Anne Bouie Interview, October 20, 2020

SEGMENT SYNOPSIS: The following transcript is automated and may not provide an accurate transcription of the interview. There may be typos or inconsistent line breaks. Please refer to the attached document for a more accurate transcript. SUBJECTS: DC Black Lives Matter Artist; (Virtual Interview)

All right, so Hello, my name is Joy Pierce. Today is

Tuesday, October 22, at 9:12am and I'm calling from my home in

Stephens City. Could you please introduce yourself, Anne, and

spell your name?

Sure. Hi, my name is Dr. Anne Bouie, B as in boy,

O-U-I-E and I'm chatting with you from Washington, DC.

Wonderful. And do I have your permission to record

this interview?

Yes, you do.

Awesome. So can you tell me a little bit about where

you were born and when?

Sure. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent a

few years there before my family moved to Atlanta.

Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about your

parents, their names and occupations?

Sure. My mother's name was Anna Laurie. And she's

the youngest of 10 children born to Willie and Nicey Gaynor in

Jackson County, Florida, Marietta Florida. My father was

born in Easley, Georgia, another small town in and they met on

the train on the way to Atlanta.

Wonderful. Um, can you tell me a little bit about

your family background? You said all of your family lived in the

south.

My nuclear family? Yes, on both sides of my nuclear

family. My mother was the youngest of a farmer. My

grandfather was a farmer and his great grandfather was the land

was deeded to my great grandfather, great grandfather,

yes, who received the land upon being freed from enslavement.

And that land is still in the family today. And my mother's

father farmed it. And he sent his daughters to school so that

they wouldn't have to serve as domestics and he had his sons

working the land. My father came from a very small town, and his

mother did day work, as they called it. And his father was

ill and confined. So but they were both, as I said, they're

both origins are of the earth and of rural people.

That's amazing. And can you tell me a little bit

about your childhood and growing up there?

Sure. I'm one of those families that--or one of

those people that eventually has to share with you all of my

entire life simply to tell you where I'm from. Because we were

in Atlanta for a minute. My I believe my mother said my father

had a photography gig there or something. But we moved back to

Atlanta, and we went to school in Atlanta and lived there. My

mother was familiar with Atlanta, she left home from

boarding school. As a student at Nursing at Grady college--at

Grady Hospital which was at the time, still may be one of the

premier hospitals for training black medical professionals. And

so she was there and getting ready to graduate. Marriage to

my father interrupted that. He went to the Korean he served in

the Korean War, and came back and was able to enroll at Morris

Brown College and served as a tax accountant with H&R Block

for 35 years. My childhood was spent in Atlanta, my brother and

I were city kids. And the first time I saw the earth and saw the

country really was when we visited my grandmother, and my

cousins over the summer. Being a city kid, I was amazed at the

land and saw acres and acres and acres and acres of crops and a

big old barn and of course when you're a little child, it looks

huge. It looks absolutely huge. But it was there that I got

introduced to the earth and to the land and I really resonated

with it and loved it all the there. Even though Atlanta is a

green and was at the time a really Green City--trees and

lots and parks and little streams going through the city,

at least in the area where we lived. But the country is in

altogether different thing. So I love the time in the country.

Although we were there in the summertime in early harvest

time. So it was quite a bit of work going on, we moved around a

great deal. When my mother remarried, we we became an Air

Force, brat family, an Air Force family, which meant a great deal

of moving around. So I actually have been to school in Florida,

Georgia, Kansas, and Pennsylvania by the time I was

in fourth grade, so that we moved around a great deal. And

some of that was fun, and some of it was, as would be expected.

That's so interesting. So what was it

like, constantly moving like that for you?

Well, as I've thought about it, over the

years, the upsides to it, as I'm sure most Air Force brats would

say, army brat, whomever would say that you get to see a lot of

different places and a lot of different people. And for me,

that meant seeing lots of difference. And at the same

time, there's similar things go on at every place. And they're

similar people at every place and the thing that it taught me

was the ability to go into situations and discern who was

friend who was foe, get a sense of the lay of the land, get a

sense of what being the new kid on the block meant over and over

again. So you got pretty good at being the new kid on the block.

The positive thing about that is obviously, your discernment

skills are very finely honed, the thing that can become a

handicap is you really don't have the opportunity to learn

how to develop relationships outside of your family with

people over time. Because you know, you're not going to be

there very long. And so making connections to people, for

example, I can remember friends, even to this day, in every place

I lived, that I lost contact with as we moved around as

children. And I can also remember, people who did the new

kid on the block thing with me everywhere we lived. The

positive--you get if you want to, you get kind of a

cosmopolitan view of having simply been around a lot of

different places, that puts some kind of sheen on people or some

kind of mark on people whether they want it to or not. And if

you're conscious of it, and intentional about it as an adult

reflecting on it, then it really does help understand why a

person can flit in and out of so many different arenas and

maintain some kind of sense of self.

Absolutely. That's so interesting to me, sort of

the adaptability that comes with that sort of constant change.

