It’s gonna rain 

It’s gonna rain 

You better get ready and bear this in mind 

God showed Noah, the rainbow sign 

He said it won’t be water but fire next time. 

Way back in the bible days, 

Noah told the people it’s gonna rain 

but when he told them they paid him no mind 

and when it happen they were left behind, 

I tell you It’s gonna rain 

It’s gonna rain 

You better get ready and bear this in mind 

God showed Noah, the rainbow sign 

He said it won’t be water but fire next time.

"Elder James Baldwin penned a letter to his nephew , better k known as the book, The Fire Next Time, that ends with the Negro spiritual, “It’s Gonna Rain,” above. In his letter, Baldwin does not refer often to fires, but near the middle, he writes about at least two different kinds of fires. He discusses the fire God promises Noah; the red-hot flames of such cosmic vengeance for the cruelty he saw in humankind. And he talks about fire as a personal experience of human cruelty from which all black people must “snatch our [personhood], our identities.”1 He notes that even if we do not survive the fire, we gain something and learn something about human life itself that no school or church on earth can teach. We achieve our own unshakable authority. “In order to save our lives, we are forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted and to read the meanings behind words.” This has been the experience of generations of Negroes, he continues, “and it helps to explain how [we] have endured and how [we] have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. [What we do] … demands great spiritual resilience not to hate; not to teach your children to hate.” As black educators, we confront fires every day in our communities: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Cameron Tillman, Laquan McDonald, Vonderrit Myers Jr., Micheal Brown, Rekia Boyd, the Charleston church massacre, Philando Castile. And there are the fires in our schools, such as a cop flipping over the desk of a young woman in Columbia, South Carolina, in an attempt to take her out of the classroom.2 We breathe this fire. It’s not just the fire next time, it’s the fire we live in now.”

Frederick J. Brown’s painting Stagger Lee captivates one’s attention. The Chicago-raised abstract artist based this painting on the song “Stagger Lee,” or “Stack-o-Lee”—a song about a real-life man turned mythic character in American blues history. Stagger Lee represents the trickster hero, the black man who breaks society’s rules unapologetically, a man who is not imprisoned by society’s definitions of him.

This is a song that spans generations. Over four hundred artists have recorded it since its first recording in 1923. Lloyd Price, James Brown, Neil Diamond, the Clash, Pat Boone, Fats Domino, Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, the Grateful Dead, and Ike and Tina Turner are all among the artists who have recorded some version of this song. About the song, Frederick Brown said, “My grandfather used to listen to Stagger Lee . . . he liked that tune. So when I did my series, ‘The Blues,’ I thought, well, let’s paint Stagger Lee. And it’s between abstract and figurative painting, because the story of America, the mythological story of America, is a very abstract story, and all of that story is in there.”

Stagger Lee, both the painting and the song, is the perfect metaphor for this chapter for a couple of reasons. First, the song spans several generations—each new artist in each generation, whether Duke Ellington or the Clash, keeps the essence of the message and yet adds their own unique sounds. Similarly, though the times have changed and each generation of teachers has brought something new to the profession, the underlying message of education for justice—for democracy—has not changed.

Second, if you try to look at the painting all at once—try to make sense of the whole thing—you get confused by the colors flowing into and out of different forms. But what the painting forces you to do is to look at the iteration of each figure. Different colors, traditions, and cultures make up each one. Brown forces you to pay attention to the minute detail in order to understand each figure and then the entire painting’s message. Stagger Lee, both the painting and the song, is the story of America—the spirit of breaking free from society’s expectations and the spirit of personhood despite oppression. However, it is a story that you need to get up close to, almost nose to nose, to understand.
This chapter features the narratives of four millennial teachers. And like the painting Stagger Lee, you have to look at each story, each brushstroke, and each color combination to grasp how we four millennial teachers understand, interpret, and remix the call to teach in today’s complicated world. Each figure in the painting Stagger Lee has a history—it is history. Each has a color palette and a story all to itself. And as with each figure in Stagger Lee, you must stay with each narrative to understand how we teach, why we teach, and some of the experiences that we’ve had along our paths.

This volume comprises compelling chapters about millennial teachers—specifically millennial teachers of color. You will read research about our quest for community, our aptitude for technology, our activism, the struggles that we have regarding race, our identity as teachers, and how we fit into the workplace. But like the painting Stagger Lee, this volume’s message is deeper than just understanding the differences and similarities between the generations of teachers. Like Brown’s artistic message, this volume’s message is deeper than what you see at first glance; like the painting, this volume goes beyond understanding – to illustrate the complexity of how these differences interact between and through generations. It’s understanding how, as Herrera and Morales describe in chapter 3, we both think back to the myths, stories, and lessons passed down by our families, elders, and other generations of teachers, and yet look forward by taking those lessons and remixing them to create something that reflects the story of America at present and, more importantly, what the needs of our students are today.

And so we invite you to read our stories. We invite you to read them as you would look at the painting of Stagger Lee—carefully, up close, with the intention of sitting a while and understanding the complexities of how experiences mix together like Frederick Brown mixes paint to depict an abstract cacophony of experiences. We invite you to see how we respond to the call to break society’s rules for the students we teach, a call that spans generations—one that has been remixed and remastered to meet these unique times in which we live."

“Stories by people of color,” Gloria Ladson-Billings writes, “can catalyze the necessary cognitive conflict to jar dysconcious racism” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 21). The purpose of my narrative is to create such a cognitive conflict. I am an Afro-Caribbean woman; a first-generation American whose grandparents moved her mother and father from Trinidad and Tobago for better life opportunities. I have lived in six states but grew up in a majority white town in Washington State. The daughter of an Army Colonel and an entrepreneur, I grew up in the borderlands of socioeconomic privilege, racial exclusion and tokenism.

My resilient parents and supportive mentors have loved me through stumbling and navigating these borderlands...

​Writing helps me reflect on and learn from my experience..."Living in a state of psychic unrest,” I follow Anzuldua’s (2012) lead, and through my writing, dig at the cactus needle embedded in my own heart. I write to “get deep down into the place where it is rooted in my flesh and pluck away at it” (Anzaldua, 2012, p. 95)...This narrative is one of the many ways in which I try to get down to the root of that needle and find out how it got lodged here in the first place...

To live in the borderlands means to live in multiple spaces and no space at the same time.

Systems of inequality graft themselves onto our lives every day. They touch us at the most personal levels (Alexander, 2006, p. 275).  “It means that we are all defined in some relationship to them, in some relationship to hierarchy” (Alexander, 2006, p. 275). We are all responsible for accepting our roles as cultural actors; especially in a world with socio-political roots historically cut and carved by European colonial governments. We are all responsible for understanding how we exist in and perpetuate the social hierarchies we try to fight. Writing is one of the ways I take responsibility."