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

Olivia was beaten by her mother for years at home. During this time, Olivia excelled in school—her “salvation” (9). By the time she entered seventh grade, her mother, a hotel maid, beat and abused Olivia each night. As a young girl, Olivia believed that her mother was possessed by the devil. At age 12, Olivia decided to run away: she left home with a duffel bag, the names of shelters torn out of the yellow pages, and her mother’s leather jacket. She spent the night at a shelter, and the social worker arranged a meeting with Olivia’s mother at which she lunged at her daughter. At a later court hearing, the judge explains that Olivia’s mother would have to undergo psychological testing and counseling if she wanted to regain custody of her daughter. Her mother cried, “I don’t want her” (11).

Olivia became a ward of the county and lived in 10 different group homes and foster homes by the time she was 16 years old. Many were Dickensian in nature. Though her father was half black and half Cuban (her mother was Mexican), Olivia considered herself black. She was, however, shunned by the other girls without multiracial heritages, and her academic aspirations also set her apart. A group-home administrator told Olivia about magnet schools, and she applied to Crenshaw, near her group home, and was admitted.

Though Crenshaw is plagued by gangs and a dropout rate of almost 50%, it became a haven for Olivia. She was one of only two ninth graders to earn all “A’s.” In 10th grade, however, she felt the shabbiness of her clothes acutely, as she rarely received money from her group homes. She became an entrepreneur and stopped by a discount supermarket to buy snacks before school and then sold them at school. When the principal shut that down, Olivia sold fire-safety equipment door-to-door and was able to buy stylish outfits and her own food.

Olivia went absent without leave (AWOL) from her group home during the summer before her junior year. She lived with friends and then rented a room in a roach-ridden hotel. When she later rented an apartment, she wasn’t sure how she could work at a hot-dog stand and handle her junior year. She stopped by the office of Scott Braxton, the head of the gifted program at Crenshaw and to whom she was close. He arranged her schedule so that she could take classes in the morning and work in the afternoon. However, she was then laid off from her job and had to return to a group home. She then acquired a fake ID and got a job as a clerk at a women’s clothing store. She went to class in the morning, worked in the afternoon, and tried to do homework before falling asleep at midnight.

After punching a girl who she thought had stolen some of her money, Olivia was thrown out of her foster home. A friend’s family took her in for a while, and the mother of the family, Lita Herron, told Olivia she could stay there until she graduated from high school. However, in August before her senior year, Olivia acquired a 1977 Volkswagen and drove it without insurance or a license. When Herron and her husband forbade Olivia from doing so, Olivia again went AWOL, and Herron was afraid that Olivia, despite having signed up for three AP classes, might drop out of school. Olivia was looking forward to taking AP English with Little, who had taught Olivia before and who Olivia admired. No one knew if Olivia would show up on the first day of school.

On the first day of school, Little is in an irritable mood because there are 42 seniors in her AP English class, twice as many as she thinks she should have. Telling the students, “This class is too damn big” (22), Little decides to weed them out with an extremely difficult prompt about literature related to a Fay Weldon quote about happy endings involving “spiritual assessment or moral reconciliation” (22). While the students in other classes that are not part of the gifted program are obstreperous, the students in Little’s class are determined and diligent and spend the class writing. Olivia, however, is absent.

Meanwhile, Scott Braxton, head of the Crenshaw Gifted Magnet Program, is overwhelmed with paperwork. He tries to track down Olivia, as he connects with her and admires her willingness to take hard classes. He calls Lita Herron, who does not know where she is. He wants to get Olivia to graduate after all the work he has put into her.

The next morning, Olivia is still absent, and no one knows where she is. Five students have dropped out of Little’s class, and she is assuaged. She brings in extra desks to accommodate the 37 students. When she is distracted by two girls in her introduction to The Crucible, she tells them, “You’re still just two little girls with weird lipstick” (25). When Little reads that we inherited the Puritan belief that “they held in their hands the candle that would light the world” (26), a student named Sadikifu (nicknamed Sadi), interrupts to say that “religion was forced on us. Black people” (26). Sadi then gives a sermon about the Muslim interpretation of heaven. Little reminds her students that they will take a three-hour AP test at the end of the year and need to be more serious. She confides in Corwin that she is worried about this year’s class.

Crenshaw, Corwin notes, is built in a residential neighborhood, unlike most of the local schools, which are built on major thoroughfares. By the second day of school, the walls are covered with graffiti, including the names of gangs and students who died over the summer. The painter at the school continually tries to cover the graffiti, and the smell of fresh paint is constant.

Little, making coffee from a machine hidden behind her file cabinet, reacts angrily to an email from her department chairwoman, Moultrie, asking to see the handbook Little created for the school’s English teachers over the summer. Little believes Moultrie is trying to get credit for what Little did, and the two will, in the future, only communicate via email. When Julia, Olivia’s friend, enters the classroom, Little finds out that Olivia has no transportation to school. Little volunteers to pick up Olivia. It is this “bifurcated personality” (31) that marks Little. She sits with some students at her kitchen table to help them, while she berates others to the point of moving them to cry.

Little had taught Sadi as a 10th grader when his reading of The Great Gatsby convinced him not to hate white people. He said at the time, “Gatsby’s feelings are universal” (31), and he related to Gatsby, as did Olivia.

