When a federal court vacated the U.S. Department of Education's anti-DEI directive in February 2026, I said what educators, students, and families have long known: "celebrating the full existence of every person and sharing the truth about our history is essential." That statement was not only about one legal victory. It was about a larger principle: Black children deserve schools that tell the truth, and Black educators deserve the freedom to teach it.

As a former teacher and principal, and now as CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED), I have spent my career working to ensure that Black students have Black teachers, and that the truth is not erased from the classroom. That is why the Department's      "Dear Colleague" directive was so dangerous. By threatening schools and districts engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion work—racial justice work, essentially—the federal government tried to turn honesty into liability and equity into a target.

CBED joined the lawsuit because our mission, our partnerships, and the students and educators we serve were under attack. When the Department signals that work centering Black educators or affirming students' identities could jeopardize funding, it is not making a neutral legal argument. It is punishing schools for the very practices and partnerships that help students thrive. The court's decision to block the directive, followed by the Department's decision to abandon it, was a critical victory for academic freedom and for honest teaching.

But defunct does not mean defeated.

We should not misunderstand this moment. What produced that directive did not begin in 2026, and it will not end there either. The effort to police Black truth in classrooms is older than this administration, older than the phrase “DEI”, and older than the latest battles over curriculum. It belongs to a long lineage of campaigns to sanitize history, regulate Black thought, and narrow who gets to shape public understanding and benefit from public good. From the suppression of Black literacy during enslavement, to the backlash against Reconstruction, to textbook wars, anti-busing campaigns, and today's attacks on so-called “divisive concepts,” the throughline is clear: when Black people move closer to full citizenship, somebody tries to make truth itself illegal, suspicious, or inaccessible. 

That is why vigilance is necessary.

As Malcolm X said, “racism is like a Cadillac: there is a new model every year.” The language changes. The strategy evolves. The legal packaging gets more polished. But the underlying aim remains strikingly familiar. And as Neely Fuller Jr. warned, “if you do not understand racism, everything else you think you understand will only confuse you.” We cannot afford that confusion now. Anti-DEI efforts are already maneuvering through state legislation, school boards, budgets, and bureaucratic and judicial reinterpretations of what schools supposedly can and cannot do.

For Black students, these policies are not abstract. They show up as missing stories, silenced questions, and classrooms where the full truth is treated as dangerous. When Black history is diluted, restricted, or framed as controversial, students lose more than content. They lose context. They are denied the chance to understand this country through the full weight of Black struggle, Black brilliance, Black resistance, and Black contribution. They are asked to embrace a nation they have not been allowed to fully study.

That is why the fight for Black history in classrooms is inseparable from the fight for Black futures.

This is not merely about representation. It is about preparation. No one can understand the United States without understanding Black history, and no student can be prepared for a multiracial democracy by being shielded from that history. 

Honest teaching gives young people the tools to recognize injustice, analyze power, and imagine something better. Distorted teaching does the opposite. It trains students to mistake silence for peace and erasure for unity.

For Black educators, the stakes are equally urgent. 

Anti-DEI policies do not just limit what can be taught. They send a message about who is welcome in the profession and under what terms. They tell Black teachers, and any educator committed to equity, that bringing your full self, your community knowledge, and your moral clarity into the classroom is risky. They cast culturally responsive teaching and equity-centered partnerships as legal liabilities instead of educational assets. Black educators are told that they have a place in our districts, but only if they       erase themselves       and eradicate the truth first.

At a moment of severe teacher shortages, that message is more than misguided. It is self-sabotage. Research has made clear that Black students who have even one Black teacher are more likely to graduate and attend college, and Black boys, in particular, see powerful long-term benefits. 

Diverse teacher workforces also strengthen school climate, reduce exclusionary discipline, and help all students develop deeper empathy and cross-cultural understanding. Building a stronger Black teacher pipeline is not exclusionary. It is one of the clearest, most research-backed ways to improve education for Black students and to strengthen schools for everyone.

We can see what happens when districts get this right, and when they do not. According to a dashboard from the National Council on Teacher Quality, Washington, D.C., stands out as a leader in teacher diversity, thanks to deliberate recruitment and retention efforts. As a result, its teacher workforce closely mirrors its student population: 74 percent of D.C. teachers are people of color, compared with 87 percent of its students. Texas tells a more complicated story. Its teacher workforce is already more diverse than most of the country’s, yet it still falls short of reflecting its students: about 45 percent of Texas teachers are people of color, against nearly 74 percent of students. The gap persists because the state has struggled to effectively prepare aspiring teachers of color and to retain them once they enter the classroom, undercutting the very pipeline it needs. The lesson is not that diversifying the teacher workforce is impossible. It is that it takes sustained investment in recruitment, preparation, and retention alike, and that investment is precisely what anti-DEI policies put at risk.

That is why it is important to invest more in      organizations like ours, not deprive them. These investments support       mentorship, recruitment, retention, and the broader ecosystem needed to bring more Black educators into classrooms and keep them there. Critics call DEI divisive when the real division has always come from disparities we have been too willing to normalize.

The same logic shows up in budget decisions. As The Hechinger Report documented, DEI work is often among the first things cut when district budgets tighten. Those cuts are not neutral. They chip away at recruitment and support for teachers of color, culturally responsive professional learning, student belonging initiatives, and honest curriculum development. In practice, they remove the very scaffolding that helps schools become more just, more inclusive, and most importantly, more effective.

If America at 250 years is going to mean anything, it cannot simply be a celebration of national myth. It must be a reckoning with who has been denied the full promise of this country and what it will take to repair that refusal. That work begins in classrooms, but it cannot stop there. It must show up in public policy, philanthropic priorities, educator preparation, district leadership, and community organizing. It must show up in what we fund, what we defend, what we teach, and what we refuse to let be erased.

So, the call before us is clear. Protect the freedom to teach. Defend the organizations and partnerships that help schools serve Black children well. Invest in Black educators not as a symbolic gesture, but as a democratic imperative. Refuse sanitized history. And build schools where Black students encounter not only the trauma of our past, but the genius, courage, imagination, and possibility that have always carried us forward. Let us be vigilant. Let us be disciplined. Let us be unafraid to tell the truth. Black futures are not secured by accident. They are built by what we choose to protect, what we choose to invest in, what we choose to teach, and what we choose to fight for together.