Henrico Schools' Manns: Black History Month is not just about celebrating the wins but also the journey

Many figures in Black history often are summed up by just a phrase or title: Martin Luther King Jr. – civil rights leader; Rosa Parks – refused to give up her seat on the bus; Toni Morrison – acclaimed author; Duke Ellington – famous jazz pianist.The same type of summation is possible for Monica Manns – chief equity, diversity and opportunity officer for Henrico Schools, longtime educator, holder of five degrees.

But although those achievements might make for a great LinkedIn headline or Facebook “About Me” section, Manns doesn’t believe they’re necessarily reflective of her story or the journey she took to achieve her successes.

“What I believe about my life is it’s a testament to showing up, it is not always a testament to winning,” Manns said. “And I am not here to lie to you to tell you that showing up is easy. When you look at me, you don’t know my journey. You only know Dr. Monica Manns, chief of equity and diversity. But what I’m saying to you is the triumph is that I continue to show up.”

Speaking to students at Varina High School on Monday, Manns reflected on her journey, one that she said was defined by “showing up” rather than what would have been the easier option: opting out.

“It would have been really easy for me to opt out a lot of the times, and everybody could have said, ‘Oh, that was justified,’” Manns said. “But if you want to get to your triumph, you have to get over your fears. What I hope that you get from my story is that triumph comes with a conviction of effort.”

For leaders of the Henrico NAACP, who brought Manns to Varina High to celebrate Black History Month in Henrico Schools, Manns’ story illustrates the diversity of life experiences and journeys encapsulated by the Black community.

“There is such a spectrum of life history, of experience of individuals who identify as Black Americans,” L. Frances Brown, secretary for the Henrico NAACP, said. “When you see someone, you have a perception of the person, but then you really don’t know their life story or what led them to where they stand today.”

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Manns explained to the students that her journey was not easy. It didn’t start out easy either. She described herself as a child of two single parents who divorced when she was very young, leaving her to spend part of her childhood with her father, a Vietnam veteran who lived in Washington, D.C., and then part with her mother, who was white-passing in a very much still segregated small town in southwest Virginia.“When I walked into the store with my mother, they never thought we were together, because my mother was extremely fair-skinned. My mom’s life was built upon that, so she struggled with that because she was not accepted – the Black community didn’t want her, the white community didn’t want her. She lived in that space of confusion,” Manns said.

Her parents both struggled with their mental health, and when Manns was a teenager, she said she made “some poor choices.” By the time she was a senior in high school, she had lost all of the scholarships she had earned except for one: a full-ride to Berea College in Kentucky.

Berea has a cemented place in Black history, as it was the first college in the South to be racially integrated. As early as 1866, the college accepted a mix of white students from nearby Appalachia, Black students who were former slaves, and indigenous students.

But in 1904, a new Kentucky law forced the college to become whites-only. Berea could not reintegrate until the law was amended in the 1950s, and when Manns attended in the 1990s, the college was still actively trying to reestablish the mixed community it had originally.

“It was this time in those territories and nobody knew how to get along,” she said. “There was a lot of push and pull from both the students and the staff about how do we create a space of unity on this campus. And so I got to really see that in real time.”

Every student was housed with another student who wasn’t from their community; Manns’ freshman year roommate was a white student from the Shenandoah area who loved folk music and introduced Manns to singers like Tracy Chapman. Manns, who grew up among diverse communities in D.C., said Berea’s mixed environment provided some of the best years of her life.

But not all students could adjust to the racial diversity of the campus. Many of the Black students, who hailed from predominantly Black communities or very segregated areas in rural Alabama, were unable to navigate an unfamiliar mixed space. They found Berea’s environment confusing, and by Manns’ sophomore year, many of the Black friends she made in her first year had dropped out.

“Coming to a place like Berea, they really really struggled. And Berea, for all its good intentions, did not do good work. I can now, as a professional, say that” Manns said. “They didn’t put programs in place for the students, they did not create space for these students to learn how to grow with one another and how to understand one another. They just stuck them in the middle of nowhere and said, ‘Y’all get along.’”

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Ironically, teaching people how to get along, and how to navigate uncomfortable spaces, became Manns’ life’s work. Her first few jobs were working at maximum-medium security prisons and juvenile detention centers in Virginia, helping inmates transition from a life in prison to a life on the outside once they were released.Virginia, similarly to the rest of the nation, has a prison population that is disproportionately Black. Despite making up only 20% of state residents, Black people make up 43% of those in jail and 53% of those in prison in Virginia, and are 3.2 times more likely than a white person to be locked up.

