Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns

Dr. Tiffany Crutcher joins the class ten years after a Tulsa police officer killed her twin brother, Terence. She is a descendant of Black Wall Street and the founder of the Terence Crutcher Foundation. She talks about the mother who taught her quiet strength and about the brother the news never showed. She shares her freedom dreams for the next generation and her plans for Greenwood North, a 65,000-square-foot home for rebuilding Black Wall Street. She also answers the hardest question: who takes care of Tiffany?

NOTES

Terence Crutcher Foundation: terencecrutcherfoundation.org 
Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, held each year around May 31 in Greenwood
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District
Former officer Betty Shelby was acquitted of manslaughter in 2017.
Terence Crutcher's estate filed its civil suit in June 2017.

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Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a school for her daughter and called it the just choice. Now she has told the world what that choice cost.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class past the arguments to the questions underneath them. What did Brown v. Board give us, and what did it cost? What does the Black tax take from us, generation after generation? Why do Black teachers matter so much? And why does a systemic problem need a collective answer? Grace for every parent making constrained choices they did not design, and one rule for all of us: keep the children out of our mouths.

No absolution for any of us. An assignment for all of us.

Let's All Get Free.

SHOW NOTES
In this solo class, Dr. David J. Johns responds to Nikole Hannah-Jones's New York Times Magazine essay with gratitude, grace, and an assignment. He traces the unpaid bill of Brown v. Board and names the Black tax as a set of architected, constrained choices. He shares the story of his former student Nala. And he makes the case that collective action, not one family's sacrifice, is how we win schools worthy of Black children.Historical contextBrown v. Board of Education (1954), and the more than 38,000 Black teachers pushed out of their jobs in the decade after the decision: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/05/10/black-teachers-lost-jobs-after-brown-vs-board-ruling
How Black teachers lost when civil rights won in Brown v. Board (The 74): https://www.the74million.org/article/how-black-teachers-lost-when-civil-rights-won-in-brown-v-board/
November 14, 1960, New Orleans: Ruby Bridges integrates William Frantz Elementary. The same morning, Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne integrate McDonogh No. 19.
February 3, 1964, the New York City school boycott: more than 450,000 students stayed out of school to protest segregation. https://crdl.usg.edu/events/ny_school_boycott/ and https://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/day-history-february-3-new-york-city-school-boycott
Freedom Summer, Mississippi, 1964, and the Freedom Schools tradition it launched.

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In March of 1972, ten thousand Black folks went to Gary, Indiana, and came out with an agenda. Fifty-four years later, we wrote it down again.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class inside the State of the People Black Papers, the community-driven policy briefs built by more than a hundred Black experts across ten states, and the two companion documents being built on top of them: a Day One list of five asks for the next Congress and the fuller people's platform underneath it.

Then he takes us to Tulsa, to the Terence Crutcher Foundation's tenth anniversary gala, where a decade of work built out of grief is doing in practice what the Papers describe on the page. Honoring Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, celebrating honoree Dreisen Heath, and asking what legacy actually requires of the rest of us.

Preorders open October 9th. Via StateofthePPL.com and routledge.com

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We never left. But this is the first new class since June.

Dr. David J. Johns opens the fall with a correction he's been carrying in public. For years he told rooms full of people that PBS should bring back Schoolhouse Rock. He was wrong twice—and the second mistake turns out to be the whole episode.

In 1979, ABC shelved a three-minute cartoon explaining checks and balances because network executives feared the government being checked would come after their broadcast license. Nearly fifty years later, a third of American eighth graders score below basic in civics, which means they likely can't describe the structure of their own government. Nobody has to shelve anything now.
This solo episode walks the three rings we should have all been taught, then shows what happens in the gap between how government is supposed to work and how it's being worked.

Congratulations to Congressman Everton Blair, sworn in September first as the first openly LGBTQ+ person Georgia has sent to Congress—a seat decided by fewer than fifteen hundred votes, won by a man who came up through a school board. Appreciation for Senator Shevrin Jones and Representative Michele Rayner, who both lost on August eighteenth after a smear about a candidate's health status and dark money moving through a committee formed weeks before the vote. And a hard look at Inglewood Unified, where an elected school board has kept its seats and lost its votes for fourteen years.

Plus: why Black joy is not the intermission, what Afrofuturist dreaming has to do with organizing, and why the real AI is Ancestral Intelligence.

We're heading into the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 55th Annual Legislative Conference. Come find us at NBJC's OUT on the Hill.

Let's All Get Free.

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ICYMI: A Back-to-School Special Rerun

Stephanie Allen does God’s work.  A career educator for more than two decades, Ms. Allen currently teaches high school in Guilford County Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, the third largest school district in North Carolina. She was recognized as a Teacher of the Year in 2019 and 2024–a recognition she’s earned. This episode features the front-line experiences of a classroom teacher, centers stories about under-supported students, and describes necessary steps to dismantle the social hierarchy that relegates Black students to the lowest rungs of every quality of life indicator ladder.

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