And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City High School Students

On the first day after spring break, Little calls in sick, and the substitute is befuddled until Corwin tells him they should be reading Act 3 of Hamlet. Cassandra Roy, the college counselor at the school, comes in to tell the students she has funds for them if they can’t afford the fee for the AP exam. Little calls and asks Corwin if there are any administrators in her classroom. Many students don’t do any work. Corwin tries to step in to explain some sections of the play.

Little doesn’t show up again, and half the class is missing. There is a substitute whom the teachers refer to as “coach.” He insists on reading the part of Claudius, and he reads as Shakespeare is meant to be read. The students give him an ovation, and it turns out he has worked as an actor.

 Later that day, Braxton attends a meeting with people in administration to figure out what to do if Little does not return to teach her AP class. He thinks she might go on disability for the rest of the year. Teachers think this situation couldn’t have happened in a wealthier, white school district, where parents are able to be more involved.

Braxton’s father, Frank, grew up in South-Central, where Frank’s mother, who had grown up in an orphanage in Georgia, fought for her son to get a coveted permit to attend school outside of the district. Frank went to college to study art and became the first black animator at Warner Brothers. Frank waited on an overnight line over three nights to get his daughter a permit to attend a school in Hollywood, and Braxton attended that same school as a sibling. Braxton’s parents later divorced, and his mother sent him to his father’s house when she felt her son was not working hard enough. His father was a hard taskmaster who checked his son’s homework and made him redo it, even if it was after midnight.

Braxton chose to attend Dorsey High School in his own neighborhood. Dorsey is Crenshaw’s rival. His father died, and his mother allowed him to attend the neighborhood school that his father wouldn’t have. Braxton dedicated himself to student government and football and attended La Verne College near LA because his college counselor took him there, and it was the path of least resistance. He majored in English and taught in South-Central. He later taught in a white school on the Westside and later started as the counselor at Crenshaw, where he has often been overwhelmed by the gravity of his students’ concerns, such as the boy whose father had been murdered by a gang. Braxton helped this boy attend a college in the Midwest by paying for the boy’s plane ticket and getting him on the plane.

Braxton originally lived in South-Central but, after attempted robberies and gunfire, he moved to a quiet suburb. In addition to caring for a baby and toddler, he has to commute on the freeway. He has dealt with difficult situations this year, such as that of Toya and Sabreen. Little has also added to his troubles. Braxton finds out that he passed the school district’s assistant principal test and will likely be in a different school next year.

The students in Little’s AP class are worried about the AP exam, and they ask Corwin to find out what happened to Little. Corwin visits Noble. Noble grew up poor in a logging camp in Florida and believes that reading helped her overcome substandard education. She closes her announcements with “‘Remember, reading is fundamental’” (327).

Noble engenders a split opinion about herself among her faculty. Some, such as Little, think she is autocratic, but others think she is able to cut through the bureaucracy to get things done. Noble told Little that Little is the second-best English teacher she had ever met (Noble considers herself the best). She also told Little that each year, Little is more and more concerned with herself and not her students, and the AP scores of her students have gone down as a result.

Little’s actions have caused some students to leave the program. Some parents have listened to her denunciation of the program, and others are put off by her actions. Braxton says, “‘This is like a virus that’s spreading’” (328).

Corwin visits Little in her duplex, where she is jumpy and smoking. She has started taking antianxiety medication. When she returned from the meeting with the principal, she collapsed. She feels bad about leaving the students in the lurch and would like to teach them in a hotel room, outside Crenshaw. She says that an administrator at Crenshaw threatened her before the break. She names several of the students she misses and says she feels horrible about what has happened. She says the students don’t deserve this situation, but she tells Corwin she isn’t sure if she is coming back.

Though Moultrie is already overwhelmed with all her responsibilities, she says she will take over the AP class if needed. Moultrie plays a documentary about the Black Panthers for her students and tells them, “I want you to challenge established notions” (333).

She begins each lesson asking the students to write on an African proverb. She then discusses A Streetcar Named Desire with them. She says that women like Blanche “‘act like the bomb, but they’re really insecure’” (334). She lectures the girls about dressing too sexually and running the risk of date rape and tells the boys that when a girl says no, she means it. In explaining why Blanche puts a colored paper lantern on her lamp, Moultrie says, “‘Anglo women don’t age as well as us women of color’” (335).

