The Superintendent Who Listens, part two: The Deep South
The South doesn’t get much deeper than Tallulah, Louisiana, a little cotton-growing town just across the Big Muddy from Mississippi. That’s where Canada grew up under the protective wing of his devout grandmother. And that’s where he returned in 1967 with a college degree in his suitcase to take his first teaching job. But Tallulah, it seemed, hadn’t moved much faster than that muddy old river in righting the injustices of a dual system. Excitedly comparing first paychecks with another new teacher—a White teacher —Canada felt his stomach lurch. Hers was $100 more than his. Indignant, he confronted the superintendent.
"That’s what all the Negroes make," the man told him.
Even now when Canada tells that story, his voice falters, his eyes sadden. Thirty years of steady climbing from that small-town teaching post to his current status as a national leader in urban education haven’t dulled those searing words.
In three decades, he has traveled as far in miles as he has in stature. The little boy who learned to sew a cuff, stitch a shoe, and milk a cow to help make ends meet in Tallulah grew up to be the man recently jetting to Africa with some of the world’s top educators. He went to share ideas (and, with luck, meet with Nelson Mandela) on a study tour sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators, over which he presides. His growing reputation as a talented administrator has earned him a spot on the advisory panel of the prestigious Urban Superintendents Program of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. When Senator Howard Metzenbaum presented him with a national award in 1994, these were the congressman’s words: "Dr. Canada is one who stayed true to his principles. Dr. Canada is one who would not shirk his responsibility as an educator to protect every student’s rights. Dr. Canada is one man who would not cave in."
On that eye-opening payday in Tallulah, Canada didn’t cave in to bigotry. He quit his job. In the American tradition, he lit out for the West. "Best decision I ever made," he says.
But from Tallulah he took away more than just painful memories. He learned about hard work and sacrifice every afternoon when he hoed the family vegetable garden or herded the two family cows to pasture. His friends would wave and call out, "Hey, Farmer Ben!" as they trotted off to the baseball field without him. He learned about self-sufficiency from a poor but proud grandmother who passed on to him her skills as a baker, a cook, a carpenter, a gardener, a cobbler, and a seamstress ("I can sew anything, from putting in cuffs to zippers and buttons," he notes with pride). He learned about faith when he sang hymns every Sunday in the African American Episcopal church he attended at his grandmother’s side. And he learned about reaching high from the teachers who challenged and inspired him. There was Mildred Crockett, who taught her vocal students to sing all kinds of music at a time when African Americans were expected to stick to Gospel. And Otis Nichols, the biology teacher who wouldn’t let up. "I always wanted to be like Mr. Nichols," Canada says. "He could challenge you, really press you—he would almost irritate you with his pressing—but you would feel so good when you’d achieved it."
Community expectations for the segregated schools he attended were low. In the Tallulah of his youth, "education" was for White folks. Black kids got "training." But inside the walls of Madison Parish Training School and Ruben McCall High School, the staff was unswerving on excellence.
"We had people who really pushed you and demanded that you achieve at a certain level," Canada recalls. "Mediocrity was not accepted. You were pushed higher than you thought you could go."