When Manns asked inmates how they ended up in prison, and what could have changed their path if something had gone differently in their life, she often heard the same answer: “If I would have had a better teacher.”

During Manns’ visit, students at Varina High said it was often a teacher that made the difference in defining who they are today. For some, it was the first Black teacher they had in elementary or middle school. For others, it was simply the first teacher who really took the time to know them and to notice them.

“I was in the seventh grade and it was my math teacher,” one student said. “Me and her were very close in age and at the time, I was struggling with a lot of past things and current things. So she was just kind of there for me with things I couldn’t talk about to certain people like my family or my mom, and she just made me want to keep going.”

“In elementary school, I went to a mostly white school, so I got bullied a lot for my skin color,” another student said. “I had this one teacher, and while I was crying on the playground by myself and I was making sure nobody could see me, this teacher, she asked me how I was. And after that, I worked so hard in that class and I got all ‘A’s. I was so happy.”

Teachers can have a profound impact on the young students they teach, Manns said, and not just teachers, but other adults in the school building can serve as important role models.

“It’s a testament to the amazing teachers who were willing to take the time to understand and know their students and build community with their students,” Manns said. “There’s also people in your building that may not be teachers – I learned the most from my custodian. There’s always people here who care.”

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Manns herself was a teacher, and later a principal, while working in alternative private day schools – facilities for students whose behavior or academic performance could not be accommodated by public schools. The students sent to her often read four or five grade levels below their grade.“By the time you make it to me, school systems are really just paying me to get them out of the school. These students could not make it in public schools,” she said. “So these were beyond just alternative schools. You guys have alternative schools here, so think about students who couldn’t even make it in an alternative school.”

Manns focused on creating ‘a community of belonging’ at each school, making sure teachers were establishing relationships with students who often had no one to go to at home. One student had severe issues with misbehavior, but he told his teacher something that explained why: he lived in a two-bedroom apartment that housed 11, and out of those 11, only one or two people were receiving food stamps.

So Manns created a ‘fruit award’ – giving the student a basket of fresh fruit every time he had good behavior, or put effort into behaving better. Within only three weeks, the student was demonstrating the best behavior in the school.

“Sounds very small, but when you’re in a household where you don’t have any fresh fruit, and that was something he craved, and you’re sharing food with 11 people, something like a fruit basket matters,” Manns said. “But we would not have known that if our teachers hadn’t had relationships with the student.”

By the time Manns stepped down as the principal, the school had a 100% success rate – every student who was sent to her and was eligible to graduate ended up graduating, a major accomplishment for many students who were told that they could never make it in public school.

But in Manns’ personal life, the past struggles and injustices in her parents’ lives had come back to haunt her. Her mother was working to get her college degree when Manns found out something kept from her all of these years: her mother was dyslexic, and she never learned how to read.

“My mother was making decisions at the time that she was with me without ever reading a document. Whatever someone told her is how she made her decision,” Manns said. “So now here I have my mom, all these years, I did not know that my mother could not read. I find out from a stranger.”

When her mother died, Manns went to get a doctorate in honor of her. Her mother had told her she had always wanted her daughter to get a doctorate.

“I had no real desire to get a fifth degree,” Manns said. “But I wanted it for her.”

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At the end of the event at Varina High, celebrating Black History Month with students, Manns read a quote from Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”Reflecting on her own “triumphs” – and pitfalls – Manns said that refusing to “opt out” of the challenges she was faced with was her way of triumphing over her fears.

“I could have opted out dealing with my parents, because those circumstances were not easy. I could have opted out when I lost all of my scholarships because of bad decisions,” Manns said. “But effort means you have to stand up every morning, put one foot in front of the other, and try. And it does not mean that every try is going to be a win. But it means you got up every day.”

During Black History Month, schools often focus on familiar stories and figures – Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks – and on the wins of the civil rights movement and of Black leaders. But there is more diversity in Black history than what is often presented, Henrico NAACP President Monica Hutchinson said, and that means talking about the challenges and the journey that led to those wins.

“I want to just challenge you to just think about how this is Black History Month. Find your trusted teacher and say, ‘Hey, there’s more about Black history that we want to learn,’” Hutchinson said to students. “We need to know about the real Dr. King. We need to know about ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ not just ‘I Have a Dream.’ We need to know about Malcom X. We need to know about the real Rosa Parks.

“And that’s why we’re here, is to work with you and work with your school to ensure that we are making sure that our history is being told fully, completely, and honestly. Because I’m hoping that one day, we’ll be able to tell the story of one of you sitting in this room.”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.