Acknowledgements
Black people have profoundly enriched my life since the beginning. Some of my earliest memories are of the Black women who taught me in pre-school while living in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands with my late mother. I was the only white child in an all Black school and felt so welcomed and loved, quite the opposite experience of many Black children in predominantly white schools and other spaces.
Upon moving back to the mainland U.S. in the early 1980s, my mother enrolled me at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I was taught in Kindergarten and first grade by Dr. Randolph Ward, former San Diego County Superintendent of Schools. He was a very tall, handsome and proud man who donned an afro and appeared to be Black Jesus to this fatherless girl.
At Amherst Regional High School, my 10th grade U.S. history teacher, Dr. Gaylord Saulsberry, took me under his wing as a mentor, having recognized a passionate interest in history and matters of social justice. He reinforced that Black history is U.S. history and should be taught year-round. It was there that I joined People of Color United to learn allyship and better understand my own white privilege.
From the porch of my childhood home, I could see the W.E.B. Du Bois research library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the tallest east of the Mississippi River. It was there that I designed my own interdisciplinary major in Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies under the guidance of Black women scholars in the social sciences such as Dr. Alexandrina Deschamps and Dr. Carlene Edie who visited me in person when I returned home after two decades following the tragic murder of my mother.
In due time and throughout these writings, I will be able to properly acknowledge all of those individuals and circumstances that contributed to my decision to fully pivot away from predominantly white male institutions of higher education. The decision to teach Black history in a state openly hostile to it is an ancestral calling that has brought me back to my roots as a trained practitioner of education.