In Detroit, where innovation and resilience often grow from the same soil, one woman is transforming how young Black students see the world and themselves. Through The Kindred Collective, a Detroit-founded program, social worker and mother Remeta Hicks-Montgomery has reimagined the classic HBCU tour into a week-long, joy-centered passage through Black history and higher education.
For Hicks-Montgomery, the idea wasn’t born from theory but from memory. “I went on two Black college tours in high school, when I was in the 10th and 11th grades. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t the best student. And so when I saw a flyer for the tour in the library, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the schools — it was all the cities and states they would be visiting,” she says. “I’ve always loved traveling, and even though I wasn’t the best student, I knew I wanted to go to college.”
She remembers the excitement of walking “the same grounds as pioneers I had read and researched about and traveling to places I had never been before, “yet being “unprepared for what it would take to actually make it there and thrive once I made it. I not only lacked confidence, but I also lacked real support. I was the first in my family, and I honestly think my family was just glad I was at a school like Cass [in Detroit] and going to graduate.”…