My Coming of Agency Moment: Staying in My School

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, a story from our True Diversity series, sponsored by the great folks at the Philanthropy Roundtable, America’s leading advocate for you to support the causes you believe in. Today, we meet a partner of their campaign, Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Ian.

My parents are from Jamaica, West Indies. They met in the mid-nineteen sixties in England, and my mom took a liking to this guy, Vincent. My mom’s name is Ula, and he was working on a sugar plantation. He was an accountant there. He’s very smart, and they started dating when they were both very young. She was eighteen; he was just a couple of years older. And, you know, this was in Jamaica, so he used to pick her up for their dates on horseback. So they had these magical dates, and they fell in love with each other.

And at the time, Jamaica was still an English Commonwealth, and so my dad felt that he had reached kind of the apex of what he could learn in Jamaica. So he had an opportunity to go to England to finish his schooling. So he went to England, and after being there a few months, he missed his “buds,” as what they called each other, “buds.” And at the time, the British government required that if you wanted to marry a young woman under twenty-one, you had to write a letter to the young woman’s parents asking toward her hand in marriage. And so, my, you know, Vincent wrote the letter of a lifetime asking toward her hand in marriage. It was much consternation in the Cid Wright household because she was nineteen at the time. So she got to leave to go meet this man all the way at England. And after much the servant, her parents decided yes. And so my mom, at nineteen years old, in the mid-nineteen fifties, you know, a young Black woman took a boat all by herself—about a five-thousand-mile journey to England to meet up with my dad—and they got married. About a year later, they had my brother, and then seven years later, they had me. So, both my brother and I were born in England, in London, and that’s why we were born there. You know, they ultimately came to the United States. My dad became one of the early Black engineers at IBM, and my mom started working for Manufacturers Hanover, which some of your listeners may not know, but it was a big bank at the time. It ultimately—Manufacturers Hanover, better known as Banny Hannie—became Chemical Bank, which then became Chase, which is now JPMorgan Chase. So, that’s how our journey started. That’s why I was born in London because it was a dream. And in some ways, for my mom, that moment when her parents said yes to this huge decision, I think—and I’ll talk a little bit about my own sort of coming-of-agency moment—I think that’s what she experienced, this moment where she felt she had a lot of skin in the game. She played a role in her own own destiny, and she was advocating to her parents to be able to go to England at nineteen, all by herself, something that wasn’t done. But she knew that it was right. And it’s a lesson I learned from my mom and my dad as well. Every young person is going to face multiple moments in their life when the future is unknown, where you’re facing a huge decision that you don’t know the outcome. And yet, after you’ve mold the decision, after you’ve mold all the factors, then you commit. You commit. That’s a part of agency, that you take ownership of decisions in such a way that, you know, you are leading a self-determined life. You’re responsible for your behavior, for your attitude.

That’s ultimately what agency is all about. And I think for my mom, having that first big, yet many years ago, initiated a cascade of decisions that she—and then she and my dad—made which essentially and ultimately, in order to the benefit of them as well as their own family. My parents were married, so forty-eight years. When my parents first came to the United States, it was nineteen sixty-eight, nineteen sixty-nine, obviously a very tumultuous time in our nation’s history, a lot of racial tension. There were riots in the streets. But they were very cognizant of what was going on in the country. They were raised in a predominantly Black country, so the role of race was far diminished. I remember my dad always used to say, “You know what? He was in Jamaica, he was a man.” He was a man in Jamaica. “I’m a man.” It wasn’t until he got a United States that he learned he was a Black man, and that had meaning to him because in Jamaica, your skin color wasn’t the first thing that defined you; would define you as much more your actions, your attitude, your ambition. But in the United States, he felt that, based on these external forces, you were a Black man first, and he fought against that. You know, I only said, “Well, that’s crazy,” you know. Yet they also recognized that the country was changing. You know, the Civil Rights Act had just been signed, the Voting Rights at signed. You know, opportunity was opening up. So, in some ways, they weren’t running from Jamaica. They were running to the United States in search of a veteral life. And so, they and still they knee, certainly, this idea that your efforts and your character and what you did matters far more than this singular characteristics.

When we come back, more of Ian Rowe’s story, our True Diversity series with the Philanthropy Roundtable, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib. Here again, Our American Stories tries to tell the stories of America’s past and present to Americans, and we want to hear your stories too. There’s some of our favorites. Fend them to us. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the “Your Stories” tab. Again, please go to Alamericanstories.com and click the “Your Stories” tab.

And we returned to Our American Stories and with Ian Rowe’s story as a part of our True Diversity series with Philanthropy Roundtable. When we last left off, Ian was telling us about a pivotal moment in his mother’s life, that being when she decided to move to England as a teenager to marry his father. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Ian Rowe.

