Michael Lawrence-Riddell is an award winning public school educator with twenty years of classroom experience. He conceived the Self-Evident Education platform in response to the urgent need for our society to honestly and rigorously engage in work to understand the histories and legacies of race and institutional racism.

Michael was inspired, in part, by his studies as an African-American Studies major at Wesleyan University, his work as a teacher of American History I, and his continued witnessing of the failures of our nation to truly reckon with the racial inequities present in history and our contemporary society. He wanted to teach the history of this nation through a lens of the creation of power and race as a tool of power. He also wanted to communicate to students in the cultural language that they understand: a multimedia lexicon. When, in his professional work, he found these materials did not exist in a high-quality and effective form, he set out to create them.