Ruth Harris, the first African American female president of the segregated teachers' college, Stowe, implemented the preservice teachers' volunteer program throughout her tenure from 1940 to 1954. The idea was likely the outgrowth from her dissertation study completed at the time of her appointment that supported teachers knowing the neighborhoods where they worked. She found teachers knew very little about students' environment and believed the information garnered from their work in the community would help them become advocates for impoverished African American children. Defining communities as learning laboratories in her book, "Stowe Teachers College and her Predecessors" (1967), Harris transformed the idea into the third of seven principles used to steer the development of the college: first, know your students; second, educate the whole teacher; third, schools should use communities as learning labs; fourth, an institution should study itself; fifth, provide for individual differences; sixth, seek better integration of curriculum; and seventh, in-service teachers should participate in the institution's planning. This study is an examination of the role two communities of color played in safeguarding their children's educational rights. The first was St. Louis Public Schools' (SLPS') Stowe Teachers College's (Stowe) preservice teachers' community volunteerism through the Jim Crow era, and the second, decades later during the 1990s, was Latinx households' funds of knowledge helped teachers teach their children.