In the early ’90s, a few years after Lennie Edwards first started teaching video production at Jefferson High School, he began to realize: It felt like he was working at two schools.
Jefferson had, since the ’70s, run a performing arts magnet program with classes in dance, theatre and music — and which aimed to attract more students from outside the local neighborhood and combat de facto segregation there. The magnet program was one “school,” Edwards said.
And then there was the rest of Jefferson, with students from the surrounding neighborhood.
Edwards found himself in the middle. As an African American teacher in a largely Black high school, living nearby in one of Portland’s historically Black communities, he taught a video production class that was once part of the magnet program.
A beloved teacher who had high expectations for his students, Edwards retired this June, ending a 33-year tenure. At Jefferson, recent protests have reinvigorated long-standing calls to rename the school, and a petition with more than 1,300 signatures wants to name it for Edwards.
He’s lived for almost as long in Humboldt, a neighborhood in the historically Black district of Albina that has, over the last few decades, gone from majority Black to majority white.
“My time at Jefferson High School has been one of the absolute highlights of my life,” Edwards said.
The magnet performing arts program housed a weekly 30-minute television program on the school’s closed-circuit system.
There were different sets of expectations between these students, Edwards said. Students in the magnet program, which no longer exists, had to agree to sustain good grades to continue studying in the performing arts classes, while other students didn’t have such a requirement.
“I sort of understand philosophically what the idea was,” Edwards said, “but I think that it had unintended consequences.”
Jefferson is one of Portland’s few public high schools where Black students make up the largest racial group — barely. Around 33% of Jefferson students are Black, according to 2018-19 enrollment data, while about 30% are white. Across the district, this year’s data shows that fewer than one out of 10 students in the district is Black, while the majority of students are white.
Edwards said he felt an added sense of responsibility to be a model for his Black students. He’d roam the halls watching for stray students to send back to class.
Edwards introduced generations of students to television production, and he took it seriously.
“I always stressed that you’re not just kids playing around, pretending to make television,” he said. “You’re making television, and there are certain standards that one must adhere to.”
Edwards proudly names a handful of his students: One was an executive at Paramount, another joined the Directors Guild of America, and several others produce films of their own and have won awards.
Former students said Edwards had high expectations. Ime Etuk, who graduated from Jefferson in 1993, remembers how Edwards would ask his students to come to campus at 6 a.m. to prepare the set for Friday broadcasts.
If students couldn’t make it to campus — their parents couldn’t drive them, or they couldn’t catch buses that early in the morning — Edwards would drive to their homes to pick them up, Etuk said.
“He was going to do whatever it took on that day,” said Etuk, now a film director who founded the Portland video production company Laugh Cry Love Entertainment. “There were no excuses.”
Etuk remembers Edwards for how he’d “talk to,” rather than “talk at,” his students.
“He would call us on our B.S.,” Etuk said. “When you’re in high school, you’re not used to that from an adult.”
Andy Kulak, a language arts teacher at Jefferson, works in the classroom across from Edwards and has known him for two decades. Every time Kulak spends time with Edwards, inside the classroom or otherwise, he learns something new.
“As a teacher, I deeply respect that,” said Kulak, who added that a friend had described Edwards as someone who “brings you into the knowledge together” and “never makes you feel small.”
From TV to teaching
Before Edwards began teaching at 33 years old, he worked in television production. In the early ’80s, after Edwards had graduated from the University of California, San Diego, he traveled to Portland at the behest of a friend who had told him about a potential internship at his workplace for minorities in television.
Edwards didn’t, and still doesn’t, like to watch television. (“I make television. I don’t watch it,” he said.) But what intrigued him about the medium was its place among the most powerful and influential sectors of the economy.
“Most of what people know — or think they know — comes from either movies or TV,” Edwards said. “So it was important to me that my students could avail themselves of that power and tell their own stories as opposed to those other people telling their stories for them.”
Though he didn’t get the internship — Edwards sent in a 90-minute documentary on Malcolm X for his application, which he said might have scared the corporation off — he started working at a Black community television channel where he hosted a weekly talk show.
He had moved to Northeast Portland, where he still lives, in the Humboldt neighborhood. Humboldt is just off Interstate 5 and includes the area between North Ainsworth and Skidmore streets.
Edwards remembers Humboldt in the ’80s as a vibrant neighborhood where his neighbors looked like him and played the same kinds of music he listened to. He also recalled streets with boarded-up and abandoned businesses.
In 1980 and 1990, Humboldt’s Black residents made up 69% of the population, wrote Karen Gibson, a now-retired urban studies professor at Portland State University, in an article on gentrification and disinvestment in Albina. But by 2000, that figure had dropped to 52%. By 2010, it had dropped again, by more than half, to 25%.
This precipitous decline in the Black population came from a mix of factors. Rising rates in crime during the ’80s pushed out Black residents who could afford to move to safer neighborhoods, for example. These new trends compounded on decades of history, including racist mortgage lending policies in the ’70s and ’80s that displaced Black residents.
Discriminatory lenders refused to lend to Black residents, leading some residents to move elsewhere to find homes to purchase. Speculators bought properties at cheap prices but didn’t invest in them, Gibson wrote, leading “to housing abandonment at a major scale.”
A mixture of low property values and the city’s efforts to reinvest in the area — making changes neighborhood residents had been asking of the city for decades — began to attract white residents to Albina in the 1990s, Gibson said.
Nonprofit housing organizations developed new properties to improve Albina’s neighborhoods. Building codes were more aggressively enforced, and the creation of a new urban renewal district and light-rail project on Interstate Avenue helped prime the area for reinvestment, Gibson wrote.
By 1999, after the revitalization effort by the city, Black Portlanders owned 36% fewer homes than a decade earlier. White Portlanders owned 43% more. It wasn’t that Black families couldn’t afford homes, Gibson said. They could. “It just was not permitted or promoted,” she wrote. Banks refused to lend out money to Black people looking to buy homes, citing racist fears of losing business by selling to non-white families.
As the neighborhood has changed, Edwards said he’s felt unwelcome at times.
Where Edwards lives, he sees yard signs that say “Black Lives Matter.” But when he walks through his neighborhood, he said, he gets looks from others that seem to ask, “What are you doing here?”
“To me, that does not demonstrate that Black lives matter,” Edwards said.
At the high school that sits in the heart of Albina, students and teachers have always discussed race. As a mostly Black public high school, it was natural, Edwards said, even before protests began in Portland following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May.
During a protest in June, protesters pulled down the school’s statue of its namesake, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who enslaved more than 600 people. People at Jefferson have long known about the president’s history of enslavement, Edwards said.
“For most people, him being a slave owner is the primary aspect,” he said. “So here you have a school full of African American children, and its namesake is a slave owner. Now that more people know that, not only was he a slave owner, but that he fathered children that he kept enslaved, I think that’s really pretty much all the discussion there needs to be.”
A petition to rename the school after Edwards has more than 1,300 signatures. But Edwards doesn’t want the school to be renamed after him. He prefers another option, one that his students came up with: Michelle and Barack Obama Middle College.
“Jefferson was a person who, through oppression, produced children of dual ethnicities,” Edwards said. “Barack Obama is a person of dual ethnicities, where that came out of choice.” He added that Obama’s Democratic politics would carry on the third president’s loftier ideals, while renaming the school would recognize Jefferson’s shortcomings.
“Now you would have a school which, for half a century, was primarily African American, named after African Americans,” Edwards said.
— Ryan Nguyen; rnguyen@oregonian.com; @ryanjjnguyen
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