The African American community has a history that values education. As a people we want to pursue and achieve the highest level of education, formal and informal.  For many African Americans schooling has been the primary means for upward mobility, socially and economically.  The establishment and continuance of more than 105 Historical Black Colleges and Universities that today still graduate over 50% of African Americans demonstrate our passion for knowledge and intellectual pursuits. Four hundred years of cultural resiliency, advocating and fighting for equity, social justice, and equal educational opportunity have been marked with such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Adam Clayton Powell,  Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Henry Clarke, and Augustus F. Hawkins -- just to name a few. One of the greatest strengths in the history of the African American community is the inter generational interaction between our elders and our youth. Through 400 years of slavery and survival, a belief   was practiced in many of our communities that it “takes a whole village to raise a child.”  The generations cooperated through family, church, school, and community to ensure the safety, growth and development of the young, as well as instilling in them appropriate morals, manners, values, attitudes, and determination that would serve them well throughout their lives.

        In 1986 it was in the spirit that it takes a whole village to raise a child, that former Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins  ask Dr. Faustine Jones-Wilson on the East Coast and Dr. Owen Knox on the West Coast to convene 37 other educational leaders, researchers, African American organizations, and school leadership groups to discuss and review the Effective Schools Research of  Dr. Ronald Edmonds,  and to seek solutions for the school problems being experienced by all too many African American students. A significant cross-section of representatives from African American  organizations, other national organizations, associations, local grass-roots communities, local and national institutions, along with parents, other concerned educators and individuals, was convened to discuss the status of the African American child.  The strategy was to consolidate ideas and information from all the stakeholders in Black students’ education: students, parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, as well as business and community leaders.  The passion felt was that student failure is not our option: the village will take responsibility for developing a plan to improve the educational achievement of Black students across the nation.  Representatives of these stakeholders worked together to establish the organization, National Conference (changed to Council) on Educating Black Children, and to write NCEBC’s flagship document, The Blueprint for Action. 

 Please join us, as we gather to commemorate our 22nd year as an organization and to further focus on preparing African American children to meet life's challenges, as well as for preparation to become tomorrow's leaders.  Without passion, the vision perishes, for it still takes a whole village to raise a child.