Truth Stronger Than Friction

They have endured murder among their classmates, poverty, dads doing time, moms doing drugs, sibling death, anorexia, dyslexia, racial slams and other plagues on their childhoods. Most of the kids had never read a book for fun.

That was before they met pearl-clad Miss Gruwell at Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach. With the help of Gruwell, a preppy-looking teacher from Newport Beach, the 150 students have now written their own book.

“An American Diary: Voices From an Undeclared War,” is a spare and moving chronicle of life as they know it where the city meets the suburbs at the edge of Orange and L.A. counties.

Inspired by Anne Frank in World War II, and contemporary Bosnian teen diarist Zlata Filipovic, the students have penned the book as a series of journal entries filled with despair yet--extraordinarily--hope.

So gritty are the stories, so risky their content, that not even their beloved English teacher knows who wrote what; the entries are numbered. Otherwise, Erin Gruwell would be bound by law to report the array of hardships and felonies to which her students bear witness. (“His warm blood gushed out of his forehead, and spread slowly on my shirt,” reads one entry.)

They call themselves the Freedom Writers, in homage to the ‘60s American civil rights activists. It is not all horrible in Freedom Writer country, although a jolting array of it is. Which makes what they have accomplished all the more remarkable. Better attendance, better grades, a trip to Washington, D.C., their own book. And now, fund-raising to visit Holocaust sites in Europe.

Greater than all of that: All 150 Freedom Writers--former taggers, gangbangers, dropouts, juvenile delinquents and others simply adrift in the sea of a big city high school--expect to be accepted to college.

If they can publish and sell the book, proceeds will go to a nonprofit foundation to pay their tuition.

They are buoyed by the purist faith of those who have already helped the Freedom Writers, a wildly different group of people more than 75 strong. They include a Fountain Valley millionaire; Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family; “Schindler’s List” author Thomas Keneally; an entertainment lawyer; and director Steven Spielberg and his publicist.

“They’re smart and bright and good people. Just because they never had a chance, were never given a chance, there these kids are with this life,” says John Tu, co-founder of Kingston Technology Inc. of Fountain Valley. “And perhaps if nobody does something for them, they will never have a break and forever [will] be lost. So that’s why I say anything I can do, I will do.”

Tu is best known for giving, with his partner, $100 million to Kingston employees last December out of proceeds from the company’s sale. He also has given considerable time and money to the Freedom Writers, whom he met because Erin knew one of his employees. At least two Freedom Writers are now employed at Kingston.

“They thank me for what I’ve done for them,” Tu adds emotionally, “but it is nothing--nothing!--compared to what they have given me.”

While Wilson High classmate Jeremy Strohmeyer drew gasps of media attention in late May with his arrest on charges he raped and strangled a 7-year-old at a Nevada casino, the Freedom Writers were fresh from a whirlwind trip to the nation’s capital. They planned the journey and raised money for it themselves. So untraveled were some, they did not know to put luggage in the plane’s overhead compartment.

In Washington in April, they hosted the U.S. secretary of Education at a dinner, presented him with their unpublished book and moved him to tears. Later, they held a candlelight vigil at the Washington monument for victims of senseless violence, covered swastikas tagged around the capitol, and visited Holocaust museums and war memorials.

Quietly, they have begun their own revolution. They mentor younger students in the community, urging them to shun gangs and plan for college. They speak to aspiring schoolteachers about tolerance and looking beyond skin color and wardrobe to find hidden pearls among pupils.

If she could narrow down what she wants to impart to her students, Erin Gruwell says it would be these two things: to know that one person can change the world, and know that the person is each of them.

Gruwell is helping them with their college applications. And a college and career day for the kids is planned Tuesday at National University in Costa Mesa, where Gruwell holds the second of her three jobs, teaching teachers diversity awareness.

That any of her students would envision higher education was astonishing to their parents and some administrators of the campus in eastern Long Beach.

“I’m not only proud of them, they’re an inspiration to me, and they make people like me remember why we got into this business,” says Carl A. Cohn, superintendent of the 85,000-student Long Beach Unified School District, the state’s third largest.

“What we have,” he adds, “is a lot of anecdotal information on students who didn’t attend school, were in gangs, who really are products of the mean streets. Now we see students of Erin’s with a purpose, coming to school every day, getting better grades, and students who want very much to play the game of college application. Next year is when it will be clear what happens to them once they’re separated from Erin.”

A Note of Intolerance Inspires a Lesson Plan

A note passed around her class that first year of teaching launched Miss Gruwell’s Wild Ride.