During the next class, Moultrie speaks about the murders of rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. She tells the class that white people aren’t going to allow them to have anything, and they are going to have to struggle for everything. Once they succeed, she says they have a responsibility to give back to their communities. She tells them to be politically active and connects what she is saying to Bigger’s anger in Native Son.

Moultrie grew up in Oakland in the 1960s and witnessed the growth of the Black Panthers. She liked their commitment to improving their communities and fighting racism. Her father was a college graduate and an FBI agent, and he was committed to his church and his community. He then became a lawyer, and the family moved to the Oakland Hills, where Moultrie faced discrimination and attended a mostly white high school, where she was told to go to secretarial school. Her mother, who went on to get a PhD in education, was outraged. Instead, all four of the children in the family went on to college.

Moultrie went to UC Davis and then earned a teaching certificate in a state program. She confronted a teacher who said that blacks had less capacity to learn, and he recanted what he had said. Her first teaching job was in the working-class neighborhood of Pacoima, where she taught Latino and black students. She encountered racism among the white teachers and felt that she had to be a strong advocate for her students. She then taught in South-Central in a federally funded program that helped teachers reach black students. From this program, she learned to incorporate black history into her lessons. She has worked at the gifted magnet program at Crenshaw for four years. She has never taught an AP class, though she may soon. She has mixed feelings; she wants the challenge but thinks the AP course is culturally biased. She plans to introduce more African-American history into the course.

When Little’s absence extends into the second week, there is a fourth substitute. The few students left in the class don’t take the reading of the end of Hamlet seriously. However, they will be expected to understand Shakespeare on the AP exam. Corwin tries to unload information he knows about the play onto the students, and he then tries to interest them in a conversation. His approach is fruitless, and he appreciates Little’s talents as a teacher.

At the beginning of the next class, several students leave when they see Little is still absent. Corwin tries to engage the class in a discussion about murder, as Hamlet feels loathe to murder. The students live in a neighborhood with a high murder rate. They also speak about revenge, and many of the students speak about relatives who wanted revenge after their family members were murdered. They read the last two scenes of the play with some understanding, if not enthusiasm.

In the next class, after scrambling to find a VCR that works, Corwin shows the movie version of Hamlet. He feels he crosses a line when he begins to discipline students who aren’t listening. The students are engaged by the movie, and Latisha thanks him for caring enough to teach the class.

Braxton still doesn’t know whether to hire a replacement for Little, as he doesn’t know if Little will return. The seniors come into his office, and he proudly tapes their acceptance letters to his wall. Danielle was accepted into Stanford, but she cannot afford the tuition. She accepts the fact and will have a scholarship to Pitzer. Curt was rejected from Stanford because he wasn’t serious enough about his grades in sophomore year. He will attend UCLA but is disappointed about Stanford.

Few of the students apply to the Ivy League, which is far removed from them geographically and culturally. Sheila is the only AP student who applied to the Ivy League. She was accepted by Cornell but cannot afford it; instead, she will attend Xavier, a black college in New Orleans. Miesha will attend UC Berkeley; Latisha was accepted by Alabama A&M; and Willie was accepted by Morehouse. Brandi was accepted by Pitzer, and Venola will go to Colby. They all have scholarships and financial aid grants. Venola’s mother is so excited that she holds a barbecue in her backyard.

Sadi was accepted to Clark College in Atlanta. As his mother Thelma needs a liver transplant, she cannot work and is trying to rustle up the financial aid to make sure he can attend. Thelma is exhausted from the effort. She says that Sadi would have earned a scholarship if his grades were better. Sadi turned around his life in 10th grade and transformed himself from a gang member to a scholar, but he lost momentum in his senior year. He had true flashes of brilliance as a sophomore and impressed Little. This year, however, he’s been working in an accounting office, and he cares more about money and spending it than working in school.

This year’s class has done well. In Little’s class, eight students were accepted to UCLA and UC Berkeley, the most selective schools in the UC system. Braxton believes this number will decline next year, thanks to Proposition 209. Though Braxton has mixed feelings about affirmative action, he voted against Proposition 209.

