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• JANET RUSSAW: The practice of true education is revolutionary, and it is transformative. And it is the notion of true liberation, especially for Black people. Before we could go to school legally, you would die if they knew that you could read. How important it is to our freedom. That's what the Brown v Board of Education represents for me.

• MAKIAH LYONS: Makiah Lyons, J.D. Hi. My name is Makiah Lyons. I am IDRA staff attorney. Here at IDRA, we have a mission to achieve equal education opportunity for every child through strong public schools that prepare all students to access and succeed in college. Today, we are continuing our Education in the Law series, but with a bit of a spin. It can be easy to read and learn about important historical court cases without appreciating the ways that these rulings, these moments and shifts in history and in time impact the world around us, including our very own families. That being said, it's Mother's Day, and I'm honored to be joined by my very own mother and grandmother. As a collective, we are three generations of women who have dedicated careers to education. And to be clear, this is not a coincidence. It's more like a family ethos. There are very many educators in our family. Probably the vast majority of us work in education in some way. And so I'm going to start by introducing them. My mom, Jocelyn Mills, is an award-winning educator and former principal. She has over 25 years of experience under her belt, and she's worked in just about every educational setting you could think of. She served thousands and thousands of students, preparing them for college and, really, life generally, with love and care and compassion. And I could say the exact same thing for my grandmother, Miss Janet Russaw. She is also an extraordinary and award-winning educator, particularly in math instruction, which unfortunately I cannot say I got the gene for, but I think I still made her proud. Her legacy as an educator is legendary, and she's truly a pillar of her community. And so I wouldn't start-- I think we should start with my Nana. Hi, Nana.
  JANET RUSSAW: Hi, Makiah. Thank you.
  MAKIAH LYONS: I do think it's important that we actually start by introducing your mother. She's not with us today. She is really our matriarch in so many ways and such an important piece of the puzzle in our family. She was an incredible woman. But I would like to really talk about her experience in her education because it is actually really unique.

• JANET RUSSAW: I think my mother's background is quite unusual for the time. My mother's father was a Black man who owned his own business. He was a barber, but he could only cut White hair. He couldn't cut our hair, and we were not able to go into his shops. He had shoeshine boys and all that, but he made a great living for his family. They had tennis courts. They played croquet out on the lawn. They lived not the standard, but they were kind, very kind. And through the years, they got ill. Most of the family got ill from a defective well water. Only two of the children didn't get sick. My grandfather had to hire nurses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to come take care of them. And what ended up happening was that all of the siblings got an opportunity to have an education. But when my mother was the baby and when it was her turn, they just didn't have the money nor the means to do so. And you had to have transportation to Morristown College, which is in another town in Morristown, Tennessee. So she did not have an opportunity to go to college. But my mother was a very, very bright woman. She read constantly. I think she gave Jocelyn the reading bug and gave me the reading bug and probably gave you the reading bug as well. She was a diamond.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah.
  JANET RUSSAW: Just an awesome lady and very, very intelligent. And my grand/mother, her mother, was very bright.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. So her grandmother went to school.

• JANET RUSSAW: Right. Her mother came from New York. Her father was a business owner himself. The interesting thing about my grandmother is that she went to school with white children. She was kind of like, I don't know what you want to call it, but they would come in to see this little black girl read because we weren't supposed to be able to read. We weren't supposed to be able to even be taught anything. So people would come just to see her read. That's how she ended up at Morristown College in Morristown, Tennessee, to further her education. And that's where she met my grandfather.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. And so then she stayed, and the rest is history.
  JANET RUSSAW: Exactly.

• MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. Yeah. That's not a very typical story by any means. And it's interesting, but it also feels like really good framing for the way our family kind of comes into and understands education as a system and a structure that empowers people, that allows people to be free in many ways. And so it's such an interesting story. And mom, I know that when you were-- I believe you were in high school, you had a conversation with Anez, which is my grandmother, Janet's mother. Can you talk a little bit about what that was?

