In her first book for young readers, National Book Award winner Imani Perry chronicles the history of schools and education in Black America.

After emancipation, freed people of all ages wanted to go to school. From the story of John McCline, who learned to read as a boy serving in the Union Army, through the teachers who built one-room schoolhouses across the rural South during Reconstruction to the student-led movement to desegregate schools during the Civil Rights movement, Imani Perry’s intimate and sweeping social history narrates this powerful desire for education and literacy—and how African Americans built and maintained an education system even while segregated and unequal public education failed them. These schools taught Black children to believe in themselves and their future despite Jim Crow and the institutionally racist society they lived in.

Informed by a rich trove of letters, diaries, and other archival materials, Hope in a Classroom is a necessary, expansive new narrative of the Black American experience for young readers, delivered in a propulsive and soaring voice.

About the Author:

Imani Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America and eight other works of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of African American Studies at Harvard University; the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute; and the co-founding director of the Black Teacher Archive at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Imani is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow and a scholar of law, cultural history, and literary studies. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.