‘They Made Us Warriors”

Think back to high school, and no matter how wretched your memories might be, there’s someone--some teacher--whom you owe. Someone--some teacher--who made you see the world differently, or yourself differently.

Maybe you have to strain. Wini Jackson doesn’t. She can conjure that warmth from 1962 as easily as you can fish your car keys out of your purse. She can close her eyes and be back at Centennial High School in Compton as easily as you can remember your first kiss. She can picture the teachers who allowed her to blossom, to tap into the aggressiveness that has defined her life, as though it were yesterday. She can close her eyes and picture them sitting before her.

And then, one night last winter, there they were: 27 of them, in their 60s and 70s and 80s, in tuxedos and sequined gowns, a couple of them hobbling on canes, beaming inside the Grand Hall of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, facing 600 former Centennial students and other friends and dignitaries, many for the first time in three or four decades, all because of a quixotic vision that had come over Wini Jackson a few months before.

The realization of that vision was a sublime, gigantic goosebump of a moment. Jackson thought it deserved a song. The “Pioneers in Education” dinner and ensuing tributes were nearly over. She had already serenaded the teachers once that night. An hour earlier, backed by recorded music, she’d sung a flawless, haunting version of “Unforgettable,” looking from the microphone to her elders, seated together on a stage. She was trying to thank them, not just for the memories but for making her an extension of them. Now she wanted to sing one more song, a song that would explain why Centennial alumni had come from as far as Pennsylvania. The music came over the speakers, and she began.

*

It must have been cold there in our shadow

To never have sunlight on your face . . .

*

This night had been born when Kenneth Washington died.

Kenneth Washington had been one of Wini Jackson’s teachers at Centennial, one of a knot of teachers whom she’d stayed in touch with. A pioneering black educator who went on to become an original member of the Los Angeles Community College District, Washington died at 75 in the spring of 1998. At his funeral, Jackson felt the rush of time.

They’re going to all slip away from us, she thought. She was talking to another classmate, Gloria Gibson. “We need to honor them now,” Jackson said. “We can’t be doing this every time they die.”

It was an irresistible thought. Washington was one of many Centennial teachers from the 1950s and ‘60s, most of them African American, who had forged a powerful bond with a growing number of black students at the high school. The relationship was complex. It had racial overtones, coming at a time when the walls of segregation were finally breaking down and tremendous opportunities and pressures awaited the next generation of black children. And it had transcendent qualities that defied color, that were instead rooted in a simpler time, when teachers seemed more loving, more commanding, less fearful.

Something magical happened here, many of the students and their teachers would always believe. They kept coming back to the word family. The teachers of one generation, raised in a harshly discriminatory world, took it upon themselves to demand excellence from these teenagers who were surging toward adulthood as the modern civil-rights movement crested with frightening power and uncertainty.

Centennial High teachers like John Redfud, raised in Louisiana, were not about to hear excuses. His students still laugh about his warning over homework: I don’t want to hear you were sick and couldn’t do it. If you can’t come to school, you send your homework here in a taxi cab. Redfud, charming and confident, liked to tell his students he was the most important person they’d ever meet, and thus nothing was more important than the assignments he gave them. He loved his job. It was more than a profession. It was a calling. He’d stand outside his door before each class and greet the students as they entered.

Even before the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision requiring school desegregation, you could feel the stirrings. Housing restrictions in Southern California, which had bottled up blacks, were gradually receding, and Compton began to integrate. The housing tracts that were built shortly after World War II increasingly became home to black families with middle-class aspirations. By the early 1950s, there was a significant population of blacks in Compton’s west end. In response--and in what is remembered by blacks as a nakedly segregationist maneuver--Compton school officials placed a new high school, Centennial, on the west side. John Redfud began teaching there soon after. By the time Wini Jackson and Gloria Gibson got there a few years later, there was a sizable population of black students and black teachers.

Life being what it is, of course, you could credit the crucial presence of a black teaching corps at Centennial to an unassuming white woman who never set foot there.

*

. . . You’ve always been content to let us shine

You’ve always walked one step behind . . .

