Building a Black Village: What It Meant for Me to Finally Have One

I was in 7th grade at Lefler Junior High in Lincoln, Nebraska when I met Tim Carroll for the first time.

He was my PE teacher and basketball coach and the first Black teacher I had ever had in my entire life up to that point. I didn't have words for what I felt around him. I just knew something was different. For the first time in a school building I didn't have to explain myself or edit who I was to make someone else comfortable. He took me as I showed up on any given day, good or bad, and never once made me feel like I was too much or not enough.

He invited me to his house for meals. He picked me up outside of school just to take me on rides and hang out. For the first time there was an adult in my world who looked like me and genuinely saw me. I became a good student that year because I wanted him to be proud of me. That was the whole reason. Not because I had resolved anything going on inside me or because the anger had settled. I was still mapping the building every morning, figuring out which doors to enter and which ones to avoid to keep myself away from the kids who made my life hard. But I had Tim Carroll and that changed what I was willing to do with the rest of my day.

That same year I found my first real Black friend. His name was Antwan. He knew my story early on and didn't flinch. He came to my house without hesitation and had me over to his. His family gave me something I had never had before, a close up look at a Black family just living their everyday lives. The music they played, the food they cooked, the way they talked to each other. I didn't register it as cultural education at the time. It just felt like belonging somewhere I hadn't known existed.

Two people. That is all it took to change the direction of my life.

What a Black village actually does for your child

What Tim Carroll gave me was something my parents genuinely could not provide no matter how much they loved me. There are things a Black child needs to receive from someone who has lived the same experience. Someone who knows what it feels like to walk into a white room and do that math in their head, who doesn't need you to explain what that costs. My parents couldn't give me that. Tim Carroll could just by showing up consistently and being real with me.

Antwan gave me something different but just as important. He was a peer who looked like me, lived like me, and didn't require me to edit myself to be accepted. That kind of friendship does something for a child that no parent can manufacture. It tells them they belong somewhere in the world outside their front door.

What happens when that village doesn't exist

I was lucky. I found Tim Carroll and Antwan at the same time during one of the hardest stretches of my childhood and between the two of them I had enough to hold onto that year. But they weren't with me every hour of every day. The summer after that year I was drinking beer and smoking weed with my older adoptive brother. I was thirteen and he was sixteen. My parents thought I had turned a corner because my grades were up and I wasn't in trouble. What I had actually done was get better at carrying it.

The beer and the weed did the same thing the cookies and punch did back in that church fellowship hall. They took the edge off the thing I was carrying that I couldn't fully name. Because even with Tim Carroll and Antwan in my life, the deeper questions about who I was and where I came from were still sitting there unanswered. Two good people couldn't close that gap on their own.

That is why I call it a village. One person is not enough. Your child needs consistent ongoing access to Black adults and Black peers who can speak to the experience your child is living. A Black barber who becomes a familiar face, a Black mentor through a community program, a Black family your child spends real time with, not a brief encounter but an actual ongoing relationship. These are not extras. They are the things I needed and didn't consistently have, and their absence cost me more than I can fully measure even now.

What I want you to do with this

Tim Carroll went on to become a principal. I went on to choose education as my career because of him. The first Black teacher I ever had showed me what it looked like to show up for young people the way he showed up for me and I wanted to be that for someone else. Everything I built over a 30-year career as a teacher, principal, district leader, and principal coach traces back to one man who decided to see a kid that a lot of people had already written off.

I lost him when I was 38 years old in a car accident. He was gone before I fully understood everything he had given me. You don't always get the chance to go back and tell the people who changed your life what they actually meant.

Your child's Tim Carroll is out there. It is your job to go find them and bring them into your child's life before another year passes without them.