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Crossing Borders
Volume 7, Number 1 - Fall 2008
On the
Bookshelf
by Scott Feifer
And Still We Rise, by Miles Corwin. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
Writer Miles Corwin followed the lives of twelve gifted seniors at Crenshaw High School in South Central Los Angeles during the 1996-97 school year. In spite of their academic skills and achievements, these resilient and remarkable students are not spared the harsh realities of their lives and surroundings.
They struggle against poverty and violence, drug abuse and absent parents, foster care and detention centers. As painful as the lives Corwin profiles outside the school are the battles waged within the classrooms of Crenshaw High.
Corwin observes two English teachers over the course of the year. One is Toni Little, a white teacher amid a predominantly African-American student body, who is demanding and troubled; she spends as much time ranting against the administration as she does teaching and inspiring her students. The other is Anita “Mama” Moultrie, an African-American teacher who lives in the neighborhood and whose lessons are part lecture, part sermon.
Corwin’s writing is vivid and embracing. At times he is jolted from his position as objective observer by the circumstances of the classrooms he witnesses and by the urgencies of his subjects’ lives, which seem to demand and deserve more than the reporter’s neutral stance.
Readers, too, will likely find themselves rooting for these bright students as they press forward, not only with intelligence, but with determination to counter the enormous odds their lives stake against their future success.