It was 1993, and she was at Woodrow Wilson High as a student teacher, but assigned her own classroom. It was not an easy time. Her students seemed to dislike one another.

Wilson High School is home to a head-on crash of race, economics and culture. White kids with cell phones and Jeep Cherokees from the more affluent neighborhoods learn beside black kids or Cambodian or Spanish-speaking immigrants whose parents are working three jobs to pay rent.

“We’ve only had a phone three times in my life, once when we lived in Louisiana,” says Tiffony Jacobs, 17. “Right now our gas is off. It’s been off for three months. We had to go to this one lady’s place to cook our food [until] we got a top range.”

Sometimes, she adds quietly, almost apologetically, “I feel like I want to kill myself, just jump off a building, but then I think of my sister and brother. . . . “

One of Gruwell’s students had transferred in after pointing a gun at a previous teacher.

Into this teeming classroom, Gruwell spent her first year as a teacher. Slowly creeping over her was the realization that her students had sized her up in stereotype: White. Yuppie. And those self-important suits!

One day, she spotted a paper being circulated among her English students and intercepted it. Crude and demeaning, it was a caricature of a boy in class. A boy, in fact, who had mouthed off incessantly and taunted numerous students.

Gruwell exploded, threw in a couple of salty adjectives. This stereotyping, she told them, was exactly the kind of thing that led to Jews being killed in the Holocaust! There was silence. Blank looks. Startled, Gruwell gazed around at the lack of recognition facing her.

“How many of you,” she asked, “know what the Holocaust is?” No hands. “Really,” she said, “seriously.” No hands. My God, she thought to herself, is this possible?

And at that point, the Freedom Writer journey began. Gruwell, all of 23, decided to throw out her meticulously detailed lesson plan for the year and concentrate on tolerance as an overarching theme of all they did. First up would be a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and reading “Schindler’s List.”

The trip seemed doomed when the rookie teacher learned that such excursions require money for insurance, bus rental and lunch, and that there was none allocated for student teachers. Afraid to let her students down when she suddenly had their attention, Gruwell paid for the trip herself, working during the December school break at two additional jobs--selling lingerie at Nordstrom and as a concierge at the Newport Beach Marriott, where she still works Sundays.

By the time the kids returned from their tour, which included meeting a Holocaust survivor who described atrocities she suffered in concentration camps, Gruwell knew the trip was worth every hour of watching ladies try on Wonder Bras.

The survivor “talked about being attacked by a German shepherd at Auschwitz, and every time she hears a dog bark to this day she gets a flashback to her childhood. Having to drink urine and eat toothpaste [to survive]. My kids saw that all they’d been through, and it is a lot, it was insignificant to what she’d gone through,” Gruwell recalls.

“The second we got [back] on the bus, everybody was hugging. It was an epiphany for the class. We went there as strangers, we came back as a family.”

Now the students were fired up. A book had been brought to life for them. But there would be more.

In the wake of an Oakland incident in which teenagers were escorted out of a screening of “Schindler’s List” for loudly mocking it, Gruwell thought it would be good to demonstrate that not all “inner-city” kids behave insensitively. She did not anticipate the greeting her students would find in Newport Beach.

Someone patted down a few of the students in a market across from the theater. Some of the waiters were later reluctant to serve dinner to Gruwell’s group. The Daily Pilot newspaper wrote about the visit and the fallout. Both the paper and Gruwell received hate calls from white supremacists, and the Pilot wrote about that too.

“Schindler’s List” author Keneally, then running the UC Irvine Program in Writing, read the story, and so did Polly Stanbridge of Newport Beach. Both were chagrined. Keneally invited the students to an all-day tolerance forum he was hosting. Stanbridge, whose own two children are grown, asked them over for lunch. Keneally would later contact Spielberg marketing executive Marvin Levy and arrange for a daylong visit to Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company. They all quickly became part of the expanding corps of volunteers helping the Freedom Writers.

“Anyone who gets around Erin gets on the bandwagon with her,” says Stanbridge, who has chaperoned students on various field trips including the one to Washington. Stanbridge was also at a meeting last Sunday night at which 60 supporters brainstormed fund-raising for the estimated $500,000 needed for the Freedom Writers’ planned trip to Europe next summer. The students and their parents presented Gruwell with a necklace. “You inspire us,” was engraved on the back.

“She is so amazing,” Stanbridge says of Gruwell. “She’s just such a catalyst.”

By her second year teaching, Gruwell got approval for a pilot program in which she started with five classes of ninth-grade English students and they have stayed together all four years.