Yeah, some people would snidely call it becoming a

chameleon and others would call it adaptability and flexibility,

depending on how--the extent I guess to which people actually

lose themselves in the process of becoming whoever they need to

become, at a certain point, versus being adaptable to

different situations.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Can you tell me a little bit about school as a

child, if you had any favorite teachers or subjects growing up?

As a child, school was obviously fun, in some ways,

and obviously challenging in other ways. I went to school at

a time when teachers were fairly rigorous and had very high

And they did it, they did a good job with that, in my experience

expectations of their students and really did not care about

too much except you didn't didn't factor in so many things

that are supposed to have meaning today about whether or

not children could learn or not. And I remember specifically, the

thing I remember most about schooling in the south was, how

rigorous the teachers were and how merciless they were. In

terms of you learning. That is what I remember most about my

childhood. teachers in the south I can still remember of course,

I can remember my second grade teacher Mrs. Davis, or her son

and her son had a crush on me. But the the thing that I

remember most is the rigor and the intensity of the extent to

which they were very serious about teaching you To the

extent, for example, that when we moved from Atlanta to

Pennsylvania, to Kansas, and to Pennsylvania in particular, that

math, which is not one of my strong suits, I was actually

ahead of kids in Pennsylvania in math coming from the south, and

so my experience is that Southern schools in spite of

having fewer resources, and having buildings that were not

as new and well, furbish, quote, unquote, as other schools,

still, the still created environment and taught children

and taught them very well. Plus, there was a sense of nurture,

that I remember, in southern schools. As I was sharing with

you the other day that my principal, Mr. Brown, every

Friday took a small group of us who were brownies precursor to

Girl Scouts, to the bank every Friday, and we deposit our

little pennies in the he would line us up and walk us in there

and the bank, people would say, "Hello, how are you?" and he

would beam and all of this and dare us not to act properly. And

we've put our little pennies in the bank, and he'd walk us back

to the school. Sometimes we got an ice cream, but he did that

every Friday with us. And I really missed that when I left

that school. And it's an indication to me of the way that

that Southern adults, nurtured their kids and, and tried to

create and did create a sense of self in them in the face of

very, very stringent hostility, actually from the larger

community.

of sheltering us as much as possible from the rigors of

Southern life for African Americans when they're

encountering the larger society there. I think I was sharing

with you that I didn't, there was a time in southern

communities, you could literally go from womb to tomb and not

deal with anybody outside the black community. And the first

white teacher that I had actually what I was in Kansas,

on military base at Salina, Kansas. And I still remember the

principal, Mr. Bowman, who was a really very fine and excellent

principal and person. And I mentioned that I don't remember

the chats he had, I don't remember a lot of what we did. I

simply remember energetically, he was a good guy. And he's an

example of what Maya Angelou says, when people might not

remember what you say, but they will always remember how you

made them feel. And I obviously still have warm feelings toward

him. When we hit Pennsylvania is when the reality of encountering

white people on a regular basis, people outside community basis

started to sink in and sort of hit because it's like, "Oh,

dear. These people really don't think I'm very smart," or "Oh

dear, these people think things of me that are not true."

And my mother having been fairly sheltered herself, all of her

life seriously sheltered. Because I remember my uncle,

Willie, her elder brother, telling her that he that his

father, my grandfather told him it was his job, to go to the

train station and pick my mother up from boarding school and get

her back home that that was his job to do. And so he would be

waiting for her at the train station. And that kind of

protective energy that many Southern families were able to,

and communities were able to give their children fortified

them when they were growing up and created a sense of

protection around them that was obviously quite dearly needed.

And obviously, something to counter the press of living in

the south living, in the north, living any place actually. I

enjoyed school and found it a place of repose actually from

having to move. The one thing that would be consistent is you

go to a school, you get some books and you get a teacher and

you start doing homework, regardless of where you are.

That is a consistent thing. And so that schooling I guess became

a staple of how I defined... I don't know, some kind of

structure and routine because you have structure and routine,

of course at home, but you're always moving. Your environment

of always moving means that you do indeed come--I can see just

When I came to California, I attended one school it was

listening here, that's probably why I enjoyed school so much

predominantly black, and I had Mrs. Haywood who was my fifth

grade teacher, who really, really, really encouraged ideas

because it was a place of routine, in a sense of routine,

and encouraged thinking and I'd go to or with any kind of idea.

you knew it was going to happen, you knew was going to be

She said, "Yeah, go for it." And she would supply me with

equipment, and with books and all sorts of thing outside of

expected of you, regardless of where you went. And that was, I

the encyclopedias and stuff that I had at home to do all this

guess, in looking at it a part of why I stayed in school so

work. And she was very excited about it. And obviously, to have

friends from there to this day, from that encounter in Riverside

long. And why the structure of school really didn't bother me

when we got to California. And then I went to another school,

that much, because you need some kind of structure. Even outside

because we moved once again when I was in California. And that

of your home, you need some kind of structure and consistency

teacher was kind of the opposite of Mrs. Haywood, she really did

not have very high expectations for any of her students, we were

course your home provides it, but you have to leave your house

all black and Latino, she didn't have high expectations for any

sooner or later and encounter the real world.

