On Amtrak with mechanical issues. Developed 10 min outside of New Haven two hours ago. Electricity doesn’t work, toilets don’t flush, no air conditioning . Toddlers and children melting down. Some people got out and were walking up the track. But then there was the bobcat😳. The new train is to pull up beside us and we are to hop from one train to the other. Some people are wondering if it will be a situation like the movie Speed! Summer travel is never dull.

I got invited to a salon last night for Black women who have, or are considering moving to Lisbon. They have roots all over the diaspora. I learned that Steve Bannon has been running around Africa and Europe: 1) helping to stoke/fund anti LGBTQ laws in Uganda, Ghana and Kenya 2) he has also been recruiting Black women political candidates in Belgium, Portugal and Leipzig (I think it was but that might not be the country). They are Europe’s Candice Owens basically and part of a strategy to inoculate the global, repressive right from charges of racism.

From the late 1840s on, you can literally pick any period of U.S. educational history and find organized groups of powerful white people trying to keep Black, Latinx, and indigenous children out of quality public schools. It starts with Horace Mann's Common School movement. In 1848 a Black father in Boston sued to get white people to let his daughter attend a common school. In 1854,a Black mother in San Francisco sued to get her son a seat. The state legislature passed a law forbidding any other groups from going to any school with white children.😠

I am finishing a chapter on how many white communities responded to the Brown v. Board decision by dismantling Black schools, firing Black teachers and abusing Black children who chose to desegregate white schools. These pictures from 1956 tell quite the story: The first Black child to graduate from a white high school in the south did so in 1956 in Clinton, Tenn. The school was then bombed and so heavily damaged that it took 2 years to rebuild. Dynamite is an acknowledged character in the story of school desegregation.

I have a story to tell about my grandfather, Milton P. Rooks Sr. He was a teacher, principal, activist and organizer in the Jim Crow South. He died in 1969. White supremacy masquerading as educational integration killed him. (Thread) This is him in his white suit with his graduating students. He was at times the President of the local @NAACP in Pinellas County, Fla and sometimes he was the Secretary. Teaching was a doorway for him and others like him to advocate politics for Black people.