*

Her name was Marian Wagstaff. She was born a few weeks before the Titanic sunk, grew up in Northern California and was taught to think independently. She always remembered meeting a black high school student while working in a summer recreation program as a teenager and feeling some of the universal white prejudices of the era slipping away. It made her want to try to never see color again. Wagstaff wound up becoming a teacher, and eventually the principal, of a Compton junior high named Willowbrook at about the time that blacks were moving into those tract homes in the late ‘40s. She saw the mismatch between the stream of black students and a faculty with no blacks and began to integrate, ignoring predictable sniping. She didn’t care. Her mother-in-law was politically connected and she felt protected. “I wanted the best teachers. It was not a matter of hiring Negro teachers, it was a matter of hiring the best qualified,” she says now, with the same crisp conviction, at 87. In 1950 she hired her first three, including a then-substitute with a master’s degree from USC named John Redfud. A few years later, Redfud and several other Wagstaff hires moved on to Centennial. Wagstaff did not join them; she headed for Cal State Los Angeles, where she specialized in teacher training. But the style of compassion and discipline she called “the Willowbrook Way” continued to take hold.

*

. . . We were the ones with all the glory

While you were the ones with all the strength . . .

*

You listen to the old Centennial teachers talk about the ‘50s and ‘60s and it sounds like another planet. They’d teach one young man how to shave. They’d take another downtown to the garment district to help him buy his first suit. They’d show another what fork to use at dinner. They’d arrange for one student with a great voice--a student named Wini Jackson--to sing professionally in a club on weekends to make some desperately needed spending money. They’d drive the debate team to the Beverly Hills High library before a big meet just to show them how the other side lived, the resources they had, as a way of wagging a finger in their faces and saying: Be ready. Work harder. They’d drop you off at an intersection near a housing project because you asked them to, never asking you where your house was, knowing all the time that you lived in the project, realizing you were embarrassed by it.

School was a place where all these eyes kept track of you.”I knew two-thirds of the students in the school by name,” says former English teacher Naomi Smith Robinson. “They’d come over to my house, could be a Saturday afternoon, and tell me who was dating whom. I can remember so many instances where you did something that involved showing love, and you weren’t even aware you were going out of your way.”

Wini Jackson would become a child advocate, specializing in finding private resources to bolster government child-protection programs. Gloria Gibson would become an energy consultant with the state Public Utilities Commission. Legrand Clegg--who’d imagined being a dentist or a fireman until an 11th-grade counselor told him that with his verbal skills he’d make a good lawyer--became Compton’s city attorney. Wanda Moore, Centennial’s first female student body president, became an executive assistant to Mayor Tom Bradley. They had to succeed. They were frightend of what Mister Redfud used to tell them: “Even if I’m dead, you mess up my retirement and I’m going to come back and get you.” These were teachers who had survived not merely segregation, but the Depression. “You must be self-sufficient,” speech and social studies teacher Maple Cornwell would tell her students. One day she heard a voice overhead calling her name, looked up and saw a telephone line worker, a former pupil. “I did it, Mrs. Cornwell!” He proclaimed. “I’m self-sufficient!”

“They taught us there was nothing we couldn’t do,” Jackson said. And so, in 1989, after serving on a jury that convicted a man of robbery, it was nothing for Jackson to decide that she had made a mistake, that the man was innocent, that she should spend months hectoring the district attorney’s office, that she should plead with the court to set aside the verdict, that she should file a declaration renouncing her vote of guilty, that she should ask for a new trial. She called FBI agents and private investigators and copied police reports never shown to the jury. She met with the defendant in jail and took to reading him the same Scriptures on the phone several times a week. Prosecutors dismissed her protests until, several weeks later, police stumbled upon a man who said he’d driven the getaway car in the robbery and said he’d never seen or heard of the man convicted for it. That was enough. A judge reversed the conviction. “That’s what those teachers put into me,” Jackson would say later. “They made us warriors.”

*

. . . Only faces without names

And we never once heard you complain . . .

*

And then Kenneth Washington passed, and the idea of a tribute began to build. For months a small core group of students, most of them from the Class of ‘62, began congregating at Gloria Gibson’s house in Leimert Park. They had no money to do this. Everything was going to be borrowed or begged, but they had enough civic and business contacts to network themselves to glory.

