I don’t recall what provoked me, well into adulthood, to ask my parents what the hardest part of their more than 50-year journey together had been. It was an impromptu inquiry spurred by nothing in particular, but I remember how astonished I was by their answer. “Choosing schools for our Black children,” they said, with no hesitation and in full agreement, as though they had considered and resolved this question long before I asked.
By the time I arrived in the 1980s, the American schooling landscape was still a rocky racial terrain of post-segregation, and lagged far behind the fair and equal education promised by 1954’s Brown v Board of Education decision. My parents are fortunate and had the means to opt in to private schools, but they decided that independent schools were responsible solely for the academic preparation of their children. They would be the ones to supplement the cultural curriculum about Black life and heritage that was also required for their daughters’ development.
