Producer
Emmy Nomination
Recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for producing work that carries historical truth into mainstream media. [CATEGORY + YEAR PENDING]
About Ernest Crim III
I Kept Recording. Then I Spent Ten Years Teaching What Happened Next.
On July 30, 2016, my wife and I were called the N-word and spat on at a festival on the South Side. I recorded it. The court said it wasn't a hate crime. So I spent the next ten years teaching our kids, and everybody else's, how to recognize what they're seeing, name it out loud, and answer it well.
EDUCATOR · AUTHOR · SPEAKER · PRODUCER · FOUNDER
Chicago, Illinois · Booking nationwide
Where This Started
The Court Said It Wasn't a Hate Crime.
A summer festival on Chicago's South Side. A stranger's slurs. A phone I refused to put down. And a verdict that named none of it.
We were at a festival at the South Shore Cultural Center, my wife and me, when a white woman started screaming slurs at us. She knocked the phone out of my hand. She spat on my wife. And I kept recording, because I was shocked, and because some part of me already knew that if I didn't have it on camera, nobody would believe it happened at all.
The video reached millions. The prosecution did not follow. She was acquitted of both felony hate crime counts and of aggravated battery, convicted only of misdemeanor battery, and sentenced to probation and ninety days.
I had spent years teaching our kids that history explains the present, and that night the lesson arrived at my own address (the institutions built to name what happened could not even say the words), so I stopped waiting for them to say it and started teaching people to say it themselves.
“My first piece of content wasn't me just recording myself teaching Black history. It was, ‘Can you help me get justice?’”
[DATE PENDING VERIFICATION] · South Shore Cultural Center, Chicago
I Don't Teach Black History So You Can Remember It. I Teach It So You Can Use It.
Most of us were taught Black history as a month, a mural, a moment of silence. I teach it as a tool, the thing you reach for when the room turns, when the policy lands wrong, when your child asks a question you weren't given the tools to answer.
“I needed to teach people how important knowing who you are could be to responding to situations like that.”
The Path
From One Classroom to a Country.
The viral moment made me visible. Twelve years in the classroom made me worth listening to.
2009
University of Illinois
I earned my BA in History, with a minor in African American Studies. The framework arrived before the platform did.
MA
Secondary Education
My master's degree, the credential that turned me from someone who could talk into someone trained to teach.
2010-2022
Twelve Years in the Room
I taught high school history in Chicago, then in Joliet. Every day, thirty teenagers who didn't have to care about what I was teaching. I made them care anyway.
[YEAR]
The Incident
The festival. The phone in my hand. The verdict that wouldn't call it what it was. The first video I ever posted.
2022
I Leave the Building
I left Joliet Central High School and founded Crim's Cultural Consulting, same lesson plan, just a much bigger room now.
NOW
National Practice
Three books. An Emmy nomination. The Vanguard Award. A 501(c)(3). Millions of our kids and their families reached every month.
Credentials
Entered Into Evidence.
These credentials matter for one reason: they mark the difference between a compelling speaker and a qualified one.
12 Years Teaching · BA History, Univ. of Illinois · MA Secondary Education · 3 Books Published · 501(c)(3) Founder
Honor
Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award
Named for two people who understood that education and liberation are the same project.
University of Illinois
LAS Outstanding Young Alumni Award, 2024
From the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, where the work began.
Documentary
PBS · Divided We Fall
Cast member in the PBS documentary examining a country arguing with itself.
Published Work
Three Books. One Argument.
A memoir, a book for our youngest kids, and a field manual. Three different readers, but I'm making the same argument in each one.
2025 · Field Manual
How Black History Can Save Your Life
From the Talk to George Floyd, Everything You Need to Know to Deescalate a Racist Situation. This isn't theory. It's the procedure I wish I'd had, for the moment the room turns and you need to know what to do with your hands, your voice, and your history.
Explore the book
Memoir
Black History Saved My Life
How My Viral Hate Crime Led to an Awakening. My full account of the night, the verdict, and what I built out of both.
Explore the book
For Families
The ABCs of Affirming Black Children
Twenty-six artists, activists, and speakers, one for every letter. I built it for the reader who is four years old and already forming a sense of what's possible for our kids.
Explore the bookThe Method
This Is Not a Lecture.
Twelve years of teaching teenagers who didn't have to pay attention gave me a method, and it turns out it works on adults too.
01
I tell the truth about what happened.
Not a sanitized version, and not a version calibrated to keep everyone comfortable. The actual account, including my own, because I've found that a room gives you its full attention the moment it's certain you aren't managing it.
02
I teach the history that explains it.
Every present-day pattern has a documented origin, and I connect the two in a way that survives the drive home, narrative first, sourced throughout, never just a slide of dates.
03
I hand over the tools.
Language for naming what happened. A framework for responding. Something our kids and the adults around them can actually do on Monday morning. I don't leave people inspired and unequipped, because that's the failure I refuse to be part of.
Reach & Recognition
The Room Keeps Getting Bigger.
Classrooms, conference halls, newsrooms, and feeds, the lesson scales, and so does the room I get to teach it in.
- [X.X]M+
- Reached monthly across platforms
- [XXX],000+
- Followers across social
- [XXX]+
- Schools, districts and organizations served
Figures verified [MONTH YEAR].
As Seen In
- CNN
- HBO
- CBS
- PBS
- NPR
- ABC
- Meta
- Warner Bros.
- Microsoft
- A&E
- The Washington Post
- Chicago Tribune
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Crate and Barrel
[VERIFIED TESTIMONIAL PENDING, a named district leader or conference chair speaking to outcome, not charisma]
Give Me the Room, and I'll Bring the History.
I do keynotes, workshops, professional development, and institutional consulting for schools, universities, companies, and communities that want the complete version, not the safe one.
Explore the resources Support Crim's Class
“History is not background. It is context.”