The School America Once Denied Us

Nearly six decades after Black children were turned away from a new school with empty classrooms, I was asked to lead that same institution. Our work at Sousa Middle School was not simply a turnaround. It was a modern chapter in the struggle over whether access to a school building would ever become genuine access to opportunity.

There are assignments a leader accepts and assignments that make a claim on the leader. Sousa made a claim on me.

When I became principal in 2008, the public description of the school was brutal. Sousa had been called an academic sinkhole. Another educator described it as a dumping ground for burned-out adults. Only 23 percent of students were proficient in reading and 17 percent in mathematics. Fights, hallway disorder, inconsistent instruction, and low expectations had become part of the school’s public identity.

Those conditions were urgent, but they were not the whole story. Sousa was also one of the most consequential school buildings in the history of American education. In 1950, Black families had asked for their children to enter its doors and were refused. Their resistance produced Bolling v. Sharpe, the Supreme Court decision that ended legal segregation in the public schools of the nation’s capital. Decades later, Sousa students had organized to prevent the historic building from being demolished. They understood that the building was more than brick. It was evidence of an unfinished argument about race, education, and public responsibility.

That history changed the meaning of the principalship for me. I was not entering a blank institution and imposing a turnaround model upon it. I was inheriting a place where Black parents, children, educators, lawyers, and community members had already fought over the meaning of equality. My responsibility was to honor that struggle by making opportunity tangible for the children sitting in Sousa’s classrooms now.

The work therefore had to be about more than scores, even though the scores had to rise. It had to answer a harder question: What does equality require after children have been admitted through the door?