• JOCELYN MILLS: Absolutely. So I think it's one of the most definitive conversations I've had as a young woman to have that conversation with my grandmother about why she didn't go to college. I've had a very unique experience as a young person because both of my grandmothers knew each other very well. One of my grandmothers went to college, and my mother's mother didn't. Now, in my mind, I couldn't necessarily reconcile that because I knew both of my grandmothers as being extremely brilliant women. And it never really fully made sense to me that my other grandmother didn't get to go.
  And so in the conversation, I remember sitting in my grandfather's chair at the kitchen table and having a conversation with her about why she didn't go. And she told me very clearly, she didn't have a ride- very straightforward, which seemed so bizarre to me. And so in my mind, I'm like, what do you mean you didn't have a ride? What does that mean? Didn't you have a ride? Could nobody take you? Couldn't you get a ride? And she said, "You have no idea. You don't understand what it was like."
  She didn't really go into a lot of detail about what it was like. But what she did say is, "Part of why you don't understand what it's like to not have a ride is because I made sure you had one. And so it puts it in perspective about your place of progress, that the progress may not happen for you. Sometimes your positioning of the progress happens for your line. Positioning your child, your grandchild, to be the one to make sure they get the rights. My grandmother made sure that her children and her grandchildren got the rides that they needed to get.
  And so I think that as I've gotten older, I've been able to reconcile how emotionally intelligent she was to be able to just get to the gist of saying, " No, I didn't go. You do. You're going now. I'm passing that baton to you." And I also think it's very interesting to see the progression of that. So to start with, my grandmother's mother, to know that-- I still, as a young person, remember going to college with people who were the first in their family to go to college. And to understand the weight of that, that I was three generations out already at that point.
  The first generation for us was 1905, which is a huge, huge deal when you really start talking about the span of time and place, what that really means. And so that's why it's interesting to see when you start talking about my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, me, and you. Nessie was the only one that didn't get to go. And so for her, she was the one that kind of had that little bit of a disruption. But even as a young person, I fully was aware that it wasn't because she wasn't capable; she just didn't have the ride.

• MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. And so you make such an important point because it's the seeds that you plant, right? And they bloom later. And I think Anez understood that to be her role and what she was going to do. And so I'm really interested, Nana. So, you had also such an extraordinary story about your education, and it starts kind of at the top of Jay Bird Hill in Jefferson City, Tennessee, at a school called Nelson Merry.
  And just as a little bit of background, Nelson Merry has been named kind of over time a couple of different names. So Nelson Merry School, Nelson Merry College, right, Nelson Merry Academy. But it is named for a formerly enslaved man who became the first black ordained minister in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1853. And so then Nelson Merry School was founded in Jefferson City in 1890. And you attended Nelson Merry as a child. And also to be clear, because this is something that I did not say explicitly, it was a school for black children and for black educators. And so to be developed there. And so what was it like growing up? Because you also grew up in the neighborhood. What was it like growing up in Jefferson City and attending Nelson Merry as a child?

• JANET RUSSAW: The interesting thing is our community. And when you hear it takes a village to raise a child, for me and my circumstance and my growing up, that’s exactly how I grew up. My parents had to work, and the neighbors looked after each kid. But the interesting thing about it is, education was important. They felt like that was our way out of our circumstance. So we weren't just expected to graduate from high school. We were expected to get an extended education to go to college. And a lot of the kids that came out of our neighborhood did just that.
  But the interesting thing about it is, once we left, you couldn't go back. Because there was no way, no jobs to support you coming back. So that's how so much of our community got scattered. You'll find them in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Pittsburgh. They got educations, but they had to go elsewhere to find work. Our school was wonderful. We had parades, we had queens, and we had all the things that you want in growing up. The interesting thing about it was we were ahead of them in science. We were ahead of them in math. We had great math and science teachers. We got their hand-me-downs and their leftovers. We got their old textbooks. We got their old typewriters. When they got new stuff, we got their stuff, their old stuff. But I have to say the teachers, I admire them for what they did for us. And for us to come out with the kind of education that we had was amazing. So it was a wonderful place to be socially, academically, in every sense of the word.

• MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. And so, you talked about getting on the bus, and your father was, in many ways, also a pillar of his community and a wild man. Believe me, there could be a whole other episode about him. But he really saw this vision of his children kind of being able to access those resources at the other schools. So he's pushing for that. And during that time, Inez, your mother, right, when she sees you get on the bus, what is her reaction?

• JANET RUSSAW: My mother stands on the porch and cries her eyes out. She just cried. I felt so bad for my mother, but I understand where the tears were coming from because my brother and I were her two youngest kids. And she didn't know how our day was going to go. She didn't know because you have to understand what you saw on TV, the demonstrations, the dogs, the beatings, and all that. And I think she felt like we were being sent into the lion's den. You know what I'm saying? She went in protective mother mode, which I respect. So she learned that it was going to be okay, that everything was going to be okay. So she adjusted.

