By Mark Gaskins

We Never Waited for Permission. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, before Brown v. Board, and before anyone in power decided our children deserved an education, we were already teaching each other.

In his book The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, historian James D. Anderson documents something that should stop every Black parent cold. We did not wait. While it was illegal for us to read, while the full weight of American law was designed to keep us in darkness, we built schools anyway.

In 1861, Mary Peake held class under an oak tree outside Fortress Monroe, Virginia. She taught enslaved people to read in defiance of Virginia law. That tree still stands. It is called the Emancipation Oak. Her classroom had no walls and no protection. It had courage and community.

She was not alone. The Pioneer School of Freedom was established in New Orleans in 1860, before the Civil War ended. A school in Savannah, Georgia, operated from 1833 to 1865, led by a Black woman named Deveaux, quietly and deliberately, for over three decades. Anderson’s research reveals that many of these schools predated the Civil War entirely. Formerly enslaved people had already built educational collectives, staffed entirely by Black educators, governed entirely by Black communities. And critically, they were not willing to let their educational movement be controlled by, in their own words, “civilized Yankees” or white institutions.

Read that again. Before Lincoln signed anything. Before any federal policy acknowledged our humanity, we had already developed systems for instruction, for community, for the future of our children. Independent, self-determined, ours, and then America noticed. And America moved to take it.

A Pattern We Should Know By Now

Integration did not save what we built. It consumed it. Over 38,000 Black educators were displaced after desegregation. The schools, the culture, the self-determined educational infrastructure our ancestors bled to create, were absorbed into a system that was never redesigned to honor them.

A century after Reconstruction, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense built something again. Free breakfast programs feed children before school. Community health clinics serve people that the medical system has ignored. A self-determined infrastructure of care, built by the people, for the people.

The U.S. government surveilled it, disrupted it, and systematically dismantled it. There is a pattern here that we have to name plainly. Every time Black people build something that works, something that centers our children and our community without asking for permission, the system finds a way to co-opt it, contain it, or destroy it.

Because a self-determined Black community is not a problem the system knows how to manage. This system has a strategy. It leverages our absence. It divides our presence. And all the while, it drains the essence of our children, replacing their identity with compliance and their curiosity with survival. We have been here before. And we have always known how to respond.

“Before Lincoln signed anything. Before any federal policy acknowledged our humanity, we had already developed systems for instruction, for community, for the future of our children.”

What Organized Parents Can Still Do

Nothing about us, without us, can be for us. That truth is not new. What is new is the urgency of acting on it now, within the very institutions built to exclude us.

A small group of parents in one California school district decided they were done watching their Black children be underfunded in a district that had money available to do better. They did not protest and leave. They learned the legislation governing how school districts must allocate funding for their highest-need students. They read the budget documents. They joined site councils and district committees. They showed up to board meetings after board meetings, not to vent but to educate, advocate, and hold the administration accountable to the law.

That small, unified group redirected $1.8 million toward programs explicitly focused on Black student success. Not a grant. Not a donation. Public money that was always supposed to serve their children is finally being required to do exactly that.

This is what our ancestors understood that we sometimes forget. A united and informed community is very hard for a system to manipulate. Not impossible. But hard. And every barrier we dismantle together makes the next one weaker.

It’s Time To Walk Back In

Your child’s school needs you in the room. Not as a volunteer at the bake sale. As a governing voice. As the kind of organized, informed, unified parent presence that systems have always feared and always moved to neutralize. Walk in like you belong there, because your ancestors built the blueprint long before the building existed.

Now here is the how:

• Learn the legislation. Every state has funding formulas that require money to follow high-need students. That language is your leverage. Find it. Learn it. Use it.
• Read your school’s budget. Ask for the Single Plan for Student Achievement. It is a public document. It tells you exactly where money is going and who it is supposed to serve.
• Show up before there is a crisis. Consistency builds credibility. The parent who shows up every month carries more weight than one who appears only when something goes wrong.
• Join the committees where decisions are made. School Site Councils. Budget subcommittees. District advisory committees. These are not formalities. They are where agendas get shaped.
• Stay unified. A divided parent community is easy to manage. A unified one is impossible to ignore.

The Village Method is a pathway toward reclaiming exactly what our ancestors built: a self-determined, community-owned system for raising our children. One that cannot be taken from us because the people carry it. We built this before. We know how. It is time to build it again.

Author

Mark Gaskins is an education strategist, community organizer, and co-founder of The Village Method, a power-building organization serving families in the San Francisco Bay Area and Atlanta metro region. Learn more at thevillagemethod.org.