of us. In fact, she very well communicated that she thought we

had a certain place or location, and it was her job to keep us

there. And to... not ever think that we could move or do any

better than that. So her energy towards her students was she'd

say things like, "You're going someplace and I don't want you

to act like you don't know how to act." And it's different from

when your parents say, "Don't forget who raised you. And don't

forget how you were raised." It's creating some kind of

expectation for you when you go someplace, was really, really,

really about don't embarrass me in the sense of who you are. And

she, I remember quite clearly taking ideas to her. And, as I

did with Mrs. Haywood and her simply dismissing them,

dismissing the ideas and really making it very clear that I

didn't know how to act. She was the one who, when I transferred

to junior high school, at the time, they had an overt tracking

system. Today, the tracking system is a lot more subtle, but

they had an overt tracking system of x, y, z and double x,

and she put me in y classes. And I remember being in those

classes, and I still remember the teacher, Mrs. Queenie Kales,

who at the end of um, I guess it had to be ninth grade said, "Now

Anne next year, I'm putting you in x classes, and I expect you

to act accordingly." And I really didn't know what she was

talking about until I got there in the x classes and saw. I

said, "Oh, this is what she's talking about," being the only

little black child in there.

Again, the teacher saying things like I used the word ambivalent

in a paper. And she called me to the front of the room and said,

"What does this word mean?" And I told her because my mother was

a psych nurse. So of course, I knew what the word ambivalent

meant. But she swore that I didn't and insisted that I write

the paper over again. So she was one of the people that created a

sense of "How dare you?" with me, and on the other hand, she's

countered with people like Mrs. Galbreak, who would work us to

death and say, "This is what I want you to do." And we did it.

And when I told her it was so much work, she just said, "Yes,

it is go do it." And other teachers there who did that. So

all kids encounter teachers who they don't like and who don't

like them. I personally believe if you have more than three

kids, you don't like one of them, but you love them and you

do what you're supposed to do with them and for them. And but

in the case of African American students, case of girls, in case

of poor, white students, whoever is on the bottom of the rung,

quote unquote, it is very important, and can almost be

life defining, the people that they run into or the people that

make the biggest impact on them and whether or not they run into

any advocates along the way. Because I used to reflect on it

even then that, why was I in all of these classes and none of my

friends were when I knew that most of my friends were as smart

as I was supposed to be labeled as and were just as competen but

none of them were in these classes. And that always

disturbed me, because why is that? And you certainly can't

make it into well, because I'm special and I'm different.

That's not the case. The case is a combination of any number of

factors that landed you there and did not land other people

there. And one can take that to mean that you think you're

somebody or something else and another way to approach it is to

be grateful and to be appreciative of that and

understand that in many ways, it's got it got nothing to do

with you personally. It does, and it doesn't.

And that's one of the things I've learned from very early on

that intelligence and creativity and humor and all that it's sort

of like this song that Gil Scott Heron thing some people don't

ever land in a place where they get to grow, they don't get a

chance to grow. And so when people do get a chance to grow

or land in some place where they do get a chance to grow, it's

very humorous to me when they really do start to think that

it's all about them and what they did and what they

accomplished and how they did it for themselves and nobody helped

them. That simply is not true. That is not true. In my

experience, if it hadn't been for some people along the way, I

wouldn't have made it into--Queenie Kales was a

deciding factor.She is the one--Mrs. Cooter decided I

should go into y classes which are dead end, academically.

Queenie Kales three years later said, "I'm going to put you in

this class." So that any number of the people along the way make

a profound difference in how the capabilities of anyone get

nurtured and deployed. So my schooling in high school--shared

with you the gamut from Mrs. Lawson to Mrs. Golbreck into Mr.

Shannon, had a hard time with the geometry, I took a class

from the same book in the same teacher for three years in order

to get a passing grade in it, because I had a very hard time

with it. And Mr. Peterson never made fun of me or never did

anything, said, "Okay Anne let's get at it again." And so those

experiences in school are making or breaking a difference. And

that is one reason that when I became an educator, that's part

of the reason that I did because most students are not unwilling

to learn. They are simply unmotivated to learn, and I

would defy anybody who goes someplace five days a week, for

seven hours a day and runs into people thinking that they don't

have home training or that they're not capable of learning

because of their skin color or the hue of their skin color, or

where they live and managed to continue to want to learn quote,

unquote.

Absolutely. So can you tell me a little bit about

your journey from high school through college and becoming an

educator?