• MAKIAH LYONS: She adjusted. We talked about this. Her fear was not irrational. It was unprecedented, right? And the things that you were doing as a little girl, you're a child, right? And she can't go to school with you, right? And so, there's a level of almost relinquishment that she had to feel to feel like you could break new ground. I can't imagine what that feels like, right? But I mean, it's amazing. And so, I would like to also talk a little bit about zooming out. What is your earliest memory of segregation itself?

• JANET RUSSAW: Oh, my childhood was full. We could go to the grocery store, and there was a department store downtown. But we could not go into restaurants or any of the other businesses. So it was definitely, we got enough to survive. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. We had to eat, and we had to have clothing and shoes. So those were open to us, but to go out to eat or to go into the drugstore, you had to go in and stand. You couldn't sit at the counters. It was true. You could not mingle or mix at all.
  MAKIAH LYONS: So at the time that you're kind of integrating schools, you are also integrating everything else.
  JANET RUSSAW: Everything else. The movie theater, the skating ring, the swimming pool. And my dad was instrumental in seeing that that was done. So, we did all of that so that we would be able to go and sit and be served.

• MAKIAH LYONS: So Brown v. Board of Education, which is the decision that overturns Plessy v. Ferguson, this idea that separate but equal is anything that makes sense, right? So Brown v. Board comes in and says separate is not equal, right? And so you have to integrate, right? You have to desegregate schools. I think a lot of people's perception of what that meant is that overnight, we take students from these schools and kind of usher them into White schools. And that's really not what it looked like. And it did look very different in different places. And so kind of what do you remember about-- I know you talked a little bit about it before, but what was that process like? What grade did you start attending in, quote-unquote, "White school," and kind of what did that look like?

• JANET RUSSAW: I was a freshman in high school, and my brother was a junior. What happened was that the four…
  JOCELYN MILLS: And hold on, mama, make sure you tell it. You ended up marrying my daddy, who was also a junior. So I had to [crosstalk].
  JANET RUSSAW: That was my brother's best friend.
  JOCELYN MILLS: Don't leave him out too.

• JANET RUSSAW: He was my brother's best friend. And they were great athletes and very smart. That's why I think they thought we were handpicked. And they just held it up. I mean, they were liked. My experience, they were prepared for us when we were coming. They knew that we were coming. They had prepared the students. When I walked in, I was the first bus rider and my dad and my brother and all of them were waiting for me at school when I got off that bus to make sure that I was okay. I went in, and I registered. And then they took me to class. And when I walked into that classroom, you couldn't hear a pin drop. It was complete and total silence. And there's this one chair empty. I assumed that it was waiting for me.
  But in general, it went very smooth. There was no violence, no name-calling. I mean, you knew there was a difference. I mean, I'm not saying things were perfect, but we had to prove ourselves. And in a lot of instances, we had to be way better than them to get any recognition at all. But my overall experience, I don't understand why. Then the next year, others began to come. And then finally, when it was completely integration was going to be, that's when Nelson Mary closed. Then we were all there. But that took a couple of years for that to happen. And some people asked me, "Well, where's the newspaper articles? Where's the pictures?" It wasn't a celebration. They didn't want it to happen. They weren't going to have the press there taking pictures and putting it in the paper. They wanted this thing to go away.

• JOCELYN MILLS: The name as a historian, if you look at most of the press that was happening, it wasn't warm and fuzzy. It was dogs and firehose, Ruby Bridges' pictures being escorted with fire marshals. And so in some places, that wasn't a PR move to have press there.

• JANET RUSSAW: And then pictures and stuff, nobody was snapping pictures. You know what I'm saying? It was not a happy time for them. And also, it was not a happy time for some people in our own community. Did not like us going over there. Actually, my father received hate mail from people in his own community. So you had opposition on both ends. I see benefits from integrating, but I also miss the benefits from being in that little school, Nelson Mary, too.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. And I also can imagine this kind of shift coming, and especially with Nelson Mary being such an integral part of the community.
  JANET RUSSAW: Exactly.

