Education Does Not Wait: Lessons from Africatown to Refugee-Led Schools

By Lila Raouf

From Africatown, Alabama to refugee-led schools abroad, I keep learning the same lesson: education does not wait.

Recently, someone told me I don’t “fit the Alabama stereotype.” I paused…not because I was offended, but because the comment revealed something deeper about how we flatten places, people, and histories. In reality, my career, values, and research are deeply shaped by my foundational upbringing in Mobile, Alabama.

I grew up in a place marked by profound systemic violence, racialized exclusion, and deliberate neglect… and also by extraordinary resilience, organizing, and care. That tension has followed me everywhere. It is no coincidence that I left Mobile at 18 and eventually dedicated my Fulbright research at UCL to refugee-led education initiatives. The throughline of social justice has always been there.

 

Africatown and the Refusal to Wait

While home recently, I finally visited the Africatown Heritage House. There, I learned more about the Mobile County Training School, built by descendants of the Clotilda survivors — people who were forcibly displaced via the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States.

The school was not gifted by the state. It was not the result of benevolent policy reform. It was built by the community itself, as an act of resistance and survival.

The school was burned down twice.

And twice, Africatown residents rebuilt it. They refused to let education wait.

Today, the Mobile County Training School is part of the public education system and continues to serve students. But its origins matter. They tell a story we too often overlook: when institutions fail, communities do not sit idle — they organize, teach, and build anyway.

Echoes in Refugee-Led Education

As I walked through Heritage House, I was struck by how familiar the story felt. The themes echoed the very patterns I’ve been researching in refugee-led education contexts across borders:

• Communities creating their own education systems when formal ones exclude them
• Educators emerging from lived experience rather than credentialed pathways
• Persistent demands for recognition, representation, and the right to learn

Refugee-led schools are not temporary stopgaps or “informal” alternatives. They are acts of expertise, care, and political agency — much like the schools built by Africatown descendants generations ago.

 

Localization Requires More Than a Buzzword

At a moment when funding cuts are pushing the humanitarian and development sector to champion “localization,” I think we need to pause.

Before celebrating localization as a technical fix, we must interrogate our gaze:

Do we see refugee and displaced communities as educators and innovators in their own right? Or only when policy shifts and funding cycles force us to?

True localization is not a rebranding exercise. It requires unlearning, humility, and a serious engagement with the long histories of community-led education that have existed despite systemic violence and marginalization.

Africatown reminds us that education has never waited for permission.

 

Why This Matters for The Imposters 

This reflection sits at the heart of The Imposters. The platform exists to make visible the expertise that institutions too often overlook — the educators, organizers, and thinkers whose authority comes from lived experience, not proximity to power.

Imposter syndrome doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It is produced by systems that consistently tell communities like Africatown — and refugee-led educators globally — that their knowledge is secondary, informal, or insufficient.

Yet history shows us the truth is much simpler: they have been leading all along.