Originally posted July 28th, 2016.

I’m currently researching and drafting a post on the killing of Charles Smith Jr. in North Little Rock. All the media pictures I see of him are school related–him smiling in class, in graduation regalia. I’ve an educator and have been for the last decade, and it hurts me to see a 17 year old student die in such a way.

I saw the video released by the North Little Rock Police Department; the struggle, Smith nearly killing his friends and police with his random and desperate shooting. I’ve read the stories of his alleged criminal record. And I heard the silence after the dashboard video was released. The local activists community quieted their anger. The police department and their supporters retreated into smugness and rectitude. I was offended by all of this. The exploration of the full circumstances that lead to Charles Smith Jr., a child on the cusp of manhood, being blown away ceased.

My outlining led me back to this old piece and to something Nikole Hannah-Jones mentioned regarding Michael Brown and the crucible that shaped his personhood. Her quote is the guiding light of my upcoming post on Smith. Please enjoy. 

I came to Atlanta this week to receive good doctrine. I was in town for the annual KIPP School Summit, an annual professional development/religious-like revival for educators working at KIPP schools nationwide. Our organization’s leaders firmly declared #blacklivesmatter. After our opening ceremonies, we held a candlelight vigil for our dead felled by police brutality.

This was my fourth summit and my most focused. I had used my previous summits to hobnob with the elite in swanky hotels, overflowing glasses of malbec in my right hand. I confused my job for service, and thus busied myself in animal pursuits for power, influence, and recognition. But Philando Castile’s stepdaughter and millions on Facebook Live watched him bleed out in the front of his car. I’m now working hard to put down my insecurities regarding recognition down. I want to serve.

At Summit, we hosted two erudite, confident black women—journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Isabel Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Hannah-Jones writes extensively about race and school segregation, a process that’s accelerated after Brown v. Board of Ed as white flight led to majority black school populations in public education. “For black parents,” she said, “they always have to choose what struggle they want for their children when it comes to school choice. Should my child be a lone voice in a white school? Or should they go to a poor school surrounded by people and leaders who look like my daughter?” School choice for black folk, like most of our interactions with American institutions, is riven with inequality.

Hannah-Jones posed a challenge to us educators in all black schools: that integrated schools—not segregated or desegregated schools (a desegregated school will often have black children, but no black teachers or leaders)—are the only solution worthy for black folk to pursue. “High performing schools in poor black communities are only an escape hatch for a few kids. While I love KIPP, operating segregated schools is not a scalable solution.” She then linked segregated schools to #blacklivesmatter:

Mike Brown cannot be separated from his school system. He graduated from the most segregated school system in his state- a school that had at one point lost its accreditation, and was on track to go to a predatory trade school. Yet he had made it through a system designed to inhibit his success.

My school is far from failing. But what opportunities, exactly, can segregated schools hope to pipeline to in the long run? Where did it lead Michael Brown? I believe the only true strategy for integration is reparations; they, however, are not forthcoming. I also believe segregated communities need excellent schools; I am currently training for this responsibility. But now I feel a gnawing lack of imagination.  Shouldn’t I be fighting harder for my obsolesce? In a more just nation, I would be a leader of a school of a rainbow—rather than a monotone—of children, in a school system that would not dump out its survivors to be killed by police without scrutiny.

I’m not sure how to pursue this goal. Wilkerson reminded me that I am grappling with an ancient, ungraceful reality of the American experiment. Her book follows three black people as they leave the South during the Great Migration. It is an unabashedly black book, yet Wilkerson asserts that the book is ultimately about “freedom and the things people will do to get it.” Black people, she argues, became political refugees after 12 generations of slavery and a century of Jim Crow. They were immigrants in their own land, seeking asylum, and America cannot forget the human toll that took on black folk; Wilkerson pugnaciously said, to chuckles and applause, that “I do not write about segregated water foundations on bathrooms because any second grader after February can talk about that.”

Among the anecdotes she gave on the black souls that fled their fatherland, one stood out. She talked about how Richard Wright fled the South to the North. He eventually fled the North—found himself trapped in a similar, segregated community that Michael Brown would eventually find himself years later—to France. And at the end of his life, he was seeking to flee France for England. “He never stopped searching for the warmth of other suns,” Wilkerson mused. He never stopped running for a place where a government and society would fully allow the flowering of his talent.

I cannot fault Wright and the other dead black men and women for moving to find their sun. They lived in a different time where staying put either meant the abolition of their talents or death. I feel their lives have a doctrine embedded into their struggles. Other suns do not exist; the one shining above our heads in Atlanta and Ferguson has always belonged to us. The work now is to make sure that we can enjoy its rays in places not separated by race and reduced opportunities.