For retired teachers and couple Charles and Queen Laureen Butler, the eighth annual “Know Thyself Book Fair and Author’s Forum” represents an ongoing endeavor to foster intergenerational bonds in D.C.’s Black community while boosting young people’s literacy and African consciousness.
Long after D.C.’s Black veteran teacher force dwindled under D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Queen Laureen Butler counts among those fighting to keep young people connected with elder scholars. She said time’s of the essence, especially for Black students still matriculating through a local education system unlike the one she left nearly 15 years ago.
“I have friends in different school systems, who are getting more and more frustrated with what’s happening,” said Butler, who’s organizing the annual book fair in her capacity as UNIA-ACL Woodson Banneker Jackson Bey Division 330’s education committee co-chair.
By the time Butler retired in 2011, she had nearly 40 years of experience under her belt with stints as a K-12 and special education instructor in public schools throughout the District. As she recounted to The Informer, she and her colleagues, when given time and some level of autonomy, often created programs proven to effectively boost student attendance, and reading and writing fluency.
She questioned the degree to which the District public school students of today could say they are learning from an experienced, racially conscious Black teacher.
“When I was leaving, [D.C. Public Schools] brought in a lot of Teach for America teachers,” Mrs. Butler said. “People think teaching is easy, but it’s not. The system was dying, and COVID almost destroyed it. We have to bring our children back on track.”
Recognizing a Local Bookstore for Its Work with Young People
On Feb. 1, visitors at Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage will, once again, have a chance to peruse a slew of literary works written by well-regarded African authors, poets and scholars in the D.C. metropolitan area. In years past, guests purchased books and interacted with the likes of Danny Queen, a poet who recorded Dr. Frances Cress Welsing’s lectures for years. They also heard from historian-novelist Dr. Nubia Kai.
This year’s book fair and author’s forum, also sponsored by Heritage Gallery and Thurgood Marshall Center Trust, will take place weeks after the Biden administration issued a posthumous pardon of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a Black nationalist and UNIA-ACL founder wrongly convicted of mail fraud. Authors featured include cultural historian Anthony Browder, attorney-activist Nkechi Taifa and Dr. Shantella Sherman, a historian and journalist who interprets eugenic themes in popular culture.
Guests will also have a chance to see Sankofa Video Books & Cafe in Northwest and the now shuttered Children of the Sun Bookstore, along with Everyone’s Place Bookstore and Black Classic Press in Baltimore, receive recognition as institutions continuing to educate the public about movements, past, present and future, to liberate African people.
Since 1998, bookworms and budding scholars have frequented Sankofa, Video Books & Cafe, their store of choice along Georgia Avenue in Northwest. Haile Gerima and Shirikiana Aina Gerima named the business after Haile Gerima’s award-winning 1993 film, “Sankofa.” As other Black-owned bookstores, and businesses for that matter, continue to fall victim to gentrification and displacement, Sankofa, located in an increasingly expensive part of the District, secured property tax relief from the D.C. government while expanding its collection of books.
Shirikiana Aina Gerima told The Informer that children and young adult titles — including Cheryl Willis Hudson’s “When I Hear Spirituals” and Andrea Davis Pinckney’s “Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters” — count among the majority of the bookstore’s inventory.
“We try to stand by that responsibility [to children] by keeping our children’s literature collection as large as we can. It is there to remind children that the world is theirs,” Gerima said as she mentioned the bookstore’s engagement of District public school students.
With Howard University across the street, Sankofa Video, Books & Cafe has also become a popular meeting spot for undergraduates, professionals and activists yearning to learn their history and organize for self-determination.
“Every year brings another crop of students hungry after coming out of school systems not knowing about a Black world,” Gerima told The Informer. “We directly and indirectly have that link and that commitment to the young people.”
Bridging the Gap Between the Schools and Greater Community
Within a matter of years, District public and public charter school graduates are anticipated to experience a social studies curriculum revamp, courtesy of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, D.C. State Board of Education, District teachers, administrators and community members.
The new standards, finalized this school year, focus on instruction about North America’s First Nations, world geography, and American history up until the Reconstruction Era.
Eighth graders and high school students, some of whom attend public schools that’ve undergone a programmatic redesign, will engage in project-based learning as they explore D.C., U.S., and global history. Amid a global social justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s murder, DCPS has also provided more opportunities for students to learn Black history. Middle schoolers recently met Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Lesley Lounge at on-campus events facilitated by An Open Book Foundation that followed youth’s extensive reading of both authors’ middle-school level works.
Kendi and Lounge exposed students to author and Hoodooist Zora Neale Hurston, Middle Passage survivor Kudjoe Lewis, and 18th century Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano.
Though public school officials tout these programs, and high-impact tutoring, as the engine behind the school system’s post-pandemic recovery, some people, like Charles Butler, still point out reading and writing gaps that he said existed throughout his 40-year teaching career.
Butler, a retired college professor with experience teaching photography at University of the District of Columbia, said that some of the young people entering college from the District public and public charter schools often struggled to piece together sentences and paragraphs while taking his course.
That dilemma, he said, inspired a plan of action that included mandatory weekly journal entries. He said those assignments increased students’ writing stamina and attendance.
“They turned in those papers to me as part of the photography experience,” Mr. Butler told The Informer. “They’d write about what they photographed, how and why they selected the pictures and subjects in their photography, and how that increased their ability to read and write. At the end, they had a notebook full of information about subjects and they were able to speak in the photographic language about an image’s composition.”
Butler said Pan-African and nationalist formations, like the UNIA-ACL, deserve an opportunity to continue such work in DCPS and District public charter schools. However, he lamented the possibility of public school officials not being amenable to viewpoints critical of a structure that even the Black professional class upholds.
“In order to get to the schools, you have to talk to the principals. If they’re open to it, it makes it easier,” Mr. Butler told The Informer.
“It’s an engagement process we have to develop. D.C. has different types of schools [with] a different dynamic on how they accept the public coming in,” he continued. “As a Black person, there’s a lot of apprehension when they don’t know what you’re talking about.”
DCPS didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about its work with Pan-African and Black nationalist groups.
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