2021

Fela Barclift was born in a house in Georgia. 

While her mother labored, her father was equal parts nerves and excitement. His first child was pushing her way into the world, and he couldn’t stop pacing and getting underfoot. Finally, those trying to tend to his wife shooed him away.

Mr. Barclift stepped outside onto the porch and cast his eyes upward. The night was filled with stars. He watched as one loosened itself to shoot across the sky. The star was completing a journey that spanned an unfathomable distance of years. As it traced its final path, its light reaching the young man who was the progeny of enslaved people with an African ancestry that stretched back to the dawn of human history, his child unleashed her first cry. 

Mr. Barclift ran back inside to hold his baby girl, thrilled for her existence. The love between father and daughter took root.

“He just would look at me, like he could really see me and see a great person in me,” Fela says from the parlor of her home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in central Brooklyn. Fela’s father believed she could be anything; she credits his belief in her potential and his unbridled joy in her being alive with grounding her even now. 

This earliest lesson is what Fela passes down to generations of Black New Yorkers fortunate enough to attend Little Sun People, an Afrocentric daycare and preschool she founded in 1981. Established in Bed-Stuy and now based in Fort Greene, Little Sun People is a community built around the littlest humans. Its mission is to serve Black and Brown children between the ages of two and five, and teach them to celebrate their Blackness, know their culture, and understand their history so that every child who passes through her doors will exalt in themselves and strive to reach their potential. 

In essence, Fela is waging her own revolution: to shape generations by teaching children how to love themselves. 

Fela was two when her parents left the Jim Crow South for good and settled in Bed-Stuy, which had one of the largest Black communities in the U.S. At the time, the neighborhood encompassed more than 630 square blocks of Black people and families living in gorgeous Victorian-era brownstones. The Civil Rights era was dawning, but the mainstream remained firmly in the grip of racist tropes and beliefs.

Despite her father’s love, young Fela wasn’t immune to these messages. “I thought that Black people were heathens, pagans, ugly, stupid, lazy,” she says. “Television, movies, my own parents, the church, the neighborhood — every connection I had communicated to me that there was something wrong or bad about having Black skin.” Her earliest years were spent hating herself. “I would look in the mirror and just want to take a knife and peel my skin off.”

When Fela was 10 years old, her beloved father suffered a mental breakdown. That same year, she heard Malcolm X speak on television, which inspired her journey toward healing her own self-hatred and claiming her identity as a Black person. As a young adolescent, Fela sought out every interview Malcolm X gave and watched his every television appearance. 

During those years, she often felt ignored at school by teachers and administrators. “I didn't feel like anybody even saw me,” she says. “I had really terrible circumstances in my family. I'm sitting there in shock and trauma and nobody's even looking to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ The kinds of things that now we do automatically.”

In time, her seeking knowledge and community led her to join political organizations like the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa. At 19, she discovered Bed-Stuy’s own The East, a Pan-African cultural center that was a mecca for Black artists and musicians, organizers, and intellectuals. Jitu Weusi, the leader and co-founder of The East, eventually invited her to work in their kitchen, and she accepted. 

Soon Brother Jitu, who was known for being able to really see a person, gave Fela an “assignment” to teach in The East’s school, the Uhuru Sasa Shule or Freedom Now School.

She remembers responding, “Me? I’m not a teacher. I don't know anything about teaching,” But he reassured her. “Don't worry,” he said. “We'll teach you to be a teacher. You can't be any worse than the teachers you've had in school all these years.” 

Her first class was made up of girls aged eight to 14. “We had a great time,” she says, but she also learned that by the time girls reached adolescence, it was too late: They had already internalized hating themselves and their people. To instill a sense of history, culture, and self-worth in children, she needed to catch them at that magic age when they were the spongiest learners. This is when the seed for what would become Little Sun People was planted. 

By the early 1980s, Fela had left The East, finished college, married, had a child, and was about to begin a prestigious white-collar job. But she couldn’t find a daycare where she felt like her one-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, would see images of herself and her culture reflected back to her. Ultimately, Fela declined the fancy job and decided to open an early childhood center in her house. 

In naming the school, Fela wanted something that “evoked a picture of who the school was designed to serve.” She thought about the beautiful Black faces of African children, about the energy of the African sun that deeply browned the children's skin as they played in the sunshine. “I wanted the world to know that this school was for those little people whose faces were gently kissed and browned by the African sun,” she says. “Out of all those thoughts, the name, Little Sun People, emerged.”

“I started with four students, including my daughter,” she remembers. Fela bought a stack of children’s books and called together a group of women from The East to help her color in the white faces and make the hair more like their own. 

“I made dinner for everybody, and then we sat there and took markers and colored in all the faces,” she says. “Page after page, there we are sitting in a circle, having ourselves a good time coloring in all of these faces.” 

She says it took a little while to realize the children needed more than colored-in faces and kinked-up hair. “At the very beginning, it was a little shallow. Later, I realized when reading the stories to the children that it's still a completely white story that has no connection to this child's life — who they are, where they came from, what they're doing, nothing,” Fela says. “This was 1981, and there weren't any storybooks for Black children in America, at least not that I found.”