The first time the term “affirmative” was combined with “action” was at President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball in 1961, when Lyndon B. Johnson, the Vice President, saw a black lawyer named Hobard Taylor, Jr. He asked Taylor to craft an executive order barring racial discrimination in hiring. Taylor chose the phrase “affirmative action” for its alliterative qualities. Executive Order 10924, crafted by Taylor and others and signed by Kennedy in March of 1961, simply banned discrimination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not allow racial quotas. In 1965, Johnson, then President, gave a speech at Howard University that many believe was the beginning of affirmative action. Johnson spoke about creating “not just equality as a right and a theory” but “equality as a result” (365). The phrase “equality as a result” shifted affirmative action “from the protective to the proactive” (365), in Corwin’s words.

In the 1960s, only 5% of college students were black, and blacks made up 1% of law school students (366). Erwin Griswold, head of Harvard Law School, was concerned that law was so critical in the Civil Rights movement, but there were no blacks at Harvard Law School. In 1966, he began admitting black students with lower test scores than white students, and several other schools followed suit.

In the late 1960s, civil rights lawyers were concerned that in some professions, such as construction, there were no blacks. The riots that had broken out in black areas forced whites to look at the chasm in hiring between blacks and whites. Nixon had the most explicit quota system, as the Philadelphia Plan required a certain number of federal construction jobs to be set aside for black workers. He saw this as a way to pit blacks against unions and break up the Democratic Party, but this form of affirmative action remained in place for 25 years (358).

By the 1980s, though they faced competition for affirmative action spots from other groups, blacks had made significant gains in education. The number of blacks who had graduated from college in the age group of 25 to 29 tripled, and blacks now made up 7% of law students (358). Several of the professions were opened up to blacks, who found a way into the middle class.

However, by the 1990s, momentum against affirmative action grew, and it has been disallowed by Texas and California. Affirmative action is what Corwin refers to as “an imperfect solution” (359), but he feels the rejuvenation of inner-city areas is unlikely to occur. Even Nathan Glazer, who was a critic of affirmative action, has written that the end of this program would bring dire results (359). 

Danielle calls Little and asks her to attend a Sunday study session for the AP exam. She agrees to come to Khaliah’s house in a wealthy neighborhood, though she shows up late. Little will return to school, and she tells Corwin it’s because she has run out of sick days. She leads the students in a spirited discussion, though he has the premonition that the students will not do well on the AP exam.

Little returns the next day, and the students are overjoyed to see her. She learns that many were absent when she was. She plays the rest of the movie and leads the class in a discussion on the play. She comes up with a lesson plan about how to lead the class before the AP exam.

That same day, a math teacher in the gifted program named Gwen Roberts is in the quad when she smells marijuana and is punched to the ground by a student with intense hatred in his eyes. Not one student helps her until a student from the gifted program sees her and helps her to the office. The student who punched Roberts is arrested, and Roberts goes to the hospital, where she is diagnosed with a concussion and torn ligaments in her elbow.

Later that day, a physiology teacher named Lisa Lippa is teaching in the gifted magnet program when glass explodes on a girl’s hair. Lippa thinks someone has thrown a rock through the window, but her students tell her that it’s a bullet. A student finds the slug, still warm. Many students, including Venola, are blasé about the situation. Lippa is eight months pregnant, and this is the second time a bullet has gone through her classroom. She decides to look for another job after her pregnancy. There are other violent episodes on the campus, including beatings and nearby shootings that presage a gang war.

Two girls in Little’s class have been expelled after stealing scholarship checks and will not be taking the AP exam. Olivia will not be allowed out of her center to take the test. Babson has rescinded her acceptance, but she has been accepted at some UC schools and still has hope.

On the first Friday in May, Little rushes through a superficial lecture on poetry and some last-minute suggestions for the AP exam. She is worried about the test and passes out review sheets for the students to go over during the weekend.

Little’s students are unable to study for the test because they had to work. The college counselor marches the students to the library, where they will take the three-hour test. Students pass only with a three out of five, and Little figures out which students will pass. She thinks Robert will pass. His father is not a part of his life, and Robert lives with his younger brother and mother, an interpreter for the deaf. Robert is a good writer, but he is often absent from class. He will attend UCLA.

Little peers into the library and sees her students writing: “‘This is where the rubber meets the road,’” she says (372). She knows that her students face a disadvantage because they don’t read outside of class, unlike many AP students across the country. They work many hours, and their parents often don’t have the tradition of reading. Students in the gifted program tend to do better on the math section of standardized tests.