Sure, um, we landed in Riverside when I was in the

fifth grade. And at the time, Riverside was a sleepy little

town that had more orange groves than people probably. Yeah,

really nice place to grow up in but not a good place to have a

lot of different kinds of experiences in and when I

graduated from high school, like a lot of us, I went to Riverside

City College and was taking classes there. And there too, I

ran into the extremes of a teacher who simply did not think

I could write and another one who, as I shared with you, whose

assignment was go watch the film, "Cool Hand Luke" and come

back and write on all the symbolism that is in the film,

which was a mind blowing experience. And I really

remember that film and that assignment to this day because

it opened up another set of neuron tracks in terms of

looking at the world and studying. At the time that I was

in junior college, the Watts Riots broke out. And one of the

responses in California was the creation of the Educational

Opportunity Program. And that experience reinforced my

realization of the disparities and the nature and the

implications of a kid's packaging as considering the

opportunities that they might have access to. Because the

Educational Opportunity Program came as a direct result of

policy and programmatic direct response to the inequalities

that were brought to light as a result of that urban rebellion.

And yet the people who were out there dying and confronting the

tear gas and all of that, their children, by and large, did not

wind up at UC Riverside and certainly did not wind up

graduating from UC Riverside, it was African American, and Latino

kids whose parents were already--who were already

placed, who had already been to junior college, who would

already had some economic and social currency, if you will, to

be in a position to take advantage of that. And the few

kids that did come from the urban arena, from LA and San

Francisco, and places that the resources were not as well

allocated, had a very hard time and many of them didn't make it.

And so I am one of the people who benefited from the sacrifice

and suffering. People in my own lifetime--I don't have to go

back to enslavement to talk about benefiting from the trials

of others. In my own lifetime, as a young adult, becoming a

young adult, I saw that. I wasn't out there in those

streets but I was one of the ones who got the benefit of that

program and of other programs. And there too.

And the other factor is that is while those programs might have

helped people like me get in the door, they certainly did not

ensure that I would get out with the paper so that a lot of times

people talk about African Americans and others taking the

place of other people, the whole affirmative action thing. And my

experience and observation of that is the affirmative action

and EOP program and other programs like that might have

gotten you in the door. But in some ways, they actually were a

hindrance in you getting out because you went in there with

people assuming that you did not belong there, and treating you

accordingly. And so you had to work very hard, if you will, to

demonstrate the fact that look, I did earn this and it just so

happened that the door opened, it's not anything to do with the

fact that I came in here unprepared, or that I came in

here unable to learn how to get prepared, learn how to make it

and do well there. And so on on both sides that really shaped my

views a lot. I really have a hard time with people talking

about I made it and I and I did it. No, you didn't. (laughs) I

have a hard time with people saying that, "Well, you got

there and you didn't deserve it." It's like, "Yes, I did. And

yes, I do. Because it was earned it was not given to me."

And most of the programs--we all know that the first year of any

grad school program, especially at the PhD level is about

weeding people out it really, that is what it's about. They

can say yes or no if they want to. But we both know that we all

know that. That's really what many, the first year many PhD

programs is about. In fact, that's the case with some

undergrad programs. I remember a woman telling me she went to

Spelman and her professor said, "Look to your left, and then

look to your right. And one of those people will not be here

when the semester ends." So no one can say that a person got

out of the place. And the bottom line is getting in is important.

But getting out with what you came for is also important in

the EOP program didn't guarantee that and programs that talk with

people about ethnicity or race--it doesn't guarantee that

they'll get out. And in some ways, the forces make it very

rare that you won't get out and that if you do get out, you will

have paid for it dearly.

So that I transferred from when I was at UC Riverside. I was

getting ready to graduate and I had another one of those

professors on the Mrs. Haywood end who said,"You don't know

what you're going to do when you graduate. Fill this out." And it

was an application to Stanford to the secondary teacher

education program. So I rounded education, in fact, because Mark

Loman knew that I did not know what I was going to do, and saw

some notion that I might benefit from that program and at least

put me in an arena where I would learn a whole new--a whole lot

of different things and become exposed to a lot of different

things that I had not to been before. And part of the reason

that I know that my experiences are not unique, because I, all

of us ran into people like Mark Loman. And all of us, I can

remember in the tradition of rigor and excellence, and really

not caring about a whole lot of other things. I think I told

about one of my professors, Dr. Jacqueline Haywood at UC

Riverside, who was the first African American professor there

and inaugurated the black studies courses there. And I, we

all loved her, of course, and we're really glad that she was

there. And I remember her calling me into her office. And

we were talking, just as I shared with you, just as you and

I are talking right now. And she laid a paper that I had

submitted to her on the desk. And I knew what it was, it was

one of those night before B plus papers, or B minus papers that

you submit. And she put the paper on the desk, and she just

very quietly asked me, "Now about this paper, do you want to

talk about it? Or do you want to do it over?" And that was all

there was to that. So that those are the kind of professors I ran

into that shaped to me about, "Don't come in here playing and

thinking you're going to get over" because they call you out.

And that has been my tradition with with students, I will call

them out when--the problem is not misbehavior. The problem is

not even trying. And part of the effort issue is because why

would you try when somebody is going to put you in a y class

anyway? And you look at the work and the work is insulting to

your intelligence, which you know, you could but that's where

you are, and what do you do? And there are all kinds of ways that

kids revolt against being intellectually and psychically

insulted. And that is one of the things that they do is just

become disengaged, why would I engage with something that

daily, daily, daily tried to tell me who I was, and in many

ways, that's counter to the the message that I get from people

who do Love me, and who are supporting me, and who are

working in some cases, two and three jobs to get me those three

figure tennis shoes that I come with, because they know I want

them and who are working?

