthorne and Lewis gave me language for what a school can be. Their argument starts with a refusal: traditional geography has tended to render Black spaces either invisible because Black place-making goes unacknowledged or hypervisible as sites of pathology, "underserved, and otherwise lacking." Against that deficit view, they insist that Blackness is not only a subjectivity that experiences the world but "a situating force, a place-making apparatus" that makes its location "more meaningful, more substantial, more human" (Hawthorne & Lewis, 2023, p. 5). Black people do not simply occupy space; we produce it. This circles back to D.G Kelley’s mother's belief that she instilled within her children "that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers" (Kelley, 2002, p. 2). That is how I see educational spaces. School does not simply hold children. It is a place that can actively co-create the future day after day, with the children, families, and community.

How I see Black August as a parent, educator, community member, school founder, and administrator is seeing the freedom that our political prisoners protected inside their minds is connected to a similar freedom that we try to protect for our children. It asks us to protect that fullness with the discipline of people who know exactly what is at stake. It asks us to make our classrooms into Black geographies, places actively created and oriented toward a world that does not yet exist. There is no waiting for the revolution, we are co-creating and building it with the children. We are not only remembering freedom fighters this Black August. We are raising the generation who learned how to fly young. The container which is America can never hold the fullness of our liberation. It was never meant to but our task is to teach the children how to fly before anyone convinces them they were made to stay on the ground and to have the discipline, critical thought and the love to build the sky we are pointing them toward.

References

Armstrong, G. (1972). Preface. In G. L. Jackson, Blood in my eye (pp. ix–xvii). Random House.

Hawthorne, C., & Lewis, J. S. (2023). Black geographies: Material praxis of Black life and study. In C. Hawthorne & J. S. Lewis (Eds.), The Black geographic: Praxis, resistance, futurity (pp. 1–24). Duke University Press.

Jackson, G. L. (1972). Blood in my eye. Random House.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Beacon Press.

Lorde, A. (1978). A litany for survival. In The collected poems of Audre Lorde. W. W. Norton. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147275/a-litany-for-survival