After the test, many students say that it was difficult. They are pessimistic about their results. Sadi says he did not do well, but he is ecstatic because he has almost all the funds needed to attend Clark College. Little finds out the students were distracted by a fight in the hallway during the test, and she calls the organization that arranges the AP and asks how to report this incident. She thinks that if the students did not do well, it was a result of the testing environment, not their preparation.

Corwin visits Olivia. She is dejected after not being able to take the AP exam and learning that she will not attend Babson. She feels that she might not ever be able to attend college because she needs to work. Her counselor, Dunne, says Olivia has been more open in therapy but that it has been painful for Olivia. Olivia has acknowledged that it’s hard for her to feel close to people and that’s why she doesn’t feel it’s wrong to rip them off. She isn’t sure if Olivia will be ready to leave in August and believes that she needs more time.

After the AP English exam, several students in Little’s class take the AP Government exam, for which they feel well prepared. Their teacher, Scott Allen, has the long hair of a hippie, but his class is meticulously well organized, and he gives frequent tests and quizzes. Though he is very different from Little, many students consider the two teachers their favorites. The students know that Allen will prepare them for college.

Though Claudia failed out of Little’s class, she passed Allen’s class because she listens and does well on the multiple-choice parts of the tests. She made up her “F” and was accepted into California State University, Long Beach. Allen believes that Claudia will pass the AP exam, though the students in his class are at a disadvantage. Unlike AP students from other backgrounds, they do not have parents who subscribe to the newspaper and discuss current events at home.

The AP program offers 31 tests, but Crenshaw only offers eight. Programs in wealthier areas offer many more, and some programs with mainly black and Latino students offer none. These students are at a disadvantage because many schools weight GPAs depending on how many AP classes students take.

Gwen Roberts still cannot move her neck a month after the attack. At a hearing in which the student and his stepfather attend, Roberts testifies. However, the student is allowed to return to school.

Little decides to award a bank scholarship to Miesha. Though Danielle is the most advanced student, Miesha’s interest in the class helps the class along. Miesha credits her brother Raymond with inspiring her. Raymond, for his part, is disappointed that his sister will be attending college 400 miles away in Berkeley.

On Friday, May 16, there is no class for seniors so they can prepare for the prom. Many students will leave school after high school graduation, so prom is very important. All the students at Crenshaw attend, and many girls save for a long time for their prom dresses. One girl tells Moultrie she cannot afford a dress, as her mother died from a drug overdose and her father is in prison. Later, she says her uncle, a drug dealer, is buying a dress and limo for her, and this girl accepts that the money comes from drug dealing. She explains that her uncle, who served time in prison, can’t get any other job.

Princess, the prom queen, shows up in a floor-length white dress that her mother was able to buy for her when she found a job. The other students are also dressed elegantly, including Toya, who is enjoying the ambiance of the prom. When Little shows up late, the students rush up to greet her.

During Little’s next class, she tells her students that she is looking for a new job because of the racism against her at Crenshaw because she is white. She then engages her class in a discussion of what ties together all the literature they have read. She asks them what they learned, and Latisha responds that she liked “‘that stream-of-consciousness thang’” in Joyce’s novel (385). Princess  feels a connection with the Elephant Man and the trials and tribulations he endured. The students emphatically say they will continue to think about the characters they studied this year.

Moultrie spends the end of the year teaching The Great Gatsby to her 11th grade classes. As she did not receive enough books, she has to collect them at the end of each class and give them to her other class. She also teaches Othello to introduce the class to a black character in Shakespeare. At the same time, she has a number of unorthodox assignments, such as a play based on the murder trial out of Native Son. These assignments infuriate Little, who thinks they do not prepare students for the AP class, but Moultrie thinks they are necessary to interest her class in the literature. Moultrie has taken several workshops and classes to prepare for possibly teaching the AP class next year. Moultrie teaches a class on Othello in which she reads a speech by Iago and reminds the students to keep negativity out of their lives: “That’s some free advice from Mama Moultrie” (389).

