During Black History Month, we have held a series of Lunch and Learn discussions focused on connecting history to the present and future. During the first week, we centered our conversation around the St. Louis area. We watched the BBC documentary, the Delmar Divide, and discussed neighborhood configurations/divisions in the city and county. For the second week, we turned our attention to the education system, both locally and nationally. We considered the concept of the resegregation of our schools since the historic Brown v. Board of Education case. Last week, we focused on the justice system and used a lecture by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness as the basis for our conversation. In that conversation, Nyla Long (Class of 2018) mentioned that “the discussions have come full circle and really tie everything together from our city’s structure to education to the criminal justice system”. Her reflection describes the focus for this coming week. We will consider what the past and present tell us about how we moved forward at Crossroads. While we’ve had a core group of students and faculty at all discussions, we enjoyed having new voices each week. Regardless of if you’ve been able to come before, we invite everyone to join us this Thursday at Lunch (Room 6) as we have our final conversation is this Black History Month series. If you have any questions about the past or upcoming discussions please email Kim (kim@crossroadscollegeprep.org).