In Detroit, the fight over what our children are taught goes deeper than an academic debate—it’s a question of survival, self-worth, and the kind of future we’re building for the city’s Black youth. Over the past two installments of this “Black Students, White Curriculums” series, we’ve dug into how Eurocentric lesson plans erase, distort, or dilute the truth about Black history and culture, and what that absence costs our children. Statewide data shows that only a fraction of Michigan school districts include comprehensive African American history in their curricula, and even fewer weave it into everyday instruction. The result is a system where most Black students spend their formative years learning in classrooms where their own heritage is treated as an elective rather than a foundation.
In this final chapter, the lens turns hyperlocal, centering the story of one Detroiter whose educational journey proves exactly what’s possible when Black children are given the opposite experience.
Tiffany Brockington, educator, higher education practitioner, and PhD candidate in education, grew up on Detroit’s west side, directly across the street from John J. Bagley Elementary School. It was so close she could see the front doors from her home. But when her parents tried to enroll her before kindergarten, they were told she didn’t meet the criteria to be considered “at-risk” enough for early admission.
“I was denied admittance because I wasn’t considered ‘at-risk’ enough,” she recalled. “My parents sent me to a private Catholic school because they had to. Though I went to school with majority Black students, the culture and experiences didn’t center us—obviously.”
She remembers one of her earliest experiences there: being required to attend Wednesday Mass but barred from taking communion. Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church—one of the oldest Black Christian denominations in the country—she was used to worship that welcomed everyone. The restriction confused her and left her feeling out of place.
That changed in the third grade, when her parents enrolled her and her brothers in the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, then under the leadership of founding principal Carmen N’Namdi.
In 2016, the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse closed after 38 years in operation. Founded in 1978 by Carmen N’Namdi and her husband, the small African-centered school was named in honor of their late daughter, Nataki Talibah.
Nataki Talibah created a wave of African-centered education efforts led by Black educators and community leaders in Detroit who believed that the public school system was failing to affirm the city’s Black children. The late 1970s and early 80s were a period of economic crisis and white flight in Detroit, and public schools—already under-resourced—were increasingly dominated by curricula that centered Eurocentric history and values. African-centered schools like Nataki sought to be the antidote. They were intentionally designed to weave African history, cultural pride, and community responsibility into every subject area, while also maintaining rigorous academic standards. The name “Nataki Talibah” translates to “she who seeks knowledge” in Swahili, a direct signal of the school’s mission.
Under N’Namdi’s leadership, Nataki became one of the first charter schools in Michigan to fully embrace an African-centered philosophy. Its approach drew on traditional African learning models that connected education to community life, artistic expression, and moral grounding. This was a deliberate counter to the standard public school experience, which often left Black children learning about themselves only in the context of enslavement or oppression.
“Centering Black students shouldn’t be something that is out of the norm—for Black students, educators, and communities,” Brockington said. “We should not expect outsiders to center us and our needs; we already know what that looks like.”
One story, passed down to Brockington by N’Namdi years after she’d graduated, captured the school’s ethos perfectly. A young girl had asked her mother to put her hair in pigtails. Her natural texture puffed upward instead of hanging down. Rather than force her hair to conform to a style designed for straight textures, N’Namdi reframed it: this was the hair’s gift, its unique talent. It was something to celebrate, not change.
Those moments mattered. They built an internal compass that pointed Brockington toward self-assurance. “It’s regular for me to be centered,” she said. “It changed how I understood and framed experiences. I didn’t realize how different my schooling experience had been until high school. But I didn’t have the words until I was at Howard University in Dr. Carr’s freshman seminar, when he talked about the mbongi and being present intellectually. Those norms were already my norms because of Nataki.”
Brockington is quick to connect her confidence to her community’s legacy. Her paternal grandfather, a physician, delivered and cared for generations of Detroiters from 1960 until his passing in 2005. Her maternal grandmother was a DPS special education teacher, a Boy Scouts Den Mother, and a Girl Scouts leader. These were her relatives—folks who were examples of how to build a life in service to others.
That same spirit drives her work today. “People who are centered and affirmed tend to have a lot of audacity,” she said. “As someone who’s had a considerable amount of privilege, I choose to extend my privilege to others, however I can. My audacity is for the community—and that means sometimes I might make people uncomfortable.”
Now, as a higher education practitioner and doctoral candidate, Brockington treats every student as if they have a destiny—because that’s how she was treated. She recalls one of Nataki’s assembly songs, “Everybody is a Star,” a call-and-response with lyrics like, “You shine bright from where you are… like a diamond in the sky.” It was catchy, but it was also a mantra, a declaration that every student was valuable and expected to rise.
That expectation is rare in a city where the majority of Black students attend schools still working under Eurocentric curriculum models. In the first two parts of this series, data from the Michigan Department of Education showed that fewer than 20% of public schools statewide offer any structured African American history courses before high school. In DPSCD, curriculum reviews found that while Black history is present, it is often confined to slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and a handful of notable figures—rarely integrated into math, science, literature, or everyday classroom examples.
Brockington sees that gap as both harmful and avoidable. “Black children need to be centered,” she said. “Black children are centered in African-centered educational experiences. It’s equal parts cultural and curriculum. Without the cultural element, there is no anchor for instruction or community building. Denying Black children of that experience is dehumanizing.”
She points out that other communities in Metro Detroit have created and sustained their own culturally specific educational spaces—Dearborn’s Muslim American schools, Oak Park’s Hasidic Jewish schools—and that no one questions their legitimacy. For Black Detroiters, she argues, the same opportunity should be protected and expanded.
The long-term impact of her Nataki education is written into her life’s work. She is balancing grassroots organizing, academic research, and direct student engagement as a scholar-practitioner. Her doctoral research focuses on the lived experiences of alumni from African-centered schools, with the goal of developing community-based programs and adaptable curriculum models.
“Mrs. N’Namdi is 100% the reason why I am an educator today,” she said. “She created a space for critical engagement in thought and action. We were free to ask questions and to challenge ourselves—and she was secure enough to be challenged by the children she was teaching.”
Nataki’s story also holds a mirror to the broader curriculum battles Michigan has faced for decades. Since the 1990s, attempts to introduce African American history standards statewide have faced political resistance, often under the banner of “curriculum neutrality” or more recently, opposition to so-called “critical race theory.” In Detroit, where over 80% of public school students are Black, these fights are not abstract—they determine whether students see themselves reflected in their education or erased from it.
As Detroit continues to wrestle with curriculum reforms, Brockington’s story is a reminder that these debates are not theoretical. They are about whether children will see themselves as whole, capable, and worthy—or whether they will be asked to shrink themselves to fit into a worldview that excludes them.
It’s also a reminder that culturally grounded education doesn’t just benefit the student—it benefits the city. Alumni like Brockington return to Detroit’s communities equipped with the confidence, cultural literacy, and sense of purpose to lead, teach, and build. They become the kind of people who not only succeed for themselves but clear the path for those who follow. It’s the circle of life for our communities.
Her path—from Greenlawn Street to Nataki Talibah, from Howard University to doctoral research—proves that when Black children are centered early, they carry that affirmation into every room they enter, that kind of preparation is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.
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