Imani Perry’s Hope in a Classroom traces the history of Black education in America from emancipation through the Civil Rights Movement. The focus however, is not on segregated schools and the events that force desgregation. Instead, Perry is providing a history of the people who built educational communities for Black students - the people who provided solutions.

Following the Civil War, Perry highlights individual formerly enslaved people who pursued literacy: the teachers who established schools across the South, and the generations of Black educators who created institutions that offered students both academic instruction and built a belief in their own abilities. The last poriton moves into the student activism and legal battles surrounding school desegregation, but Brown v. Board of Education is not the focus of this history of Amercian Black education.

Perry does not minimize that inequality, but she also shows what those schools contained: highly committed teachers, intellectual ambition, strong community ties, and an understanding of education as a route toward freedom and citizenship. Integration was necessary because segregation was fundamentally unequal, but the transition also resulted in the loss of many Black schools and Black educators. This is another piece of Black History that is seldom touched upon in mainstream readings.

The archival material, including letters, diaries, and individual accounts, keeps the book exciting and personal. People remain at the center of this history and will enable all students, of all ages, to imagine these champions of freedom and education. Although Hope in a Classroom was written for young readers, the story is not simplified. This book could easily be used with high school students, but also educators. An underlining question is what is lost when educational reform focuses on changing institutions without taking into consideration the communities already sustaining the children within them.

A thoughtful and important history of Black education that expands the story well beyond the usual events, highligting real people that are true heroes.

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Publication date: January 12, 2027

This is an excellent, accessible history of Black education in this country and how central young people were to that struggle. Reading as a parent, I was moved by the incredibly difficult choices parents made with their own precious children, sending them into hateful and hostile environments because they believed so deeply in what it could mean for their communities and the children who came after them.

I read a lot of Black history, but this was my first time learning the history and full lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” and the journey from celebrating Frederick Douglass’s birthday to Black History Week and eventually Black History Month. I love when a book can fill in pieces of history I didn’t even realize I was missing.

I hope this makes it onto many reading lists and, even more, that many lesson plans come from it. It’s accessible without flattening the history, and gives young readers a real sense of how much young people themselves have shaped the fight for Black education.

What an amazing collection of stories, from Civil War to current day, about education and inequality in the US. Imani Perry is just the scholar to bring this to kids, would be happy to have this in our collection.