BJ Richards, our Sister/Friend/Co-Madre/Partner passed away on June 12, surrounded by her family and embraced by children and parents far and wide. She was a huge force in early childhood education, and her impact is legendary. Alex and John and Judi and Maya and Dede created the circle—we were holding hands with her and Dandara, her beloved daughter, when she left us.
I worked side-by-side with BJ for almost a decade, and she inspired my first book, THE GOOD PRESCHOOL TEACHER, where there’s a lovely picture of BJ as a new mom, and Dandara as an infant. My next book, WHEN FREEDOM is THE QUESTION ABOLITION is THE ANSWER, includes this glance backward at our time together at BJs Kids:
In those early years we were part of a homemade communal childcare community on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called BJ’s Kids. Fairness was a central value, and the deeply radical and profoundly ethical slogan of the Wobblies from a hundred years earlier was a poster on the wall: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” That standard was easily grasped by preschoolers.
We tried to speak an anti-oppressive language at BJ’s—“firefighter,” not “fireman”—and our block area fought racism and sexism: the figures included a Black woman doctor, a Latina firefighter, a male nurse. Reality imposed itself, however, and it was clear that the firehouse across the street was staffed by all white firemen. On a field trip Caitlin, one of the four-year-olds, asked the fireman showing us around when we would get a woman firefighter in the station, and our guide exploded in derisive laughter: “A woman! We don’t want any women! The neighborhood would burn down!” That’s not fair, Caitlin said, and back at school she dictated letters to BJ addressed to the mayor and the newspapers.
We built solidarity between kids and adults, and with everyone in reach. Solidarity, not service, and not hierarchy. There was an open promise of acceptance, care, and repair at BJ’s. No one was a target of instruction; everyone was a dynamic and growing part of the whole. We dove freely into the wide, wild world, and swam as hard as we could toward a distant horizon, powered by experimentation, discovery, and surprise, always asking the next question and the next, and then the next.
BJ was raising abolitionist children, people who would grow up to stand against subjugation, people who together could construct shared spaces of fairness and kindness, folks who would be a prelude to the possible, willing to ask the big questions: What kind of world do we need to build in order to live free? How can we build it here and now?
Bill Ayers 