In the year 2009, I was an Executive Director with a beautiful eight-year-old son, 17 years experience in the field of youth development, a 5,000 plus student roster, a multimillion-dollar budget, and a billion dollar concept. Before the close of the year I would give up the multimillion-dollar budget and depart from the 5,000 plus students to focus my billion-dollar concept on one person, my beautiful eight-year-old son.

This journey with my son began at the end of the 2009/2010 school year, when my wife and I pulled our son out of school. He had just completed the second grade; for the grades three, four and five my son, my wife and myself built our own homeschooling network. The main goal was to protect our son’s spirit for learning, love and laughter. From as early as preschool my son would wake up for school with the same excitement he had on Christmas morning and we were not going to allow our dissatisfaction with limited school options in our city to interfere with that spirit. Plus, the growing number of assaults on the mind and bodies of Black boys in our school systems pretty much made the choice for us. So, for three years we entered the world of the Nvizaboman and went completely off the educational grid.

Nvizaboman.co is about an African-American father and son’s preservation for learning, parenting, play, economics, intimacy and the creation of a worldwide playground where African-American parents feel they have transparent support that enables them to create the world they envision for themselves and their children. Though this site will include vignettes, scenarios, featured articles, shared resources, products and web links, our immediate goal is to lead by the example of our personal success of establishing a new paradigm in parent and children relations.

And who is the Nvizaboman? As Ralph Ellison said, “I am the [Nvizaboman]. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am [nvizabo], understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” And I refuse for that to be the same for my son.

Welcome!