So I could go on and on with that. But I won't. In terms of

undergrad and graduate experiences and getting through

school and that's how I left Riverside after all those years,

from fifth grade to UC to graduating from UC Riverside, at

Stanford. And at Stanford, in some ways, as I shared with you,

I'm really glad that I did not walk into Stanford,

understanding the allure and the the reputation and the fact of

Stanford. I walked in there--It's another school that

I'm going to it wasn't until I got there that I realized what

people thought of the institution and how highly rated

it was, you were transformed into another kind of human

beings simply because you attended Stanford, and that too

was "Oh really?" to me. So I'm glad I walked in there with

that, and wasn't until I actually got into the the

teacher ed program, and started seeing what the implications of

being Stanford were about and looking at, "Well how did you

get here?" And looking at the assignments, but I had some fun

in that teacher ed program. And I learned a lot in that teacher

ed program that has stood me to the rest of this day. And that

helped shape me becoming an educator and go into grad school

because of some of the things that I learned and I did.

One of my formative core experiences when I was intern

teaching at Burlingame High School, was how much of what I

really needed to know I was not taught and in grad school at

Stanford University, and I realized--our teacher education

program was rated number one or two in the country. And so if I

wasn't getting it there, very few people were getting it

anywhere else, at least that so-called counted. And one of

those things was working with students, especially students of

color, because I walked into my African American history class

that I was teaching at Burlingame High School, and they

welcome to me the same way that we welcome Dr. Hayward UC,

Riverside, excuse me. And I walked in there and I asked them

per my Stanford training about involving students in learning

process, quote, unquote. And I asked them what they wanted to

learn in this black history class. And what my students

heard, and what many students hear is not, "I'm being open and

want you to learn new things." What they heard is, "This woman

does not know what she's doing and does not know what she's

teaching. Why should I respect her?" Because they came from a

place of wanting to know that whoever was in front of them,

was competent, and would be able to work with them not whether or

not they liked the person, quote, unquote. Initially,

liking had nothing to do with it. So I lost that class, even

though I was African American. And they liked me quote,

unquote. I lost that class. And it was, it's really humorous

today because my department chair, Aldo Priviney, who is

this really very suave, kind of high school teacher everybody

thinks about--camelhair jackets and black turtleneck and loafers

kind of teacher. I asked him to come to my class, to help me see

whether or not my assessment was correct. And he sat in that

class and he said, "Yep, Anne you've lost them. They're gone.

You've lost them." And but what he meant from that I had no

control of the class.

And I was, in all likelihood, not going to get control of the

class, because it's very difficult to get control of a

class, once you've lost them, the best thing to do is not ever

to have lost them. Because the work you have to do to reclaim a

class that you lost in terms of discipline and attention and

creating a learning environment is so, so arduous, that it's

all--I can understand why people give up, because it is extremely

difficult to reclaim a class whose discipline so forth has

gone out the window that you've basically lost control of. And

that was so humbling and humiliating that I have never

lost a class since then, because I learned a different way of

doing things with different kids. On the other hand, I had a

class, predominantly white, and it was contemporary problems.

And I had different kinds of experiences. Two of my favorite

students were John and Peter whom I remember to this day,

very wealthy kids. And one day, they came into my class with a

jar full of marijuana seeds, because I was young, African

American, cool da, da, da, da, da. And I told them, "I would

strongly suggest you take those out of my class. And if you do

it again, I will call the authorities on you. Because I do

know what you look like when you're high, you know, eyes are

red, and dilated. And you're coming here, almost as if you're

floating. Don't do that again. And in fact, I want to research

paper on the street names or drugs and medicinal names of

drugs and their uses. And I want footnotes on the paper." And

they looked at me quite shocked. And how and, "Who are you?" And

I said "Yes, indeed we will. Otherwise, there can be

consequences to this." And so looking at my approach in asking

kids, "what do they want" versus saying, "Oh, no, no, no, no,

no." John and Peter not only turned in excellent papers, they

gave me the first edition of a book, I guess they got from one

of their homes, Stanley Livingston's "In darkest

Africa," one of the first editions of it. And I still have

that book to this day.

I still remember Michael Brown, this little cowboy who put his

boots--took off his boots in my class and put them directly in

my walkway to see what I would do. So you ran into all kinds of

kids. And I learned a lot from Michael Brown. "Michael, would

you please put your boots on? Thank you." And from Little

Peter, who had gray hair because his parents expected him to go

to Harvard and the child had gray hair in the 10th grade.

Oh my gosh.

Yes, it was horrible! To the two very very

smart kids like Linda Savage who said, "You know, I really like

you but they don't think that you can control them. They don't

think you can teach them and that's why they're there like

that Miss Bouie." And having to regroup with that and

understanding that there are different cards, you have to

learn how to play. And any school that's going to send you

into an urban school if they don't teach you the complete

playbook, they're doing you a disservice because it's not that

children are uneducated or don't want to learn or behavior

problems. As I got out of grad school, and I worked, and I

learned even more, that was one pivotal experience losing that

class and working with John and Peter.