• MAKIAH LYONS: And so many people being employed there, right? And so many of your aunts and being teachers and things like that, I can see where that resistance kind of stems from and this desire to kind of protect an institution that we kind of created and that we could produce our own teachers and produce wonderful students like Ms. Janet Ressar. And so I think the interesting thing is, again, people think it's an overnight thing, but you're still, even four years later, after you integrate your high school, you're going to college.
  JANET RUSSAW: Exactly.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Right? And you go up the street and I'll let you tell the story and you go to Carson-Newman.

• JANET RUSSAW: I go to Carson-Newman and your grandfather was there. So there were seven of us.
  JOCELYN MILLS: And he was the first student athlete. He was the first black student athlete, I believe.
  JANET RUSSAW: And I was the first black cheerleader. It's interesting when you come out of the time that I came out of, you're the first of a lot of things. I found myself in my career as the first on my job, the one and only. You know what I'm saying? So we were still vying for jobs. But it was interesting experiences. They weren't easy. But I think they make you strong. But I got an excellent education at Carson-Newman. Excellent. I have to say that. And I had great experiences there. And the other interesting thing at Carson-Newman, when I first went, you could not wear pants. So it would be cold if we would wear pants and we would have to take them off before we got to campus. Just strange little things.
  MAKIAH LYONS: It just sounds so crazy.
  JANET RUSSAW: It is.

• MAKIAH LYONS: So you come out of college, right, and you don't become a teacher immediately.
  JANET RUSSAW: No.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Can you talk about kind of why you became one? What ended up shifting for you?

• JANET RUSSAW: I became a teacher because of my son, basically. And I felt like he was not getting what he needed. And he did not particularly like school. And I would be teaching him at home what he should be learning in school. Also, I felt like, in my experience, little black boys can do things, and it's a major catastrophe. And the white boys can do the same thing, and it's no big deal.
  There was not equal treatment going on. And I felt that. And I feel like every student deserves a chance to learn. And the expectation for our kids, and especially our boys, was very, very low. And I felt like that needed to change. I had a job to do. So I quit my job at the bank, and I went back to school and got an education degree. And I was at the bank for 20 years. So that was my journey back into the classroom. I graduated and immediately left town to come work here in Kingsport, Tennessee.

• MAKIAH LYONS: And it's incredible because if you spend a day with Jan in Kingsport, Tennessee, you would think that she was an absolute celebrity. It is like spending a day with Beyonce. You just can't go anywhere without someone recognizing her or hugging her and wanting to update her. And so when you're the child of a teacher, you don't get to be an only child. But when you're also the grandchild of a teacher, you're never alone. You never get at the moment.
  And so I kind of want to pass the baton here. So you kind of become a teacher because you're looking around at the system and you're just like, "This is not working for all students. It's not working for my kids," right? And so, Mom, when you're growing up, really through the '70s and the '80s, and you're really in the shadows of all of these huge shifts that had happened, but you're still in Jefferson City, Tennessee, at least in the beginning. What was that like? Kind of, what was growing up there like?

• JOCELYN MILLS: Because from where I came through, I literally was in the middle of all of that transition. And in some ways, it's a very unique place to have come through. So I still have memories of Nelson Mary, whereas I don't know that anyone that came in after me would. Now, there's some faulty logic in that because I don't have the memories my mother had in her timing beforehand, because by the time I came through Nelson, Mary largely was a community center. And that's how, sadly, I would remember it.
  And I think that it does it a disservice in some ways, because it was only when I became an adult that I realized all the greatness and scholarly pursuits that came out of Nelson Mary. And so what a tragedy for a young child to have seen Nelson Mary as only a place where you go to play softball games and pick up basketball. Now, I knew that it was at one point a place where some of my people went to school, but I think something got lost in some translation there between when we left it behind.
  There were some things we should have taken with us that we didn't. And that's unfortunate, because now we have generations of young people that are coming out of Jefferson City that drive by Nelson Merry every day and don't realize the greatness that came out of it. And so I think that that makes it an interesting place. I also think it makes it interesting that there are things as a young person, if you aren't operating in consciousness, you miss.
  And so I missed the full awareness of how many people around me, at the time, were fully educated. I took it for granted. I thought that was the experience of all children. I went to church with people who were teachers, who probably at one point had taught my mother at Nelson Merry. And I had no full awareness, at the time, that I was surrounded by all these educated black people. People who were engineers at TVA. Just wild stuff when I think about it. Had operated with no awareness that, literally up the street in New Market, is Highlander Research Center, where Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and that whole civil rights movement was educated on non-violent protests. And the folk singer We Shall Overcome, that song came out of my hometown up the street. No awareness at all. And so I think it's interesting how things come full circle, that the chaos of change will sometimes have you losing some parts of yourself.