No matter what chaos may have been happening in the world, my parents were there. We first came to Brooklyn, on Wyona Street, and, you know, we had a very humble home. We were in our two-family house. And what was interesting about that time was my parents, frankly, we’re not that happy with what they saw: how young Black men were operating their lives. They thought they were too loose, and they were concerned, especially given the larger contexts of all the issues facing the nation. And so, in Brooklyn, when we first got there, I was kind of on lockdown. All of my education—kindergartens through twelfth graders—in public education, so K-to-twelve public schools. But from kindergarten, you know, I went to school in the morning, came home immediately, did my homework. We had dinner as a family, went to bed, woke up, went to school, came home directly, did my homework, had dinner, went to bed early. And so, my experience growing up were very contained. It was very contained. My parents placed a huge value on being together as a family. They placed a huge value on, say, placed a huge value on education. I did love school. Well, let’s put this way. I both loved school and knew that I didn’t have any other option but to love school. You know, my parents, they placed a very high premium on education. You know, they came to the United States during an era of severe racial tension, and they knew that if you were going to succeed in this country, the opportunities were there, but you have to be prepared once those opportunities come your way. And so, that was really my early life. My parents would do anything for us if they thought it would mean a better life and capitalizing on what they believed in America had to offer. And so, in nineteen seventy-three, after we had been in Brooklyn for few years, my parents “moved on up.” Aks. You remember the Jeffersons’ comedy, “To Come.” We moved on to Queens. We moved to a small town, Laurelton, Queens, into a community that had been predominantly White, Italian, Jewish, but was slowly becoming more racially integrated as more Black people, in particular, were moving into Laurelton. And, unfortunately, that since slow integration led to a lot of racial tension in Laurelton, and my junior high school, Junior High School 231, had become the epicenter, and the school board decided to solve this problem by saying, “You know what, we’re basically just going to putt. We’re going to create a new school, an annex in Rosedale, Queens, which was another town a few miles over in a more permanently, predominantly White part of town. And essentially, what happened was all of the White parents that were going to my Junior High School 231 in Laurelton decided to take their kids out and send their kids to this annex Junior High School in Rosedale, leading Junior High School 231 as a segregated, virtually all-Black school. And my parents, on the assumption that where the White kids go, that’s where the better education will be. You know, that’s what my Jamaican parents would come to this country in search of the American dream. That’s what they presumed. And so, therefore, they said to me they were going to take me out of 231 and send me to this other school. And I’ll always remember Sunday night, were the transfer papers were supposed to be submitted. I begged my parents. You know, my parents would crawl through broken glass for me and my brother—you know, if they felt they would be good by us. And so, there are a lot of things that they decided that I may not have understood in the moment. But if I gave my parents the supreme benefit of the doubt in every decision, but something about this decision didn’t feel right. I loved my school; I loved my teachers. And even this very idea: just because now all the White kids are gone, somehow it has to be worse. Why? Why? Why? Just because now that everyone’s Black, that just inherently means that it’s bad. And so, something welled up in me, particularly that Sunday night that never had welled up before. And I begged my parents. I cried, I faded. “Please let me stay! Please let me stay! You know, I’ll work hard. I’ll—I’ll do more chores, whatever it is. Like, I’ll do it. I commit, you know. I will! I’ll work really art. Please let me stay!” And ultimately, my parents relented. You know, I look back now, and I wonder if in that moment—you know, because my dad was in his regular recliner in the living room and my mom was on the couch in the same positions that we always had big conversations as the family—but I always wonder, in that moment, even for my mom, did she think back to the moment when she was in Jamaica as a nineteen-year-old girl with this letter in the hands of her parents, making this huge decision, and she’s asking them to go? “I want to go. If it’ll be, it’ll work out. I love him. I’m ready to go,” and they said yes. I always wonder if that experience parallels to when I was begging for the opportunity, now at twelve years old, to stay in my junior high school. And, you know, I like to think yes. I like to think yes, because I feel like that was her first coming-of-agency moment, where she felt she knew that she could play a role in her own destiny. And I felt, at twelve years old, after my parents said yes, that I had skin in the game now in a way that I never had before. I wouldn’t have said it then, but I certainly feel it now. That was the first moment that I experienced agency, that I was a force in my own future, that I had the ability to shape my destiny, and really that that was a turning point in my life. And I’m convinced that every big decision I’ve made going forward, particularly as it relates to anything related to my leadership in schools, is asking the basic question: Why should it matter what the demographic make up biz of a particular institution? Who cared? What matters is the expectation or asking young people to do? What is the metric for excellent? Are we holding everyone to high standards? That’s what matters. And I’m convinced that the reason I run schools today is connected back to that moment when I begged my parents, saying, “Who cares that all the White kids are gone?” I mean, I had friends who are White, and so just being all Black meant it had to be less than. Is less than. So, that’s part of my story back then that I think has a huge impact on me today.

And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling by our own Montae Montgomery, and a special thanks to Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, and also a special thanks to our sponsor at the Philanthropy Roundtable. Their True Diversity Initiative encourages Americans to embrace all the qualities that make us unique individuals, because there’s so much more to each of our stories than what’s defined by a group identity or other superficial traits. And, my goodness, what a story he told about the segregation of the schools even in Queens—White parents pulling out, and his parents wanting him to follow those White kids, and him having his coming-of-agency moment where he said no. A terrific story about so many things, including taking control of your own life. Here on Our American Stories.