Black Futures: In Conversation with Dr. Aiesha Turman

In The Education We Might Have Had: Black Freedom Dreams and Albany’s Unfinished Future, Dr. Aiesha Turman traces a line from Albany’s African Free School to the Black high school students who organized for greater representation, opportunity, and power over their education during the late 1960s. Featuring a screening of her short film Unseen Routes, the talk considers these moments not as separate historical episodes, but as part of a continuing Black educational vision—one carried across generations by young people, families, educators, and communities. What might Albany’s educational landscape have become if its earliest Black institutions and ideas had been allowed to grow? And what can the demands of Black students in the past teach us about the futures that remain possible?