• JOCELYN MILLS: And I think that for us to move forward, there was some luggage that we lost in that path forward that we need to go back and get. It's kind of like there's this African notion that we call it Sankofa; it's called to reach back and get it. I think there are some things that, in education, why the teaching of history is so important and why there's such a Herculean effort to erase it.
  Because the notion of Sankofa, you don't have that knowledge of history, you will not know what to reach back to get. And you will also not know that there's something worthy to go back to get. And so I think for me, I'm standing in the space of knowing both that we lost and that we gained. And so to know that I've been the beneficiary of the progress, but knowing that there's still some stuff to go back to get. And it's critical for our children that we go back to get it and do it very quickly.

• MAKIAH LYONS: And so I want to talk to you, right? There are so many teachers-- I know at one point you had a count, but we probably lost count- but there are so many teachers in our family, and educators in our family. And so kind of when you decided to become a teacher, Mom, what was that decision for you?

• JOCELYN MILLS: Well, I thought I had actually escaped wanting to be a teacher. I majored in political science at the University of Kentucky with the hopes that I would be an attorney. I typically have this saying that, "May the ancestors be pleased with the works of your head, hearts, and hands and what they dreamed to be yours to do. And I realized that being an attorney wasn't mine to do; it was yours to do.
  But in that awakening, I always knew it's very interesting to hear you and my mother have that exchange between that description of how my grandparents positioned my mother to go to Jeff County to view Nessie on the porch in tears and JC being resolute in your going. And I think both of those spaces reside in me as a demonstration of my personality, if that makes sense. And so I think because they do, it was always going to be inevitable that I be a teacher of some sort, if not in education, in something. Because I think that I've always wanted to be as kind and as giving and as wonderful as my grandmother.
  JANET RUSSAW: Amen.
  JOCELYN MILLS: But as courageous.
  JANET RUSSAW: That's true.

• JOCELYN MILLS: And non-negotiable and unapologetic as my grandfather. And so the notion of how that lives, two tensions are always working together at the same time, which I think makes for a very interesting dynamic, because I think you need both. When my mother was telling the story, it is the story of my grandfather that best explains Brown v. Board to me.
  My grandfather unapologetically understood the notion of freedom and liberation. He understood freedom and liberation better than anybody that I have ever met in my life since him. You were not going to tell him what to do. Hard stop. And my mother knows that. She's laughing, but she knows that's the truth. I don't know how JC survived the Jim Crow South, but you were not going to tell him what to do. And so the notion that anybody was ever going to tell him where his children could go to school, it just was not going to happen. He was going to decide where his children were going to go to school, period. Hard stop. That is the notion of freedom.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Especially with his tax dollars.

• JOCELYN MILLS: The practice of true education is revolutionary. And it is transformative. And it is the notion of true liberation, especially for black people. You have to understand, before we could go to school legally, you would die if they knew that you could read. Understanding that should tell us something.
  JANET RUSSAW: It's true.
  JOCELYN MILLS: How important it is to our freedom. And I think that that's what the Brown versus Board of Education represents for me. It literally represents that transition I was talking about where I can see myself as being the beneficiary of the progress. But also recognizing that there was a great deal of sacrifice. We lost teachers, grandmothers, and aunties. Pillars in our communities lost their jobs.

• MAKIAH LYONS: It's so important to have nuance, right, and to talk about the way that these decisions and these shifts, how they play out materially in [in?] people's lives and what it means for the ways that things shift. And as we are kind of looking to build better futures and to bring about more just realities, I think that's kind of so much of what you said, Mom, is to be reflective and to figure out what it is about the past that you can learn from and what it is that you want to take with you. And maybe some of the things that you can contemplate didn't pan out the way that they either should have or just lessons that you can learn.
  And so for you, Mom, I know that you talked so much about kind of the importance of liberatory education and understanding history, understanding social justice is such an important part of kind of what makes education education and why it's important. But for you, as an educator, right, when you first started teaching, talk about what did you teach? Let's start there.

