DURHAM – “When's the last time somebody made you feel good about being Black?”

That’s the question William Jackson, founder of the Durham-based nonprofit Village of Wisdom, posed to students while volunteering at a basketball camp. Only two students raised their hands.

“One kid, when I asked him, ‘tell me about it,’ he just he started laughing. He was like, ‘I'm just joking,’” Jackson told The Tribune.

Village of Wisdom seeks to systematically address the negative cognitive implications of racial bias on Black students while engaging families in community-based research and art.

On Feb. 28, the Black Genius Fest ‘26 will turn Durham’s historic Black Wall Street into a one-day “lab for the future of learning.”

“We have so many people walking around not feeling good, not being affirmed about who they are,” Jackson said. “The question just becomes, ‘what is our responsibility to make sure that our kids being affirmed in who they are and what they're capable of?’”

At Black Genius Fest, families and educators will gather on Parrish Street for over 20 interactive experiences, including live performances, hands-on exhibits and wellness spaces. The Fest will be an exploration of self-expression, cultural identity, self-love, joy, healing through hip-hop, restorative justice and Afrofuturism.

Jackson has a Ph.D. in educational psychology with a research focus on how Black parents make decisions related to their child’s racial identity and education. The work of Village of Wisdom has become known on a national scale as it is the only organization in the country training Black parents as educational researchers.

Some of Saturday’s exhibits include “Pulling Threads: Weaving Family and Community,” a quilting and textile-making experience with sound and video, and “I Am An Ancestor Too: I Am Because We Are,” an interactive portrait experience with a mirror mosaic wall.

In December, North Carolina appeared in headlines for being the worst state in the country for per-pupil spending, at $12,193 in cost-adjusted revenue, significantly lower than the national average ($17,853).

Durham County, however, has one of the highest per-pupil expenditure rates in the state at $5,496, according to a release from Durham County from last year. But funding is just one piece of the structural puzzle,  Jackson said.

“We can have all the money in the world to push an education to Black students in Durham,” he said. “If you gave $20,000 per student, but that education did not show that child the people that look like them, that made contributions in math and science and English and social studies, that child is going to walk away thinking that they don't really have much to give in those particular fields.”

Village of Wisdom’s mission does include advocating for better school funding, but also for Black people to take a leading role in creating a society that looks like them.

“When you leave a child with the experience of ‘the only people I've ever seen that transmit knowledge to me, my teachers, don't look like me…then what is my role in creating the society that I look like?’” Jackson said.

“I hope that when kids come to Black Genius Fest, and they see the different leaders that we're going to lift up; when they see the different exhibits that are asking them to think about how they're going to navigate their culture or explore their interests, or think about how they can change the world, that that'll inspire them to think about like ‘OK yeah, we do need a better society,’ and that pulls them into an imagination that isn't always accessible in our current education system.”

Visit https://villageofwisdom.org/black-genius-fest-26/.

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