Dr. Geoffrey Canada told this story the other morning in Longview, to a crowd gathered in the Belcher Center at LeTourneau University for the Poverty Conference. An acclaimed documentary called “Waiting for Superman” was produced a few years back, featuring his work creating the Harlem Children’s Zone. Canada was raised in the South Bronx of New York City, a tough neighborhood. He and his team have worked cleaning up and taking back 97 blocks of Harlem and serving thousands of kids over the past 30 years.
Canada said when he was young, maybe fourth grade, he loved reading Superman comic books. It provided a respite from the violence, poverty and danger of the South Bronx. But one day, his mother told him Superman was not real. He was crushed, but not in the way children react when told Santa Claus is also a fiction. Canada was crushed because if there was no Superman, then there was no one who could come in and save him from the depths of the ghetto. “There was no one coming with the power to save us,” he said.
A tall, thin man who is now 63, Canada paced the stage restlessly with long strides, his hands accompanying the torrent of words spoken eloquently and without notes. His passion is contagious, his humor infectious. As he traveled from his hotel to the Belcher Thursday morning, he noticed what those of us who work on the south side of Longview see every day: homes with bars on the windows, unkempt vacant lots littered with trash, a child waiting for the bus.
“That little boy headed to school this morning looked a little scared, a little lost. That was me,” he said. The problems we face in Longview are no different than anywhere else, he said. “I have yet to be anywhere there isn’t a problem.”
In Harlem, after receiving a doctorate from Harvard, Canada put together a team, raised money and set out to rebuild a borough sagging from years of neglect, decay and violence — block by block. It was not easy, but 15 years later they had transformed Harlem. “It is now a place people are dying to get to, not get out.”
They knocked on doors and asked skeptical residents, “We want to organize this block and clean it up. Will you help us?” And slowly, they did.
The situation in Harlem, in Longview and in cities large and small has become more dangerous than when Harlem was young. Then, disputes were solved with fisticuffs, not Glocks. When fights occurred when he was a kid, “they weren’t lethal. Now they go home, get a gun and shoot the other kid.”
Canada retired last year, but the work continues, and he has more time to spread his message: “Education is the only way to break the cycle of poverty.”
To widespread applause he said something considered controversial by some. “If you’re a teacher, and you cannot teach, you probably should get another job.”
Too many school districts retain teachers who are inept. In the South Bronx, for example, Canada said nothing has really changed since he was a child in the early 1960s.
“Millions of children have been ruined there,” he said angrily.
So who is going to “fix” this problem? Canada said he has talked with presidents, secretaries of education and other high-ranking officials for decades. The bad news: “There is no plan. We have to do it ourselves.”
It is possible to change a community, block by block, child by child. As Canada put it, “Despair is infectious, but so is hope.”
If it can be done in Harlem, it can be done anywhere.