Over time, a curriculum took shape. Rooted in a strong Afrocentric philosophy, it attracted a close-knit and proud group of adults committed to shaping the minds, hearts, and futures of children historically left behind in the American education system. All the teachers and administrators at Little Sun People took on the titles of Mama and Baba, mother and father, to reinforce a sense of familial ties in the proverbial village.

“What we've been doing over the years is trying to figure out how to take almost everything and teach it through the lens of anti-racism. Because racism is very connected to nearly everything that a Black person has to do and be a part of," Mama Fela explains. Applying this focus, LSP introduces even the youngest children to performance art, literature, history, science, math, reading, and writing skills. The children also learn violin, drumming, and dance.

Mama Fela, as nearly everyone who knows her calls her, believes young children suffer from being underestimated. A mistake, she says, because they are extraordinary beings, absorbing every aspect of their surroundings. “These people are taking in information like the top computer,” she said. “Give them six languages and they'll learn all six, able to communicate deeply in all these languages. They're learning so much!”

“When you first have a kid, you think you're going to teach them all these things, but then they teach you,” says Joy Williams, a quality improvement manager for the New York State Department of Health. Her daughter, Ava Crockwell, is nine and attended Little Sun People between 2017 and 2020, from ages two to five. 

“Ava played violin there when she was three,” Joy says. “They're given martial arts classes, learn drums. They play, they sing, they do African dance. The teachers are handpicked by Mama Fela, and they're loving and gentle, but also very good guides and very good educators, and so very affirming working through the issues. All the kids are in different developmental stages and the kids are all different, but they get space and grace to reach their potential.”

Ophthalmologist Dr. Benjeil Edghill lives with his pediatrician wife, Mary Ann, and their children, Esayah, 17, and Xavia, 15, on the same block where he grew up. His mother and sister live one house over, and four of his cousins live on the block. It is, in many ways, an American ideal of loving your community so much that you commit and root down for generations. 

When the time came for their oldest to go to preschool, he and Mary Ann chose to send them to LSP. In part, they say, because several family members had sent their children there, and those little graduates had become high achievers throughout their academic careers and beyond. But also, Benjeil attended The East’s Uhuru Sasa Shule. “I went to an Afrocentric preschool, so I knew the benefit of that foundation,” he explains. “It was very important for me that my children understood that African-American history, Black history, did not start with slavery. It started in Africa with the creation of civilizations and math and science and pyramid building.” 

He wanted his children to develop that pride of self early. “Because we all know that this world — not only this country but this world — has a narrative that Black people are not deserving of everything that this world has to offer,” he says. “So it was important for me that they came in feeling pride in who they were and loving themselves. I just wanted them to feel loved by people who had their best interests at heart.”

Both Esayah and Xavia loved their time at LSP. At two years old, Esayah recited poems by Langston Hughes and Xavia was introduced to music and dance. Years later, her love of dance would take her to the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing with DanceAfrica. 

“Mama Fela and the rest of the Little Sun People staff taught me a pride of my culture, but it's not just that. It's on an even more basic level than pride,” Esayah says. “They taught me from very early on that I had the potential to be great. Not necessarily because I’m Black, not because I'm anything other than myself, but because there are people around me who want me to excel. There are people around me who love me and are willing to see me succeed.”

His sister agrees. “I was proud of who I was and who I would grow up to be, because all the teachers and the people at Little Sun People made me feel confident in my skin and my hair and everything else,” Xavia says. Xavia’s best friends and her community can be, for the most part, traced back to her years at Little Sun People. 

Graduates of LSP have grown into lawyers, philanthropists, artists, and leading voices in their respective fields, like Dr. Uché Blackstock, a doctor of emergency medicine whose bestselling memoir, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine, details her life and career to date. 

In the book’s acknowledgments, Dr. Blackstock, a Harvard Graduate now in her forties, writes: “To my nursery school, Little Sun People, and its founder and director Fela Barclift, aka Mama Fela, I feel incredibly lucky that LSP provided the strong foundation and love that [my sister] and I needed as little Black children growing up in Brooklyn. Our experience at LSP was and continues to be integral to our identity as Black Americans.”

Within a few years of opening, Mama Fela’s Little Sun People needed a bigger space. Brother Jitu, still her mentor and advisor, recommended what was then called the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Center, which is in the heart of Bed-Stuy. 

“They gave us a tiny little spot in the basement,” she says. “And then, after we had been there for a few years, they gave us a spot on the street level. And that spot just kept growing bigger until by the time we left, we had almost 5,000 square feet.” 

Over the decades, LSP has had its share of challenges: from bad landlords to crumbling buildings, from arcane city bureaucracy to the global pandemic, Mama Fela has somehow managed to figure out how to serve the children. And recently, a new era began with the school that was built for Bed-Stuy and grew up in the heart of that storied neighborhood moving to Fort Greene. 

Today, Little Sun People is housed in a beautiful open space divided into separate classrooms. In the middle are small couches for reading; plants line the windows, and children’s artwork is pinned along the walls. There are two parakeets, a mother and her baby, that the children help take care of, and a fish tank they’re also keen to point out to a visitor. It’s a space that exudes warmth and safety while inviting the children to explore and the parents to participate.