In honor of Tamir Rice’s 23rd birthday
On a cold November afternoon in 2014, the world ended for a 12-year-old Black boy on a Cleveland playground.
His name was Tamir Elijah Rice.
A child. A musician. A dreamer. A boy with an imagination wide enough to hold galaxies.
A boy who never got to become a man.
When I think of Tamir, I do not simply think of tragedy.
I think of a timeline.
A throughline.
A wound this country has never tended to — and a truth it has never confronted.
That truth begins long before 2014.
It stretches back nearly 60 years earlier, to August 28, 1955, when another Black child, Emmett Louis Till, was stolen from this world for existing in a nation terrified of Black breath, Black boyhood, Black possibility.
Two different eras.
Two different states.
Two different children.
One uninterrupted lineage of racial terror.
The Ghosts America Pretends Not to See
Emmett Till was 14.
Tamir Rice was 12.
Both were children cultivating joy in the only ways children know how. Emmett visiting family in Mississippi. Tamir playing in a park in Ohio.
Both were met not with protection, but with fear.
Both were assumed to be older, bigger, more threatening — a violent white imagination projected onto boys who still carried baby fat in their cheeks.
Both were denied the presumption of childhood.
In 1955, it was a lie told in a grocery store.
In 2014, it was a lie told in a 911 call.
Both lies turned fatal.
In 1955, the State looked away.
In 2014, the State pulled the trigger.
Emmett was lynched.
Tamir was gunned down in under two seconds.
Different methods.
Same message:
Black children are not allowed to be children.
“When the Nation Looks Away, the Village Looks Toward Each Other”
As a Black male educator — one of the 1.3% standing on the outside of America’s classrooms — I feel these stories in my soul. They shape the way I breathe when a young Black boy raises his hand. They shape the way I watch over our young scholars as if they were my own lineage, my own responsibility, my own North Star.
Because they are.
I am here to witness the brilliance this country tries to erase.
I am here to build the beloved community Emmett never got to grow old in. I am here to protect the Tamir’s still walking into after-school programs, playgrounds, classrooms, and community centers with dreams larger than the nation that fears them.
Every time I mentor a young boy navigating a world that misreads him, I think of Tamir. Every time I tell a young girl her voice matters, I think of Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whose love transformed grief into a movement.
This work is not abstract.
It is ancestral.
It is personal.
It is necessary.
1955 Was Yesterday.
2014 Was This Morning.
And 2025 Is Our Responsibility.
Some people want to believe history moves in a straight line — that the past is behind us and what lies ahead is progress by default.
But Black people know better.
We know history is a circle.
The same fear that stole Emmett in 1955 arrived at a park in 2014 wearing a badge and carrying a gun.
The same myth of “threat” that killed Emmett followed Tamir to the playground.
The same erasure of Black childhood persisted across six decades of unlearned lessons.
The legacy of racial terror simply changed uniforms.
What Love Looks Like in a Country That Fears Black Children
People often ask me why I stay in education.
Why, despite the battles, the erasure, the racism, the pressure, I continue to show up.
The answer is simple:
Because our children deserve a world that doesn’t mistake them for danger. Because they deserve teachers who see them fully — their softness, their wonder, their genius, their fears, their futures.
Because they deserve schools and communities that center their humanity, not criminalize it.
I stay because if Emmett and Tamir did not get to grow old, then I must fight like hell to ensure the children who look like them do.
That is my vow.
My calling.
My resistance.
My offering to the Village.
What We Carry Forward
Today, November 23, 2025, on what should have been Tamir Rice’s 23rd birthday, we honor not just his memory — but the lessons he and Emmett Till leave behind:
We will not allow this nation to forget their names.
We will not allow their stories to be rewritten.
We will not allow their lives to be reduced to moments of violence.
They were sons.
They were loved.
They were ours.
And in their honor, we build, we protect, we cultivate, and we love our children with an urgency this country has never given them.
From 1955 to 2014 to right now, the mandate is unchanged:
Protect the children.
Protect the Village.
Protect the future.
We do this work because they deserved to live.
And the next generation deserves to grow old.
“If they won’t protect our children, then we will build a world where our children learn to protect themselves — with truth, with community, and with love that refuses to die.”