• JOCELYN MILLS: So I think it's very interesting to note that I started out as a government and economics teacher, which I think should explain to people why my Facebook and social media looks like it does. And I think it often surprises people why I'm so interested in power because that's really what you are teaching students about. I mean, you are government and economics teaching. Hard stop. You're teaching young people about power, who has it, who doesn't have it, how power is used, how power is weaponized, all of that. And so, in the very beginning stages, even without a whole lot of consciousness about what I was doing, that's inevitably what I was teaching.
  MAKIAH LYONS: And then very shortly after you became a teacher, you became a mother.
  JOCELYN MILLS: I did.
  MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. And so what was that like, kind of developing those competencies alongside each other?

• JOCELYN MILLS: I don't think that you can separate them. And I think that's very interesting because I think some of the best teachers teach children as if they were teaching their own, and I think this would be true for my mother. I think that the best educators do for the children in their classroom. I'm talking about the best ones. Teach from the lens of, I'm teaching every child in this room as if they are my own. And so, there really is a very limited amount of separation in how you are approaching teaching as a teacher. And I'm just going to name, too, the Supreme Court doesn't see it as any massive amount of difference either because they have clearly named that when you stand in front of children in school, you are the substitute parent. They have named that as a legal-- I don't know if most teachers know that.
  JOCELYN MILLS: But if you don't, you should.

• JOCELYN MILLS: That is a heavy amount of responsibility. And I also think that that's one of the things that I really appreciated the most in my career when I was a teacher and a leader of an African-centered school where I wasn't Miss Mills. I was Mama Jocelyn. And that is a different level of responsibility to children. And so to answer your question, Makaya, I think that the notion of care for children is the responsibility of adults, whether you are a parent or a teacher. And I think my mother spoke to that when she was talking about it was a village. If we want to have healthy, whole, well-adjusted children, all adults will have to see themselves as leaders of children. Whether you are a teacher, whether you're a parent or a family member, the police officer--
  MAKIAH LYONS: [an attorney?], a policymaker, yeah.

• JOCELYN MILLS: There you go. There you go. And so I love sharing this because I think one of the most telling pieces of things that I've learned through my role as an African-centered educator or a leader is the Maasai. And the most fierce warriors in all of African tradition. And they have a saying, it's a greeting, "And how are the children?" And they see each other. And the response to that is, "All the children are well." And the notion is that that is the standard by which they judge their warriorship is that all children in their community are well, not one of them, not just the ones in my family, not just the ones on my street, in my neighborhood, but all the children. That is a very noble standard. And I think that most teachers operate with classrooms in that spirit.
  JANET RUSSAW: Or should.
  JOCELYN MILLS: Or should. Or should.

• MAKIAH LYONS: And so when we kind of think about Brown and the history of education justice, generally, what do you think that it is most important that we take with us into the future?

• JOCELYN MILLS: I think the most important thing that we take into the future is the notion of design. If we want different outcomes, we need to go back to the drawing board as architects. To really get to the spirit of your question, I have since moved in my frame of thinking, thinking of myself as an educator, and thinking of myself as a designer. So when I'm going into schools, I'm asking people, "Who's in the margins? Who's in the margins?" Because inevitably, in schools, there's somebody in the center, and there's somebody in the margins. And most of the decisions are being made for the ones in the center.
  JANET RUSSAW: And the ones that are in the margin don't feel worthy. They're not made to feel worthy.
  JOCELYN MILLS: And they often come from parents who are in the margins.
  JANET RUSSAW: True.

• JOCELYN MILLS: You know what I'm saying? And so we've marginalized the people. And then we blame them for us placing them in the margins and wondering why they continue to be in the margins and don't want to suffer the indignities of being marginalized. So if we want people to come out of the margins, we must design opportunities to put them in the center.
  JANET RUSSAW: That's true.

• JOCELYN MILLS: And so that's where my work is centered right now as an educator. I'm constantly pushing people because, again, now I'm coming back full circle to where I started as an educator because that's about power yet again. Who's in the margins and who's in the center is the notion of who has power and who doesn't.
  JANET RUSSAW: That's true.

• MAKIAH LYONS: Yeah. Yeah. And for you, I'll ask you the same question. What do you think when you reflect on kind of Brown and education justice, what do you think it's important to go back and get?