When I got to farwest laboratories upon graduating

from UC Riverside, I worked in a lot of urban projects around

educational dissemination and doing different kinds of work. I

worked on a project to reduce suspensions in Stockton,

California School District, and I had to work with a lot of

students and teachers there, that was a very rewarding

experience that I was given. And from working at farwest

laboratory, I moved to another educational project that worked

with reducing violence and vandalism at schools. That was

another seminal framing experience for me. And it was

there that I was able to put my experiences at Burlingame High

School into some kind of context, because the program

operated in urban schools all over the country, literally

North, South, East and West and dead center of the country. And

it brought together teams of educators, civic people, police

people, teams of--they tried to take this approach of

understanding that it was a community issue, not merely a

school issue, and invited these teams of people to come to the

sessions about how to reduce violence and vandalism in their

schools. And it was there that we hired different people to

come and make presentations and lead workshops, from mostly

local areas, or at least areas surrounding the city in which we

were in so that in the Bay Area, we worked with a lot of Bay Area

educators and civic people. And I started hearing from the

people who were effective, irrespective of packaging, the

same song. And that's what really struck me about being

effective in urban environments, and why I wanted to become an

urban educator, because they were saying, "It can be done.

And this is how you do it." And it's very powerful when you hear

dapper, trash-talking, junior high school principal from

Oakland, saying the same thing, as you see a little

straight-laced, proper African American woman to a Down to

Earth da, da, da, da, da Southern police person, all

saying the same thing about how you are effective within urban

schools, how you create rapport, how you raise expectations, how

you get kids and communities motivated and get engaged and

using their motivation, which they obviously have, in ways

that will help them in their lives. That was very, very

powerful for me that all these people were saying the same

thing. And I learned from them. I listened to them. And I

learned from them and talked with them extensively offline

about their experiences and how they did it.

So that when I applied to grad school, first time, I didn't get

accepted. And I taught for a year California University at

Stanford, San Luis Obispo. And there too, I was one of the

first African American professors that they had, and I

was in the Ed school and I was teaching urban ed and such. But

black students on campus were really thirsty for somebody with

their experiences. But I now had Burlingame's experience under my

belt. (laughs) And so I was able to know when to yield the carrot

and when to yield the stick with students inside and outside of

my classes. I learned to sense what they call the "Okey doke"

and the obvious--to some people--obvious lies of it all

versus the truth of it and learn not to be swayed by the stories.

Learn which stories to be swayed by and which stories not, learn

to discern when I was getting ready to--For example, this is

what I'm trying to share. When I was at Stanford, I was working

at Nairobi College in East Palo Alto, and I was teaching and

sometimes those were times when there was a lot of community

engagement. A couple times my students came in and said they

had court dates and they had to go to court. And they need to be

excused from class. And so of course, I said, "Oh, okay," I

assumed that this--and then somebody called me and, she

said, "Anne those are for parking tickets, they aren't for

anything civil." And soon I learned that that no, no, no,

don't come in here with a court date telling me that you have

something real going on, and you've got a parking ticket that

you want to take care of. So those kinds of things, a lot of

it was so that I was able to really be of real use to people

to students, because I was able to carrot and stick them.

Whereas before, I was mostly using carrot and care and

concern, but without the kind of care and concern that Mrs.

Haywood evidenced, for example, or Dr. Mayhew evidenced when

I--he is a classic example of carrot and stick both in working

with students. And that's what I learned from grad school.

I'm sort of skipping ahead. If I go back to talk about my

experiences at Stanford, one of those experiences is, again,

under the press of, "Was I here legitimately or was like not

there legitimately?" I actually went to the chair of my

department and said, you know, "Did I get here--how much did

who I was play into to whether or not I got in here, and he

pulled out my class, the GRE scores from my class and said,

"Look at--" and he just threw them, he just put them on his

desk and said, "Look at these," and I saw my scores, and my

scores were, my scores were solid, they were good scores.

And that again, reinforced to me that a lot of times people like

many who wind up in those doors are not there, because they're

getting a favor done. They're there, because a door that was

normally closed to people with that kind of packaging all of a

sudden opened, but they were more than able to walk in there.

And on the other hand, there are many who, for whom the door

open, and they were not prepared and equipped to be there and

when they ran into--but at their schools, for example, I used to

run into a lot of students who were A and B students. And I

remember a story I read in a newspaper article about this

woman, who's a bank vice president working with a high

school student at Castleman High School in Oakland, which was

really renowned for its athletics and its students

spirit, but but its academics were quite low. And she had the

students who've gotten an A minus on a paper. (phone rings)

And the woman looked at the paper--Sorry, the woman looked

at the-

You're okay.

paper, and said, to herself, "Am I really going to

tell this child the truth about this paper?" And she decided

that she would tell the child the truth about the paper, she

asked the child, "Do you want me to really edit and tell you

about this paper?" And the child saying, "Yes, I do, of course."

