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In the seventh and eighth grades, I took Mrs. Crenshaw's advanced language arts class. I tell you it was advanced not to show off my own skills, but rather hers. Mrs. Crenshaw was one of the best teachers in my suburban middle school. She was the only African American teacher I had for eight years in that school district.
Mrs. Crenshaw was tough. In her class, we had to follow the rules. We had to keep our work neat and turn it in on time. She was a stickler for handwriting and spelling. She didn't care that we were 13 years old and practically grown up: if our handwriting wasn't up to snuff, she would issue us a penmanship workbook and make us turn in the pages from it. She assigned challenging books and required notebooks full of writing on them. She fostered rich classroom discussions and encouraged different points of view, but she required politeness. She was the very embodiment of dignity and she insisted on the most dignified behavior she could get from her class of pre-teenagers.
Every year in February she passed out the workbook we would use for our Black History month curriculum. To get through the whole workbook, classes often stayed with this unit into March. It didn't focus only on Black history. The curriculum taught us about the contributions of many Americans of color, of women, and of people with disabilities. It taught our class of mostly white, able-bodied students how to recognize prejudice and resist it in our lives. It was some of the only explicit diversity education I had in my public school career.
And we, her classes of sheltered white suburban kids, resisted the curriculum whole-heartedly. "Why do we have a Black history month?" we whined, as though our required history courses were not months of White history themselves. "If this is Black history month, why do we have to learn about Mexican-Americans?" "Why can't we get back to our regular work?" On that first day of February when she passed out the workbook, the entitlement was palpable as we slouched and sighed over our new assignments.
Yet what does it say that now, almost thirty years later, I still remember those Black History Month workbooks? I remember the new-book smell of them and the grayish-blue paper; I remember the drawings of people in wheelchairs running for public office; I remember the writing we were required to do, digging around in our still-forming brains to connect the dots of privilege, diversity and justice. I remember that I was taught, directly and intentionally, that diversity was a value I was expected to uphold as an educated member of society.
I remember, too, the classroom conversations that Mrs. Crenshaw tended and nourished out of our initial resistance and disrespect. She did not allow our ignorance to be the last word. She knew that she, our African American teacher, was in a unique position to force some multicultural awareness into our immature, chauvinistic heads. I don't remember the conclusions I drew at the time. But it would not surprise me if some of the ideals I now cherish as an adult-ideals of diversity, of equality, of fairness, and of the American promise-were founded in Februarys in Mrs. Crenshaw's classroom.
As an adult looking back on this experience, I think of it from her point of view. What was it like for her to teach year after year of resistant 12- and 13-year olds? What support did she get from the school in offering this curriculum? Enough to buy the materials, but not enough to integrate diversity education school-wide? How did she decide that this was part of her mission? Did anyone-students, parents or fellow teachers-ever express to her the gratitude we owed her for including diverse histories and points of view in our education? I never had that chance. I am more grateful than I can say for the education Mrs. Crenshaw provided me.
America is changing. Our nation is becoming more diverse in every way. We have seen the presidency of our first African American president, the candidacy of the first woman to be nominated by a major party, and the entrance of Muslim Americans into political leadership nationwide. We can't live anymore with the reality and history of the dominant culture as our only education. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we all have cause to give thanks for those people in our lives who lead us and show us a different and better way, as Mrs. Crenshaw did for me.
In faith,
Rev. Sarah Stewart
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