Back to School
The conversation would repeat itself over and over, as if it were a scene from “Groundhog Day.”
I would be introduced to someone who grew up in my hometown. He or she would hear my last name and smile.
“Are you Mrs. Dobrow’s son?”
I would smile back.
“Indeed, I am.”
Then, invariably, I’d hear some version of this:
“She was the best teacher I ever had.”
In Great Neck, New York, Vida (more commonly Vicki) Dobrow was the stuff of local legend. She poured herself into her job teaching fourth grade with a seemingly endless supply of creativity and compassion. If she were teaching American history, she’d write a play that the whole class would perform. If she were introducing statistics, she’d build a whole lesson around baseball cards. A child whose home life was falling apart would always find kindness and support from Mrs. Dobrow, the empress of empathy.
She knew that life was often unfair; she believed that the job of adults was to make it more fair. And she had a rock-solid belief in young people, a sense that they were the path to a better world.
All three Dobrow children are now teachers. I was a high school teacher for five years. Today is the first day of classes in my 28th year at the college level.
Tomorrow is the first day of classes for my son, Josh, who teaches middle school math in Philadelphia.
The rhythms of the academic year are natural ones in my bloodline.
So I guess it’s no surprise that my new book (Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida) essentially follows the ups and downs of one academic year, 1963-64.
That wasn’t the original rationale for framing the book between August 28, 1963 and July 2, 1964. Those were the glittering bookends of a supercharged year in civil rights history—Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on one end, LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the other. (And, of course, all that anguish in the middle: the Kennedy assassination, the bombing of the Birmingham church, the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi on the first day of “Freedom Summer.”)
In point of fact, though, the book does trace a school year through the experiences of many of its characters, students from elementary school through college, the kind of people my mom would have championed.
Original City begins with registration for a fourth grader on that August 28, one of the first five Black children to enroll at a previously all-white elementary school.
It traces the experiences of four teenagers through a year that would include harrowing stints in reform school as punishment for taking part in a nonviolent sit-in. (For those who have read Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys—or seen the equally brilliant movie from RaMell Ross, proceed with caution.)
It explores the experience of college students who traveled to St. Augustine for a spring break absolutely nothing like your stereotypical image of northern students heading to Florida in March. (Marshall Bloom’s anguished letter to friends from the St. Johns County Jail will tear at your heart.)
There is even a graduation story toward the end of the book, involving Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and a college president: a showdown around moral courage.
**
My mom has been gone for five years now. She’ll never see this book.
But I like to believe that she’s smiling as she hears those school bells ring. It’s the sound of hope for a better tomorrow.
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