Last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones published a raw, unguarded essay in the New York Times Magazine about the educational choices she and her husband made for their daughter, Najya. They had the resources, status, and time to choose differently, but still sent her to a mostly low-income Black school.
I kept comparing Nikole’s story to my own and to the long educational road ahead for my son. I keep coming back to one line: As long as we rescue our own children from schools where we let other people’s children languish, she writes, there is “no absolution here.”
Reading Nikole’s piece made me realize that the question of what we owe our community starts long before kindergarten. It starts at the very foundation of a child’s education, and in Harlem, that foundation is at risk.
Ms. Susan has lived in Harlem and taught its children for more than 40 years. She comes from a family of educators devoted to nurturing curious minds and filling them with confidence and pride in being Black. I know, because I was once her student.
A few weeks after my son started at her home-based daycare, we were swapping stories and I realized who she was to me. I had gone to Step Up to Basics, the preschool that taught me my manners and my ABCs, and instilled pride in my heritage. It also gave me a love of learning and a belief that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. The walls of that first classroom were lined with pictures of Black inventors, scientists, and leaders. Decades later, my son is learning under the same care.
Black children deserve to be taught by Black educators in their own communities, and that should start from the very beginning. They deserve to grow into lifelong learners rooted in the neighborhoods that raise them. They shouldn’t grow up believing that a good education means traveling far from home to be the only one in the room. Ms. Susan builds resilience, curiosity, and excellence at the genesis of our children’s education, and every village needs caregivers like her.
Today, Ms. Susan’s daycare is underwater. Her home, where she has run it for the past 30 years, is facing foreclosure. If it closes, the families she serves lose a caregiver they trust, and Harlem loses one of the places where our children first learn who they are and what they’re capable of.
Nikole Hannah-Jones reminds us that none of us is off the hook. I’m not willing to let Ms. Susan’s doors close without a fight, and I hope you aren’t either. Please share her story. Someone in this community may know how to help, and the more of us who understand what’s at stake, the better our chances of keeping her doors open.
Shamier Settle is a senior policy analyst at the Immigration Research Initiative and a Harlem mother whose son, like her, has been taught by Ms. Susan.