Sadi was born to his mother, Thelma, when she was nearly 41 years old. She and Sadi’s father, who were not married, became Muslims in the 1970s, and their son’s Islamic name means “truthful and honest.” Later, Sadi’s father moved out, became addicted to crack cocaine, and served time in jail. Thelma, herself the child of a single mother, became a single mother, and she raised Sadi almost like a peer. He was identified as bright very early on. He was on the verge of getting a scholarship to a prep school in Pasadena when his father showed up, and the school, thinking that his father was not in the picture, rejected Sadi. After Sadi’s father disappeared again, Sadi became a member of the youth part of a Crip gang. Sadi was angry at his father for disappearing and at his mother for pushing academics, but she was eager not to have him repeat her and his father’s mistakes. Thelma had served time for transporting drugs when she was young, and she had found Islam in jail.

Sadi was in trouble constantly for fighting with rival gang members and other issues, and he was expelled from Crenshaw’s gifted program in ninth grade for starting a fight between his gang and another one. Being expelled probably saved his life, as the next day, his best friend, Chaos, was shot to death by a rival gang. Thelma signed Sadi up to be bussed to a white school in the San Fernando Valley, where the counselor refused to believe a black child could be in gifted classes. His mother finally had him admitted to gifted classes, where he was the only black student.

Even though many of his friends were in jail or had been killed, he was still part of gang life at home. One day when school had been canceled because of an earthquake, he was walking with people from his gang, Front Hood 60s, and they encountered a rival from another gang. One of his friends took out a pistol and fired at the rival, who was not hit, and Sadi and his friend were picked up and arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Sadi was later released.

This incident fueled an epiphany in Sadi, and he realized that he needed to turn his life around. He began attending a mosque and asked Yvonne Noble, the Crenshaw principal, to take him back. He did well, and she allowed him to return for his sophomore year with the warning that she would expel him if he consorted with the gangs at school. After he returned, he was caught between the gifted students, who thought he was a gang member, and the gang members, who thought he was a nerd. While the white and Asian gifted program is two-third boys, the program at Crenshaw is only one-third boys, and it is hard for a black boy to be valued for academics.

Sadi gravitated toward the Speech Club, and he entered and won speech contests for the poetry he wrote about the plight of blacks. One of his poems read, “Tell me why, for the average African American/The American dream has become the American nightmare” (37). He is now regarded by gang members and gifted students alike for being a poet. He tends to slide by in classes that don’t involve literature, but his mother knows that he needs to stay focused to win a scholarship to attend college. 

During the second week of school, Little writes literary terms on the board because the federally-funded Xerox machine requires her to fill out too many forms. She does not have textbooks and is frustrated that the students don’t know these terms, and she asks them where they were the year before. Her nemesis, Moultrie, is a constant target for her criticism.

Olivia shows up, having taken the teachers’ elevator (to which she has a key) rather than stopping by the security guard. She is dressed for her job at a women’s clothing store, and she has no books or notebooks. Olivia explains that because her supervisor believes Olivia is 19, Olivia is sometimes assigned to work during the day. When Little finds out Olivia’s car broke down, Little says she will pick up Olivia at her apartment. Olivia agrees.

The students gather to speak about a recent stabbing on campus. Sadi explains that a student who was about to enroll was attacked by two rivals in a different gang. Sadi was also jumped by a group of Bloods who thought he was a member of the Crips, even though Sadi told them he wasn’t into gangs anymore.

Little tells the class that they will read The Crucible out loud, and they throw themselves into their parts. They have an animated conversation about God and the devil, and Little expertly encourages and guides them. She hears students milling about in the quad, and she becomes angry when they are loud. She thinks of herself as the only one who can maintain order.

After the stabbing, the school tries to maintain order on the quad by sending two additional armed officers and asking male faculty to monitor the quad. There are also random weapon checks in the classrooms.

Braxton is also assigned to patrol on security duty during his lunch hour, but he is ecstatic that Olivia has returned to school. However, a senior named Toya is now missing. When Toya was nine and living in a small Georgia town named Hinesville, Toya’s stepfather constantly beat her and her mother. One night, he threatened to kill her mother, and when he passed out from drinking, her mother escaped with Toya to a battered women’s shelter. About a week later, her mother told Toya that she was going to return to the house to pack their things so that they could clear out for good. When Toya returned to the house after school, she found her mother, dead, sprawled out on the floor. Her stepfather had strangled her mother. Toya and her five-year-old sister were sent to a foster home, and Toya felt that she had to be strong for her sister. She did not know who her biological father was.

Toya wrote a poem about the abuse she had endured. Her stepfather had not only beaten her; he had also sexually molested her, starting when she was three years old. She had always excelled in school, though no one in her family paid attention to her academic promise. She was one of the few black children in the gifted classes in fifth grade. Eventually, she moved with her sister to her mother’s sister’s house in Watts, near South-Central. A small-town girl, she was frightened by the gangs and gunfire she heard outside her house.

Toya was one of Braxton’s favorite students because she had endured so much and was so conscientious. She achieved one of her long-term goals, getting into Cornell’s summer program, and she planned to go to Harvard and then medical school. However, she disappeared in the spring of her junior year, and no one knew where she was. One day, she showed up with her 10-day-old baby boy. She had been wearing baggy clothes to school, and no one realized she had been pregnant. Toya told Braxton she would do home study, return to school and graduate, and still go to college. Braxton was crushed because he once had great plans for Toya. She completed the home study program while taking care of her baby, and she planned to return to school.

However, Toya does not show up as senior year starts. During the second week of classes, she stops by Crenshaw and tells Braxton that her aunt has kicked her out of the house. Toya may have to attend a Watts program that offers free childcare, though she and Braxton know it will not prepare for her college. Braxton says he will try to find her some childcare, and she says that she will find a way to persevere.