On the last AP class of the year, Little shares a letter she has written to her students describing how they have contributed to her life. She concludes with final words to each, which she asks them to read aloud. She writes warmly and lovingly about the students, and she and many students are crying. She concludes her letter, “This world will be a better place because you’re in it” (393). Many of the students step forward and offer thanks to Little for helping them think and write better. Though she could have prepared them better for the AP exam, she has given them something better—a love of literature that will stay with them.

On graduation day, 400 students head to the football field for the ceremony. Forty are in the gifted program. Danielle, usually shy, delivers a confident valedictorian address in which she recalls reading Maya Angelou’s poem “And Still I Rise” in kindergarten. She says, “‘Not only did we survive, but we succeeded’” (397).

Latisha’s mother, who was on drugs in Alabama, is off drugs and is attending her daughter’s graduation, as are Willie’s mother and Sadi’s father. Miesha will be attending USC and has received a full scholarship. Several of the families greet and speak with Little. Braxton, who has had such a difficult year with Toya, Olivia, Sabreen, Claudia, and Little, realizes that most of the students have thrived.

Of all the students in Little’s class, only Danielle and Robert passed the AP exam with threes. It’s clear that Little bears much of the blame, as one-third of Allen’s AP Government class, composed of many of the same students, passed that exam (including Venola, Curt, and Claudia, who received a four). Allen was far more organized and together. Little acknowledges that she could have been more disciplined.

No other principal would hire Little. She believes her battles at Crenshaw have tainted her chances. She files a discrimination lawsuit against Noble, Braxton, the district, and other administrators for ignoring the “fucking white bitch” (402) incident. Noble is hospitalized, partly, she feels, as a result of dealing with stress from Little.

In the year after Proposition 209 is passed (1998), the number of black students accepted into UC schools is down by 20%, particularly at the most prestigious schools. The next year, there is an active recruiting effort, and the number is down by 8% compared to 1997 (403). The number of minority students accepted into UC graduate schools is also down, which could affect the students in Little’s class.

Corwin catches up with the students and teachers in the book three-and-a-half years later. Noble is the principal at a middle school. Braxton is the assistant principal at a mainly Latino high school on the East Side. Moultrie left Crenshaw and is the advisor for 10 schools and coordinator of a program that trains teachers. Little taught two more years at Crenshaw and then lead a program to introduce technology into the school. She then hurt her back and is on disability.

The students Corwin profiled are now in their senior year of college. Most work in addition to receiving aid.

Miesha is at USC, majoring in management consulting and volunteering as a tutor for inner-city girls.

Sadi regained his motivation and attended a program for minority students at a state school. He attended Clark with his mother’s help in getting aid. His mother died last year. He works to pay for school and still writes poetry.

Danielle is at Pitzer and is majoring in sociology and black studies. She served as the President of the Black Student Union and spent the first semester of her senior year in Ghana.

Toya did not attend a summer program that she needed to graduate from high school, but she went on to a church program that provided childcare so she could earn her GED. She works as a teller at a credit union. She was featured in a Los Angeles Times article on this book, and many people offered her financial aid for college as a result. She hopes to go on to college.

Willie is at Morehouse in Atlanta, majoring in business and working at a restaurant from five o’clock in the evening to eleven o’clock in the evening.

Claudia is studying psychology and anthropology at Cal State, Long Beach. She has regained her motivation and is doing very well.

Venola is at Colby and is working and majoring in Spanish. She wrote an article for the Christian Science Monitor about attending a white college after attending an all-minority high school. She plans to go to business school.

Latisha attended Alabama A&M for a year but dropped out and returned to LA, where she works as a customer service manager and takes classes at a community college.

Princess is at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in communications. She wants to be a news reporter.

Sabreen earned a GED but dropped out of community college because she had so many household tasks. Her husband hit her, and she left him. She is now in New York and hopes to attend college.

Curt is at UCLA. He had a hard time living in the dorm but transferred to his own apartment sophomore year. Though his parents could support him, he supports himself by working and wants to transfer to Howard.

Naila is studying medication administration at Stanford. She dropped off the basketball team at the end of her junior year. She wants to enter hospital administration.

Robert is at UCLA majoring in African American studies and history. He wants to work as a community organizer after graduation.

Olivia was released from custody to attend Cal State Northridge and worked 40 hours a week at two group homes. She earned almost all “A’s.” She applied to Babson again as a sophomore in college, and she was accepted and given a scholarship. She plans to earn an MBA, and she believes that school saved her.