And the woman took this A minus paper. And by the time she was

done with it, the paper was essentially would have been

about a D, in a class that had high expectations, it would have

been equivalent to a D. And so many times, the standards are

lowered, and the grades are raised. And kids come out

thinking that they really know something A or B, or C and land

at some place like UC Berkeley, or Cal State, or any place and

find out that the work that they've been told was an A was

really C if not actually failing work. And that is, those are

sort of the two ends of the continuum that many students of

color face. They're either very well prepared and not thought to

be prepared, and were able to enter the place because of doors

opening or doors open and the kids were not prepared at all

and were sent up like raw meat. So that many times that's where

students, all students, but particularly students who have

been traditionally underserved and underrepresented fall.

So going back to Dr. Mayhew, I went to him and said that I'm at

the end of my second year and my advisor had not told me about

preparing for the proposal, nor about the fact that I needed a

master's degree outside of the School of Education to graduate

and that that meant another 36 units that I had to pick up and

pay for. And that was one of the times I almost quit school.

After learning that and after having gotten through that

trauma, and decided that I would press on, solely by the the

grace of God I might add, and the spiritual support I got from

a church that I had become a member of. I went to tell him

that my situation, and he said, Come back in two weeks. And when

I went back in two weeks, he said, "Okay, this is the deal."

And he laid out the the proposal development guidelines and said,

"There are five chapters in a dissertation. This is what each

one of them does, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, come back to me in a

week with an outline of each of the five chapters." And I was so

taken aback that I actually did it. And from then on, he became

my major advisor, and he hired me as a TA. And I was working

three jobs, counting his at the time working at Nairobi College

and working at American Institutes for Research, and

with him and taking a full load.

And he had assigned me to write some kind of policy handbook and

I called him one time and I said, "Dr. Mayhew, I'm really

got a lot of going on right now. Can I get an extension on this

assignment from the deadline?" He said, "No." And pretty much

goodbye and hung up the phone. (laughs) And so I was sharing

with you that the the grad school thing is as much about

the process as it is about the content of the work. And I don't

remember the contents of that policy handbook, per se, nor do

I remember in detail some of the assignments that I was given at

AIRA to work on. But I do remember that Dr. Mayhew said

no. And that meant that I had to get all of that stuff done. All

of it done.

And running into a professor when I finally accepted that I

was going to have to do this history thing went into a

professor like Kennell Jackson, who would assign you 500 pages

of reading this esoteric, African, African American

History, names with five and 10 syllables in them and countries

from places that you're just trying to get a grip on. And the

history of all of this and acting as if that's the only

class you had is his 500 pages of reading, and going to a

seminar. And hearing that--I missed that seminar. I'm so glad

I did. But as I shared with you going to a seminar, and I call

my friend to ask her, what did we need to do as a result of it?

And she told me the Kennell sent us home. She said, "We were

sitting around the table. And we started going through the

discussion at the seminar and Kennell just stopped and he

said, 'You guys have read. Go home.'" And send them home. And

so the press, those are the kinds of things that that stymie

people and cause them to give up not so much the work, although

the work is obviously arduous, but those are the experiences

that stuck with me about the kinds of standards you can hold

people to, especially if you know that they're also in your

corner.

As I shared with you about Dr. Mayhew, when I started this

internship at University of San Francisco. The prof that I ran

into was from UC Berkeley. And he invited me to his home in the

Berkeley Hills to discuss the assignment. And it didn't feel

right. And I went to Dr. Mayhew and I specifically remember

sayinh, "You never invited me to your house in the Berkeley Hills

to discuss anything." And he did his proverbial, "Huh. Get back

to me." And sure enough, I got back to him. And the next time I

talked to that Professor, we were meeting on UC Berkeley's

campus, not in his house in the Berkeley Hills. So that the

quintessential thing about being, I believe, a good

manager, a good educator is knowing when to hold 'em and

when to fold them. And Dr. Mayhew told me no on getting

that assignment done. And on the other hand, when I went to him

about an untoward approach by a professor, I'm telling you, that

man treated me with kid gloves from then on out. (laughs) He

treated me with kid gloves. And to this day, obviously, I don't

know what Dr. Mayhew said, but obviously he said something. And

that man left me alone. So that those are the kinds of people

that struck me, the kind that expected the absolute most out

of me and almost had no mercy. And at the same time would take

anybody who tried to harm you to the mat.

So those are lessons--this little trail as I look back on

things that taught me about how to be and help me examine how I

was treated and what helped me get what enabled me to keep

moving along, aside from the familial things, and my mother

who had just--if you come home with A's and B's and you get a C

or D in something, that's what gets emphasis, not the A's and

the B's, what gets emphasis is, "What about this, and dah, dah,

dah, dah, dah on that." And so between those two streams of

environment, I distilled out of it if you're going to jack

somebody up or be untoward, with somebody about something they

didn't do, you have to have their backs. And I had the same

experience with my mother, going all the way back to junior high

school, I was in the teacher's classroom. And she was very mean

to me, and had me standing out in the hallway and had me in the

back of the room when I didn't have my glasses, and sent me to

the dean's office. And the dean told me to come back the next

morning because she was going to talk to me, and I went home and

told my mother about it. And my mother went to the school with

me. And sure enough that Dean and my teacher in there waiting

for me to I guess, send me into my next incarnation. And my

mother took them to task. And she was a classic example of you

do not want to mess with an African American woman about her

child. You don't want to do that. And I witnessed my mother

put both of those women in their seats. And there too I got left

alone after that. So I've learned all these lessons about

observing things. And as I shared with you, when I got out

of grad school, and got my dissertation done, and Dr.

