Across the country, Black male educators make up just 2% of teachers. In the Los Angeles Unified school district, just 8.3% of teachers are Black compared to 30.6% White and 46% Latino teachers, according to the district’s data.

Uric Lamb, a Black 11th grader at Fremont High School said Black teachers are always there for him. “They are really determined to see Black kids succeed in life. They are so cool that they would always have tutoring to help kids get their grades up. They will always be on you to do the right thing.”

Panelists shared their thoughts and observations on the importance of Black educators:

Hamilton High School teacher Kenneth Turner, who also advises the Black student union — one of the biggest in the nation, with 400 members — talked about what motivated him to transition from being a teacher’s assistant to a full-time teacher during the 1992 riots:

“I saw that this was no longer something that I just did, but something that I had to do. It became a mission at that point to be more connected with kids at a deeper level, and have much more to offer in terms of my college education.”

Sherif El-Mekki, the founder of the Center for Black Educator Development, hosts a fellowship for high school students to explore education as a career path: 

While attending the Black Male Educators for Social Justice fellowship, El-Mekki said he and his classmates were not being encouraged to pursue teaching as often as white educator colleagues.

“We found that to be strange, no one had been recruited, tapped on the shoulder, had a conversation with, and we said, ‘well let’s ask our colleagues,’… Most of our colleagues were white women. The average response from our colleagues in third grade was when they remembered someone inviting them to the profession. So third grade for one group, post-grad for another group. You couple all of this together and this is why we have less than 2% of our public school teachers being Black (men).”

Read the full article about Black male educators by Sara Balanta at The 74.