B-REAL Academy is equipping the next generation of Black Freedom Fighters. APPLICATION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 19TH!
THE CRISIS
The far-right extremist book ban movement arose in Kansas City, where the first banned book was removed from a KC school in 2021, sparking the beginning of a nationwide assault on Black education.
In 2023, Missouri universities were the first in the United States to abandon affirmative action practices in higher education following the Supreme Court’s reversal, cementing Missouri’s role as a testing ground for policies that disproportionately harm Black students.
Missouri & Kansas have long been battlegrounds for Black education—it is where Brown v. Board of Education overturned segregation, dismantling Plessy vs. Ferguson and igniting the fight for integrated schools nationwide.
FACT
Under the Trump regime, assaults on Black history, Black children, and Black education have escalated to levels not seen since the antebellum and Jim Crow eras.
These attacks will exacerbate existing inequalities—widening the school-to-prison pipeline and ensuring the continued intellectual violence against Black youth.
B-REAL (Black Radical Education for Abolition & Liberation) Academy is as much a program for survival as it is a transformative vision. From the moment of emancipation, education and literacy were the first acts of liberation for Black communities—tools to resist oppression and imagine new realities.
Today, B-REAL carries that legacy forward, offering an urgent, revolutionary intervention.
What We Teach: The Curriculum of Liberation
B-REAL Academy equips participants to:
- Learn to Organize: Develop direct action, mutual aid, fundraising, campaigns, and other essential organizing skills.
- Reclaim Black History: Engage in Black Study, learn and discuss stories of Black resistance and liberation movements.
- Build Narrative Power: Employ writing, media literacy & radical journalism.
- Imagine New Futures: Study revolutionary movements to define and design a better world.
Why Now?
- State-Sanctioned Repression & Impending Federal Threats: Missouri leads the nation in gutting DEI, setting a dangerous precedent for erasing racial equity and critical thought from education. With the Trump regime promising to dismantle the Department of Education and criminalize institutions advancing DEI, Black education is facing unprecedented attacks. We can no longer rely on these institutions to educate our youth.
- Education as a Weapon: The far-right is transforming education into an ideological weapon, designed to alienate and criminalize Black youth. These are no longer simply “failing educational institutions”—they are deliberate systems of control. Dangerous curriculums mandate lessons that glorify slavery, force Bible readings, and erase Black contributions, ensuring our youth are stripped of their history, identity, and power.
- Generational Impact: What happens now will reverberate for generations. The fights we win—or lose—today will shape the futures of Black children, their communities, and the power we wield as a people.
- Legacy of Resistance: Black education has always been a revolutionary act. From the Freedmen’s Schools after emancipation to the Black Freedom Schools during Jim Crow, education has been central to our struggle for survival and self-determination. BREAL Academy stands firmly in this tradition, empowering a new generation to resist and transform their world.
THE CRISIS
In a world where an already crumbling education system is threatened to extinction, we need fugitive institutions, third spaces, where liberation, agency, and community care are the primary goals.
How It Works
Program Structure:
- 14-week intensive course
- 2 cohorts in 2025, 75 students total
- Weekly 3-hour sessions on Saturdays from 11am-2pm.
- Intergenerational focus: 60% high/middle school, 20% adults, 20% elders
Unique Features:
- The intersection of organizing skills & radical Black curriculum make the program a first of its kind in Kansas City history.
- Real-world organizing experience. Mentorship from community organizers.
- Black community healing space
- Hands-on training in radical journalism, writing & narrative change.
For more information or to enroll, contact: Melissa Ferrer-Civil, B-REAL Academy Director
📧 breal@kansascitydefender.com | 📞 (813) 450-4586
Fund the Fight. Build the Future!
COMMUNITY + POWER-BUILD
Who We Are
We are a Black nonprofit community media platform employing innovative digital and community-building strategies to engage Gen Z and Millennials across the midwest. Our primary areas of focus are education, justice, business, arts & culture, and technology.
Reaching over 100 million people and growing our social media audience to over 75,000 followers since we launched in 2021, we’ve created a new model for reaching Black people and Gen Z.
RADICAL ROOTS + SOCIAL-FIRST
Our Commitment
At The Kansas City Defender, we are committed to reimagining and returning to our roots, recognizing that our role is not merely to report but to rebuild—to co-create an organization and community that unapologetically speaks truth to power, amplifies the voices of the oppressed, and engages in grassroots mobilization and community-building, especially among the youth.
