NOEL KING, HOST:
A former leader in the D.C. public school system was frustrated. Black history was always confined to Black History Month, which is the shortest month, if you're counting. So she started a new education venture.
Here's NPR's Anya Kamenetz.
ANYA KAMENETZ, BYLINE: I bet your English class never sounded like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIT IN FORMATION")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Rapping) Y'all haters corny with the lack of diverse texts. Got me reading books, and I can't even represent.
KAMENETZ: With apologies to Beyonce, that's a video trailer for a class called Lit In Formation.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIT IN FORMATION")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I've read all of those, so please tell me what's next. My favorite, Jason Reynolds, got me some George Johnson.
KAMENETZ: It's just one of the offerings from a new online course platform called Reconstruction.
KAYA HENDERSON: History begins in Africa, right? It begins where we started in the cradle of our civilization and the kingdoms and the universities and the civilizations that happened way before slavery.
KAMENETZ: That's Kaya Henderson. She founded Reconstruction as a startup to give Black kids a space to learn about their history, their culture and identity, kind of like how her Jewish friends growing up had Hebrew school, she said.
HENDERSON: I'll say hipper, cooler Hebrew school for Black kids (laughter).
KAMENETZ: There are live video chat classes on the platform on soul food cooking, Black activists, storytelling skills through West African griot, even a class called Black Shakespeare.
HENDERSON: We are examining the plays through some lens that has to do with African Americans.
KAMENETZ: Henderson used to lead the Washington, D.C., public schools. There she worked to include more black history in the curriculum. She says it's often given short shrift.
HENDERSON: There's a meme on Instagram running around where the teacher literally is, like, so first there was slavery, and then it was civil rights. We're moving right along.
KAMENETZ: For example, when Nia Warren was growing up in New Jersey and attending a mostly white private school...
NIA WARREN: I didn't get to hear a lot about the things that Black people did besides, like, MLK and these kind of token figures.
KAMENETZ: Now Warren is taking a gap year from Harvard and teaching for Reconstruction over Zoom.
WARREN: One of my classes was, like, all Black girls. And that just like made me so happy 'cause I never had, like, a Black, female teacher.
ZOE COBB: I absolutely loved it, even though it was another Zoom, which I was originally not a big fan of.
KAMENETZ: Zoe Cobb is 11 and lives in Chicago, where she's going to school online. She also took the Lit In Formation class this winter.
ZOE: We read the book "Ghost Boys." So it's kind of like a book club with - filled with kids of color.
KAMENETZ: "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes is about a young boy killed by police.
ZOE: He becomes a ghost. And he meets all these other ghost boys of Black kids who got shot by police officers.
KAMENETZ: Kaya Henderson says Reconstruction is proudly extracurricular. Individual families can sign up for just $10 a class, with usually 10 classes per session. But with the pandemic pushing so much more learning online, they've been partnering with school districts too.
HENDERSON: We felt like there were ways to take the academic standards and content and bring them alive in a Blackity-Black (ph) way.
KAMENETZ: Like in a math class called Cipher, named after the hip-hop practice of standing in a circle and trading verses.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CIPHER")
STYLES P: This what it was.
PAPOOSE: The cipher - 360 degrees - the cipher.
KAMENETZ: It's all intended to fulfill Henderson's long term vision for Black kids to be exposed to learning that gives them both windows on the wider world and mirrors to see themselves.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIT IN FORMATION")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Rapping) I like my books to look like me, mirrors and windows. I can read with...
KAMENETZ: Anya Kamenetz, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIT IN FORMATION")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Rapping) Earned all these A's, but they never take the reader out me. I got Black books in my bag swag.
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