ALUMNI IN ACTION
Restoring History
By Julia Halprin Jackson Photography courtesy of Tyson Amir
ALUMNI IN ACTION
Restoring History
By Julia Halprin Jackson
Tyson Amir’s revolutionary curriculum is building communities in California schools by offering innovative approaches to learning history, addressing hate speech and rethinking dated paradigms.
It’s a late afternoon in June at George Shirakawa Sr. Elementary School in San José. Tyson Amir, ’02 African American Studies, Comparative Religious Studies, and his colleague Azariah Cole-Shepherd, ’22 Electrical Engineering, greet children by name as they assemble tables into a rectangle
“Today we’re going to talk about Juneteenth,” Amir announces as they settle in for their final session of the Building Leaders & Activists with Collective Knowledge (BLACK) Program. Students participate in activities and discussions that focus on leadership, activism and community building throughout the year. “But before we do, let’s talk about the Three-Fifths Compromise.”
The atmosphere shifts when he explains the agreement reached during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that determined that one enslaved person was equivalent to “⅗” of his or her white, landowning male counterpart. Amir gestures around the room, saying: “There’s five of you sitting here. In 1787, the five of you would have counted for three people.”
The room is quiet as the students, who range from fourth through eighth grade, take this in.
“Most people don’t realize that African people who were forcibly enslaved were brought to the English colonies before the pilgrims,” Amir continues. “They skip over the stories of the men and women who were forcibly taken there. But in this class—” he makes eye contact with each child —“we don’t forget them. We honor them.”
The BLACK Program, a comprehensive learning experience grounded in the history of the African Diaspora, is one of many initiatives Amir offers through his education consultancy firm, Freedom Soul Media Education Initiatives. The company blossomed out of Amir’s 2016 book, “Black Boy Poems,” a collection of poetry and essays released on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. He’s also the founder of the Black Literary Collective, a collaborative network of writers, poets and thinkers.
Between his curricular offerings, his literary pursuits and his desire to connect educators across the Bay Area, Amir has become a sought-after resource for school districts and organizations interested in improving their cultural climates and providing professional development.
“How do we use our power?”
Growing up on the East Side of San José, Amir identified first as a rapper.
“My technical or classical training comes from hip hop,” he says. He recorded a number of albums — the first before he graduated from San José State with two majors and three minors — and toured internationally during his summers off from teaching.
In 2022, while leading the BLACK Program at Bernal Intermediate School in San José, his students reported a surge in anti-Black, racist hate speech. This negative climate mirrored national increases in anti-Black rhetoric; a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Justice demonstrated that Black students were the most likely to be victims of hate crimes in schools from 2018-2022.
“When the students told me that they were encountering these problems on a daily basis, I reminded them that we’re leaders and activists,” says Amir. “So how do we use our power? What can we do to change the situation? I tied that to historical examples of communities from around the world and the U.S. where young people have often played leadership roles in movements to create major social, cultural and political change.”
Together with his students, Amir created an anti-racist resolution at the school outlawing hate speech on campus. The resolution was later adopted across the Oak Grove School District in San José and in districts across the Bay Area, and is also the subject of Amir’s short documentary, “Black Impact: The Leaders We Build.”
“Black students are one of the smallest demographics in California public schools, so often Black students are going to schools where they are a numerical minority,” he says. The BLACK Program offers “learning for students, learning for adults (because they have to model the behavior that we want to see our young people doing), with a focus on restoration,” he adds. In addition to working with students, he partners with their educators, administrators and school leaders to communicate student concerns and needs.
“When people have been harmed, [it’s important to] have space for them to be restored from that harm, to feel dignified. When they see facilitators like myself bring our programming to their schools, the culture of those schools often changes for the better for all students, but especially for students of color.”
“When the students told me that they were encountering these problems on a daily basis, I reminded them that we’re leaders and activists. So how do we use our power? What can we do to change the situation?"
— Tyson Amir
“This is a change of mind, a change of state, a change of being. By doing that, people can really see themselves and the people around them differently, and interact in more helpful, positive ways so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of previous generations.”
— Tyson Amir
Honoring the past to envision the future
While Amir peppers historical dates and facts throughout the Juneteenth lesson, he challenges students to linger in the discomfort of America’s complicated past. He explains that Juneteenth celebrates the day that Major General Gordon Granger finalized the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, officially ending slavery in Confederate States.
He shares a brief history of the enslavement of Africans and Black people by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and Spanish, repeating that with each generation, “there were people who never accepted their enslavement,” that resistance and resilience is entrenched in African American history.
By enlisting his students’ energy and ideas to brainstorm how to make schools safer and more inclusive, Amir hopes to address the bigger questions about racial, ethnic, cultural and economic inequity in schools.
“We offer a comprehensive learning experience,” he says. For him, teaching is not about memorizing dates and facts for the sake of passing exams. “This is a change of mind, a change of state, a change of being. By doing that, people can really see themselves and the people around them differently, and interact in more helpful, positive ways so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of previous generations.”
As the afternoon concludes, the children are asked to reflect on what they learned throughout the year. Two of the fourth-graders say they enjoyed learning about Malcom X; another adds that he felt like he built better communication skills in Amir’s classroom. One of the younger students raises his hand, a little shy.
“I learned that Black people are kind and have done a lot of wonderful things in the world,” he says with a smile.
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