Building the Black Educator Pipeline

Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons has been a domestic and international human rights activist for 60 years. Beginning as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as Director of European programs for the American Friends Service Committee, Michael’s work has taken him to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. For 18 years, he co-founded and ran the Ráday Salon, an independent human rights learning and discussion program in Budapest, Hungary. He also taught courses on African American History and US Elections at the Budapest campus of McDaniel College.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ph.D

Dr. Simmons is a retired Professor Emerita in African American and Religious Studies and affiliated Faculty in Women Studies at the University of Florida. She obtained her BA from Antioch University in Human Service, her MA in Religious Studies & her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pa.

Simmons became active in the Civil Rights Movement during her freshman year at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1962. She became a SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) field secretary two years later in the summer of 1964 when she joined hundreds of other college-age volunteers who traveled to Mississippi to work in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Since her years with SNCC, Simmons has served as an organizer with the National Council of Negro Women, serving as their Mid-West Field Director for their Project Woman Power and later with the American Friends Service Committee, where she held a number of program and administrative jobs for over 20 years.

Dr. James D. Anderson, the renowned author of The Education of Blacks in the South 1860-1935, and Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joins Building the Black Educator Pipeline to discuss the history of Black education in this country.

Dr. Anderson's scholarship focuses broadly on the history of U.S. education, with a subfield in the history of African American education. In this episode, he shares what inspired him to become a researcher into the history of Black education and his own life journey. He shares the history of Black people working to build their own system of education and the obstacles they faced along the way. 

Host Shayna Terrell and Dr. Anderson discuss competing educational philosophies for Black folks in the South, and how we see some of the same debates in modern discourse. They discuss the politics that went along with fighting for improved education for Black students and compare the current state of education with the past. 

Finally, Dr. Anderson shares what he believes is leading to the attacks on African-American studies, as well as the increase in book bans, and censorship of certain curriculums throughout the country. 

James D. Anderson is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In 2021, Anderson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest honor societies in the nation. He was sworn into the Board of Trustees at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and inducted into the Stillman College Educator Hall of Fame—both in 2020.

Additionally, the AERA awarded him a Presidential Citation in 2020, its highest award. In 2012, Anderson was selected as a Fellow for Outstanding Research by the AERA and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Anderson was also elected to the National Academy of Education in 2008.

Dr. Bettina Love is an educator who teaches, writes, researches, and advocates at the intersection of racism, education, and abolition. She is the author of the book We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. 

Dr. Love joins the show to discuss what abolitionist teaching means to her, and the work of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, whose  mission is "to develop and support those in the struggle for educational liberation by utilizing the intellectual work and direct action of Abolitionists in many forms." She also shares what inspired her to write her new book “Punished for Dreaming.”

Dr. Love and host Shayna Terrell discuss the education reform movement and what it will take to achieve educational equity. They also consider what education reparations could look like and how we can advocate for them. 

Finally, Bettina shares how hip-hop can be implemented into education and how schools can be more inclusive of diverse populations. 

Dr. Bettina Love:

Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and the bestselling author of We Want To Do More Than Survive. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate. A co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN), whose mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities, they have granted over $250,000 to abolitionists around the country. She is also a founding member of the Task Force that launched the program In Her Hands, distributing more than $15 million to Black women living in Georgia. In Her Hands is one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S. Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. In 2018, she was granted a resolution by Georgia's House of Representatives for her impact on the field of education. You can preorder her new book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal wherever books are sold.

Dr. Greg Carr, associate professor of Africana Studies and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University rejoins the Building the Black Educator Pipeline Podcast to give us a history lesson on the life and legacy of Martin Delany. Dr. Carr explains why Delany is considered an icon in Black nationalist thought and contrasts him to modern-day activists.

Dr. Carr and host Shayna Terrell discuss the connection to academic work in today's social movements and lay out strategies that ancestors would have used to address the crisis of education and curriculum today. Dr. Carr gives his thoughts on the movement to ban books and exclude topics from the curriculum in schools and the effort to erase parts of our history. 

Shayna and Dr. Carr talk about how we can get students active in engaging with these education bills across the country. They also discuss the NAACP's recent "travel advisory" to Florida, calling the state hostile to Black Americans. 

Dr. Khalilah Harris leads the education policy team at Center for American Progress and is a non-resident senior fellow with the Maryland Center on Economic Policy. She’s worked on expanding access to educational opportunity, community organizing, youth advocacy and building an inclusive workforce while viewing those challenges through a racial equity lens. Dr. Harris served as first Deputy Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans during the Obama administration and led the development and implementation of the first White House Summit on Diversity and Inclusion in Government. 

In addition to being a proud alum of Morgan State University, she also obtained a law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law, and a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. Her most important role is mom to three beautiful daughters.