Mayhew was my chair, and he signed off on it. And you can't

ask for anything better than for Louis D. Mayhew to sign off on

your dissertation, that is a big deal and it meant a great deal

to me.

And going to work at those places where I got a chance to

start interacting with young people and when I started

getting a chance to having somebody concretize and almost

present a structure and almost a theory of how you work with

students who are disengaged, and so called unengaged and who give

off the appearance that they don't want to learn helped me

when I finally left both of those jobs. I got an opportunity

to start an after school enrichment program that was

written by the Northern California Council of Black

Professional Engineers. And it was housed at a large urban

church in East Oakland Allen Temple Baptist Church. And that

program dealt with kids, grades seven through nine who were

underachievers, and who were either failing in college prep

classes or wasting away in general math classes. And our

task was to introduce them to sciences and math and to make

sure that when they left, if they came in, in seventh grade,

when they left us, as going into school as sophomores that they

were enrolled in geometry and in biology, which according to

California state standards, that's where you're supposed to

be. In 10th grade, you're in geometry and you're in biology,

and that sets you up for the rest of the track. And we all

know that from ninth grade on, that's when it starts and if you

aren't on that track, it's very, very difficult for you to get to

get on it, if you're not on it by ninth grade.

And so our students were the kinds that would come in with

their homework folded up in little pieces of paper, lots of

them in their backpack, no date, no no class description, folded

up on these little grimy pieces of paper, and walk in and say,

"And?" about all of this. And it was our task to take these

bright kids who were very disengaged from school, and to,

if you will, help them transmute into kids who would feel

comfortable in biology and geometry in 10th grade. And this

was an opportunity for me to put into practice and see for myself

whether or not I could do what all of these people that I had

learned from in the violence and vandalism project and from my

own personal experiences with who got me to work and who

didn't and who took care of me and looked after me and who

didn't, put them into practice.

We worked with 50 to 80 junior high school kids, four days a

week, two hours a day after school and the staff were

college students who were math and science majors and/or who

wanted to become teachers. And by that time, I had learned

enough about process to understand thoroughly. And we've

already documented the fact that math is not my strong subject.

So that I told them, "These are the tools you need to develop

really good learning activities." Creative, bright

kids who needed to understand what they need--to develop

learning experiences that would help kids who were unmotivated,

quote, unquote, and who were certainly performing below their

ability, and who citizenship you see--at that level one of the

things I learned, it's not the academic grades that I want to

focus on, it's the citizenship grades that are the teller. And

if your citizenship grades are poor, that tells me something

right there, that because all you have to do is go to class

and shut up and get a decent grade for citizenship. Now, if

you are doing something to get less than a decent grade for

citizenship, that tells me right that you are nowhere near doing

any academics at all. That's not where your attention. So the

first thing is, let's get your attention to academics, and then

the ability, and the mindset will kick in. So we indeed did

that.

I taught the project interface staff (sigh) the processes of

teaching, how you teach how you set up, what you do on the first

day, what you do in the first week, how you lay out the

groundwork, how do you get a sense of establishing leadership

in the classroom without coming off as a neo nazi? How do you do

the nurture without coming off as an earth mother who has no

damns whatsoever, and no boundaries whatsoever? How do

you design learning experiences and what do you need--content to

do learning experiences, so I was a process person, and they

were the content people. And in order to develop good content,

the tools that I gave them more the California State Standards

for math and science, which were among the best in the nation.

Massachusetts State Standards, were, I understand, the very

best. California State science standards were just a beautiful

work of art. And they also produced documents about what

classes needed to be taken at each grade level to assure

college entrance, what would be in those classes, and what they

needed to know year by year. And I shared with the college

students and the staff, you all have been through this but these

And you develop--you don't call yourself a tutor. You don't call

are the standards. This is what they have to know, this is what

they should have known. I need you to develop learning

experiences that cover what they should have known and that they

don't know, what they're doing now and what they will run into.

And I got taught by people not to give people lessons, Robert

Fullilove at UC Berkeley shared what you want to do, or you want

to do these worksheets, and you have students develop worksheets

and learning activities that address all three of those

different points in the learning process.

it remedial education. We never even use the word tutor. We

never used any of those words that have come to mean that

you're stupid and you need help. We never did one on one work, we

always did work in small groups, because for some cultures in

some communities, that is the way. You don't ever do anything

alone, you always do things in a small group, or with a group of

people. Even if somebody is braiding your hair and it's you