When Gruwell’s students read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” they began a correspondence with her best friends and the woman who hid the Frank family from Nazis. Eventually, Freedom Writers got the trio to visit them in Long Beach. A read-athon fund-raiser was held to pay for Zlata Filipovic, the teenage Bosnian writer, to visit Wilson High too.

What emerges from interviews with the Freedom Writers is a picture of learning made fun, a teacher who teaches students to love learning.

“We played Froot Loop bingo to learn vocabulary words,” says Antonio Cook, 17, who is planning an accounting career.

“It started to be fun. We played Jeopardy. She dressed up for Halloween as a princess, another time in her brother’s army suit,” recalls Tiffony Jacobs, whose difficulties in life have inspired her to teach children and give them what the Freedom Writers now have. “Miss Gruwell, she’s like a best friend, or a sister . . . or a favorite aunt.”

Of their legion of helpers, perhaps the most significant has been Tu, admittedly a rich man but a man who has given time as well as money.

A basketball game of parents and students was held at one point to raise money for Bosnian children. Because some of the students don’t know where their fathers are, Tu and other Kingston workers played surrogate.

The students openly adore Tu, and find his quiet humility moving. That anyone so successful would care about them leaves them awe-struck.

If one deconstructs the smashingly successful alchemy of teacher, parents, and community working for students, there are some key components. Persistence, faith in kids that perhaps comes easier for a naive young educator, follow-up with those who have helped before. Always saying thank you and making volunteers feel essential.

But Gruwell is simply magical when it comes to inspiring people to action. No surprise that she was named 1997 Teacher of the Year for the Long Beach Unified School District.

“There is no guile to Erin; she’s the real thing,” says Supt. Cohn, himself a product of Long Beach’s mean streets. “That’s why so many of us say yes to Erin.”

Debbie Mayfield, an airline employee whose son is in his fourth year as a Gruwell student, thinks Gruwell “is an angel.”

Mayfield recalls the first time her son came home from the tolerance museum field trip. Here was her 14-year-old, describing a museum visit as “wonderful.” She was in shock.

“Dane is a good boy, but he can be a bad boy, and we were right at a crossroads with him, and we were having problems. She mentored our whole family, really, bridged the gap between us. She comes over for dinner sometimes. The kids would do anything for her.”

Liz Onukaegbe says her son Byron, 17, returned from his first day of school as a freshman and announced, “Mom, I have a teacher who is out of this world. Mom, Miss Gruwell’s gonna get me into college,” Onukaegbe recalls with glee. “She has put a challenge before them. She believed in them, they reached a goal and she rewarded them. Over and over.”

Byron, she says, spent most of his free time watching TV and videos before he joined Gruwell’s English class. Now he spends all his time in his room either reading, writing or working on his computer.

“The classroom is not their second home but more like their first home,” Onukaegbe says. “At 5 or 6 o’clock at night I’ve gone in to the class and said, ‘Where’s Miss Gruwell?’ And the students say she just left. They were all in there working on their own.”

After one late-night session, Gruwell and several students were carrying out her computer, having printed out manuscripts of “An American Dream,” when police screeched up. They were prepared to arrest her until a parent driving by Wilson saw the commotion and assured the cops that she was Long Beach Unified’s Teacher of the Year.

Several publishers wrote favorable responses to the book but cited concerns about whether it would sell. At least one publishing house wanted to consider reframing the story around Gruwell, as a sort of white female version of “Stand and Deliver.”

Gruwell is not interested in that. In fact, worried that her efforts could be misconstrued as self-interest, she met with lawyer Don Parris, who worked for free to set up a nonprofit foundation. Its directors include students, Gruwell and Zlata. Funds can be spent only on students’ college expenses.

A sense of family, students and teachers working in a communal environment is Gruwell’s personal dream. She hopes to establish a charter school for the Long Beach school district. She hopes teachers she’s met through her classes at National University--and maybe one day some of her Freedom Writers--will help run it. Says Supt. Cohn: “All she has to say is that she wants to do it, and we will support her.”

Beyond learning about literature and how to fill out a college application, Cohn says, Gruwell is teaching students “the nuts and bolts of working the system, and that will hold them in life later.”

He adds, with amusement, “They are handling superintendents of schools, corporate executives, Cabinet officers, and they’re not gonna lose that if she goes out of their lives.”

Times staff writer Nancy Wride can be reached at her e-mail address: Nancy.Wride@latimes.com

Donations in support of the Freedom Writers can be made out to the Tolerance Education Foundation c/o Don Parris, 2029 Century Park East, Suite 4000, Los Angeles, CA 90067.