• JANET RUSSAW: I think it's important to go back and have a community that actually really cares, not only do they care, but they are invested in what's going on in that building. Whatever we're designing has to work for everybody. They have to feel worthy. And until we put that back into the classroom, they have to respect who's teaching them and the folks who's teaching them need to respect who they are. If I had the solution, trust me, I would have already written the book. But I think it's like ongoing, Makaya. The changes has to be ongoing because it's always going to change. You see what I'm saying? So I can't give you one thing, but I am telling you it's a multitude of a lot of things that has to happen in our schools.

• JOCELYN MILLS: That was some of what got lost in translation in Brown versus Board because we sent children to school with people who did not love them. And that has done some harm. And so I want to name that I think we need-- to Kaya's point, one place to start is for us to start there. To start looking at the trauma that that caused children like me. Because remember, when I was at Manley, I was the only one.
  And so I don't necessarily have some warm and fuzzy memories like you have of my elementary years. I don't have what I would call as being horrible, horrific memories. I think we've got-- to Kaya's point, one of the best places for us to start is to start unpacking some things and start thinking about what has worked, what has served us well, and what has not. I think that even though I'm very much alarmed and unnerved by what I see in the current power structures, I also think it's a beautiful opportunity for us to revisit and start rebuilding and redesigning. So this stuff is not working.

• JANET RUSSAW: But it's important for children to see themselves. And it's important for them to see themselves in a positive light.
  JOCELYN MILLS: And I'm also going to lift up too, and I want to give her her props as well. I think these conversations are really interesting to have for Makaya. Because in this conversation, it's been very clear to me that she's been listening.
  JANET RUSSAW: She's been listening for a long time.

• JOCELYN MILLS: For a very long time. Almost eavesdropping because she's heard things that I wasn't aware that she was even listening to. And so that has given me some joy to know that there were some lessons and some knowledge that she was learning and that she felt compelled to want to bring to others. And Makaya, I want to name this is going to be a very powerful conversation because I think generations do need to get together. And they need to have this conversation with the children and their families because that's that Sankofa part. It's critical for us because we cannot have children walking around thinking that they don't come from resourceful, intelligent, brilliant people.

• MAKIAH LYONS: So we've been chit-chatting for a long time. And I just want to make sure we're landing in kind of a good place so we make sure that the podcast ends up kind of well-rounded. And so there's so many things that are coming up right? The idea that we have to really go back and look at history in order to understand how to inform the way that we design and plan for the future.
  There's so many themes about tension and nuance about holding things with both hands and understanding that there's something to be lost and something to be gained, that there's something to kind of be mourned and something to be celebrated at the same time. That even in times where things are very difficult and challenging, there's often moments of joy that you can capture. And also that there's been seeds that have been planted-- and I've known this my entire life-- but there were seeds that are planted long before you're even a concept, and they bloom in you, and then you plant seeds, right?

• MAKIAH LYONS: And so I think that is kind of what we're doing here, is we are continuing to plant our seeds. And I am very grateful and blessed and honored to be the fruit of the trees. And it brings me a lot of joy to continue to do the work. And I very much see the way that I do the work and even the way that I do work here at IDRA as kind of an extension of your legacies, of Inez's legacy. And so I want to, with that, wish you both a very, very happy Mother's Day. We're recording this a little bit before Mother's Day, so we will be all together on Mother's Day, which I'm very excited about.

• MAKIAH LYONS: And so I'll be able to give you all big hugs and kisses. But I also want to say Happy Mother's Day to all the other mothers out there and even some of the teachers that are not mothers, but consider themselves to be so. And with that, I thank you both for being my special guests. And I hope this conversation was informative and interesting for those of you who are listening. And thank you so very much.
  JANET RUSSAW: Well, thank you for having us, and you are truly a blessing. And I love you very much.
  MAKIAH LYONS: I love you, too. I love you, too.

• JOCELYN MILLS: Absolutely. I'm honored to be in the middle of-- you two of my bookends. So it's a pleasure to be positioned between the both of you. I love you both.
  JANET RUSSAW: I love you too, Jocelyn.
  MAKIAH LYONS: I love you.
  JANET RUSSAW: Thank you.
  VOICEOVER: Thank you for listening to IDRA class notes. For more information on IDRA and other class notes topics, go to www.idra.org. You can also send us your thoughts by email to podcast at www.idra.org.