One invitation made its way to a law office in Philadelphia, where Wallace Walker, Class of ‘59, responded in a heartbeat. His parents still lived in Apple Valley, so he visited several times a year, almost always finding time to drive by the old high school. It didn’t matter that this was a different Compton, a different school district, so riddled by failure that the state had taken it over in the mid-’90s. What Wallace heard when he drove by were the imaginary, collective voices of his old teachers: We never doubted you. We didn’t know you’d be the one with a law degree from UCLA, but we knew you could do it. “That’s what they gave us,” he says, “without ever saying it.”

The grads knew the whereabouts of a dozen or so of their old teachers. Eventually they tracked down more. Plane tickets were paid for. Private limousines were sent. The teachers were, in many occasions, overwhelmed. (“I just feel like royalty,” exclaimed Inez Hamlett, an instructor of mentally disabled children, to Gloria Gibson.) Who’d ever heard of something like this? Who expected it? Marian Wagstaff, living in Northern California, grabbed it like a lifeline. Her husband had died shortly before Wini Jackson called her. “Life has a strange way of being planned,” she said, wiping away a few tears, at a teachers luncheon the day before the banquet.

The next night, to the theme from “Chariots of Fire,” they marched in, each on the arm of an escort, before the assembled Centennial graduates. There was not merely love in the room, but awe. Like football hall-of-famers they were introduced, one by one. Some of the most beloved or memorable, like Mr. Redfud (“he knew everybody’s name--he apologized to me for not knowing my middle name,” one ex-student said), guidance teacher and coach John Q. Adams or music teacher Octave “Ted” Bonomo, received ovations that rocked the house. Speakers took the podium, endlessly pouring out their hearts. A collection of current Centennial High students vying for a scholarship coordinated by the venerable Variety Club made brief speeches of admiration. Many of the students hoped to be not merely the first member of their family to go to college, but the first to earn a high school diploma. It was impossible for the black-tie audience to listen without comparing their own struggles and wondering how so little progress could have been made in so much time.

And then Wini Jackson rose to sing again, and when her song reached its chorus. . .

*

. . . Did you ever know you are our heroes?

And everything that we’d like to be?

We can fly higher than an eagle

‘Cause you are the wind beneath our wings . . .

*

. . . the entire audience spontaneously rose to its feet. Because, really, there was nothing more to say, except to sing the alma mater, and bask in this moment.

Unless, of course, you are Wini Jackson, who basks in no moment without wondering how to make it better, how to push it. She and Gloria Gibson and that core group of alumni are already planning this December’s follow-up, another scholarship dinner that will bring back the old teachers and old students. The new wrinkle is the creation of a folksy book that would allow each of the teachers to describe their classroom recipes for success, a down-home teacher training manual.

On a recent afternoon inside the gate-guarded condominium complex in Inglewood where John and Genevieve Redfud live, nine ex-Centennial teachers traded suggestions.

“Two words,” said Mr. Adams. “Kindness and concern.” Later he’d remember a third: “exposure.” Show them the rest of the world.

“Discipline,” said Mr. Redfud. “Every time they walked in, my boards were filled with work for them to start doing.”

“Many of us sponsored student organizations; it gave us a chance to get closer to the students,” said business teacher Edna Montgomery. “Many of those students didn’t have two parents. Some were in foster homes. Sometimes if there was a mother-daughter affair, I’d go as mother. They always knew they could count on that.”

“Consistency,” said Rubye Taylor Washington, the librarian. “When they came into the library, they knew what was expected of them.”

“Dignity,” said Mrs. Cornwell, remembering the time some former students came to campus to settle a beef their sister had with an administrator--only to find that the administrator was Mrs. Cornwell. (“Girl,” they chastized her, “that’s Mrs. Cornwell, what’s wrong with you?”)

Why those times are gone, and whether they are retrievable, is a question that plunges the teachers into the same complex debate as the rest of us. Perhaps they’ll find a way to respond in December, when the Centennial Apaches gather once again, on a night Jackson says will be be devoted to giving the teachers a chance to speak--to pass on their legacy, and to inspire their students to continue it.

“They’re having another one? I’ll be there,” Wallace Walker says from Philadelphia. “If they fax me, I’ll fax ‘em back in 30 minutes. That’s a very special place.”