Remembering my teacher, Mrs. Dukes, who gave me a better sense of myself, Black community

From kindergarten through sixth grade, I attended a South Side Catholic school. But when increases in the tuition became more than my mother could reasonably afford, she had me transfer to a public school: Foster Park Elementary at 85th and Wood streets.

I’d spend most of the next two school years — my seventh and eighth grade years — in the classroom of my homeroom teacher Rose Marie Dukes. She was also my reading teacher. I’d visit the classrooms of three other teachers for math, science and social studies, but half of every school day was spent with Mrs. Dukes.

At times, we were a rowdy bunch. Our class gave Mrs. Dukes plenty of opportunities to reprimand us for talking in class, for not doing our homework or for committing other feats of mischief.

When I was in Catholic school, my worst punishments were getting whacked across the knuckles with a yardstick. It still hurts just thinking about it.

But at Foster Park, Mrs. Dukes had a different method of teaching discipline.

Instead of having us write “I will not talk in class” or “I will not forget to do my homework” a thousand times, Mrs. Dukes ordered us to copy, word-for-word, multiple chapters from some classic volumes in African American literature. That’s dozens of pages and thousands of words from titles like: “Before the Mayflower” by Lerone Bennett Jr.; “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington; and “The Mis-Education of the Negro” by Carter G. Woodson, among others.

Those assignments were grueling. I’d get started on them as soon as I got home from school. Sometimes it would take several days to complete them. Mrs. Dukes would even block off some time in the afternoons for us to work on the assignments. During those moments, you could hear a pin drop in the classroom.

But Mrs. Dukes stressed that she wasn’t punishing us. She had a term for these painstaking and laborious assignments.

She called them “enrichment.”

In addition to our lessons on vocabulary, grammar and composition, Mrs. Dukes also led us in discussions about the themes covered in those volumes, which documented the history of ancient African civilizations, the enslavement of Africans, the Middle Passage and the centuries-long fight Black people have waged for emancipation and equality in America.

Mrs. Dukes led us in discussions about the debates between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois about the best strategies for Black empowerment. She also exposed us to the poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and others. She’d write out their poems on the chalkboard. We’d recite them and then dissect them — talking through what we thought the words communicated. And Mrs. Dukes would highlight the word choices of the poets, emphasizing the power of the terms they used. She’d also share details about what was going on in the world when the poems were written.

When I sat in her classroom and when I worked on her assignments, I was reading, discussing and pondering themes and topics that I’d never before explored in school.

Learning about the past experiences of people who looked like me and learning from the words and thoughts of people who looked like me provided me with a better sense of myself and a better understanding of my community.

Digesting those words and conversations helped liberate me from the worldview that surrounded me in popular culture about Black people and Black life. I still carry those lessons with me today — 45 years after I graduated from elementary school.

We can all benefit from this kind of exposure. As they have done for me, these lessons can provide us all a more complete picture of American history and increase our understanding of the world we live in today.

Laws requiring public schools to offer lessons about the culture and contributions of Asians, Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are sometimes criticized. But even if we’re not required to do it, we should all seek a greater understanding of the people with whom we share this land.

We’re all a part of America’s history, but the histories of nonwhite people are often overlooked in our classrooms. There’s value to people seeing themselves in our history. There’s also value to people seeing others in our history. The past provides powerful context for the present. It offers us protection against rhetoric and racism.

Remember, it’s not punishment. Like Mrs.Dukes would say, “it’s enrichment.”

Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.