In this chapter response, the author revisits young men and women whose voluntary writing and visual literacy practices helped teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers rethink the "funds of knowledge" urban youth bring to classroom communities. She examines transformations of everyday spaces into teaching and learning institutions by people of African descent in the United States. She shows how the creation of "free spaces" to access both supplementary and alternative knowledge is part of a continuum, with black bookstore events and spoken word poetry venues as prime examples of 21st-century venues. (Contains 10 notes.)