African Americans have always valued education. Knowledge is power, and education is freedom. We have held these truths to be self-evident along the course of the long Black freedom struggle. My forthcoming book, The Battle for the Black Mind (Legacy Lit, May 2025), delves into the rich and complex history of Black education in America. In it, I chronicle of the relentless fight for Black educational freedom—and the bold strategies to protect, nourish, and empower Black minds. Central to this history, is the mighty contribution of Black teachers.

Let me give you a glimpse of that legacy through the life of one remarkable Black woman educator:

Mary Smith Peake understood that Black freedom was nested in the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Born free in 1823 in Norfolk, Virginia, she navigated a world that sought to deny Black people access to education, knowing full well that literacy was more than just letters on a page—it was liberation itself. This is why every state in the antebellum South deemed it illegal for Black people to learn to read and write.

Denied formal schooling in Virginia, Mary’s mother found a loophole, sending her to attend school in the nation’s capital, where Black children could still legally learn. By sixteen, she had nearly completed a high school education, an extraordinary feat for a young Black woman at the time. But education was never just about personal achievement for Mary. She saw it as a gift that needed to be shared and passed on to her people. And so, when she returned to Virginia, she came carrying a mantle to liberate Black minds even while their bodies remained in bondage.           

By day, Mary was a dressmaker, sewing garments for the very people who sought to keep her community in darkness. By night, she transformed into an underground teacher, gathering students wherever they could sneak of to—slave cabins, hidden clearings, any place where eager Black learners could escape the hyper-surveillance of white folks. Her students were men and women, young and old, enslaved and free, all bound by a shared hunger to read, to write, to think beyond the confines of a system designed to break them.

The risks were immense. Teaching Black people to read was illegal in Virginia, punishable by steep fines, imprisonment, even death. But the law had never been on Black people’s side, and Mary knew that the true crime was not in teaching, but in the system that sought to keep them ignorant. For nearly two decades, she defied that system, smuggling books like they were weapons and carving out spaces where literacy could flourish in defiance of the law.

Then came the Civil War, and with it, an unexpected shift. In 1861, Confederate forces burned the city of Hampton, VA to the ground. Mary and her family, along with countless other Black refugees, sought shelter at Fort Monroe, a Union stronghold that had become a sanctuary for those fleeing enslavement. Here, under the protection of the Union Army, Mary’s clandestine school stepped into the light.

On September 17, 1861, under the sprawling branches of an old oak tree, Mary gathered a dozen students for their first official lesson. Within a week, that number had quadrupled. She taught tirelessly, even as her health declined, her persistent cough a reminder of the toll this work took on her body. When she could no longer walk to the oak tree, she taught from her bed where her students sat at her feet trying to absorb every word.

She passed away in 1862, but her legacy was already written in ink and carved into history. A year after her death, that same oak tree became the site of the first public reading of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the South. Today, Emancipation Oak still stands on the campus of Hampton University, the institution that grew from Mary’s school, her vision, her freedom dream.

Mary Smith Peake was not just a teacher. She was an architect of Black liberation, a warrior in the ongoing battle for the Black mind. And though she never lived to see the world she dreamed of, she laid the foundation for generations to build upon.

The people trying to take over our schools today—those who want to our dilute our curriculums and erase the contributions, triumphs, and innovations of Black people—they are playing a long game. They have been organizing strategically, quietly, systematically for decades. They do not win because they are louder. They win because they understand that the battle for the moral conscience of the nation is, and has always been, the school.

We need that same strategy, that same clarity of purpose. We need to build the schools and movements and write the books and policies that will outlast every attack against Black education. We need to invest in Black institutions—HBCUs, community schools, and grassroots organizations that are already doing the work of educating our people without apology.

We need to freedom dream, like Mary did. Because the battle for the Black mind is not just about resisting oppression, it is about envisioning a world where we are all free.

Mary Smith Peake dreamed beyond the realities of slavery. The freedmen’s generation dreamed beyond the plantation. The civil rights movement dreamed beyond Jim Crow. I ask you, beloved readers: What are we dreaming beyond?

If they ban our books, we must write more. If they shut down Black studies programs, we must teach our history to our children in our communities, our churches, and in our homes. If they try to dismantle public education, we must create spaces where Black children can still learn, grow, and imagine a future beyond the limits imposed on them.

The battle for the Black mind is not new. But neither is our resistance. We have survived and thrived before. And we will do it again. The only question is—will you join the fight?

If this history speaks to you, if you want to understand not just the struggles but the solutions that have guided Black education for generations, then I invite you to dive deeper in my book, The Battle for the Black Mind. This book does not just recount the past—it lays out the lessons, strategies, and blueprints we need to move forward.