The Teacher Who Inspired Philly’s First Female Mayor

If you are or ever were a teacher, this story will make you happy and proud of your profession. Kristen A. Graham, a veteran education reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed the teacher who opened up a new world for Cherelle Parker, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.

Graham writes:

When Cherelle Parker stood outside her Mount Airy polling place on Election Day, speaking emotionally about how she rose to the brink of becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, she shouted out the village that got her there: her single, teenage mother, her political godmothers.

And Jeanette Jimenez, her high school English teacher.

“She was the one who told me that my life was a real live textbook case study on how you turn pain into power, and she told me to write about it,” Parker said. That encouragement from her teacher helped Parker — who endured poverty and trauma during her childhood in West Oak Lane — win a citywide oratorical competition and start down a path that would culminate in her being elected the city’s first female mayor.

A reflection in Black literature

Stuffed in a corner of a jam-packed room on the second floor of Jimenez’s Bella Vista home is a time capsule of Parker’s high school years.

Here’s a poem the future mayor handwrote on now-yellowing loose-leaf paper, “I Dream a World.” Here are photographs. There’s the 1990 Parkway yearbook, in which Parker proclaims in the quote next to her photo that she wants “to help Black men and women of the future to unite and remember one nation under the groove.”

She first met Parker in the late 1980s at the Parkway program, an innovative Philadelphia School District high school model with campuses spread around the city.

Jimenez, Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote in 1990, “believes there is a creative way to reach every student, no matter how poor the performance, how bad the attitude, how difficult the home life.” Every young person wants to learn, Jimenez believed, then and now.

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At first, Parker — whose mother died when she was 13, whose father was not a presence in her life, who was raised by her grandparents — was skeptical of Jimenez, who had a reputation for giving a lot of homework, and making students read a lot of books. At Parkway, students could choose which classes they took, and Parker shied away from Jimenez.

Parker was “spunky,” a standout in pink jumpsuits and long fingernails, Jimenez remembers. And, eventually, Parker was curious enough about what was happening in Jimenez’s classroom to find out more. Kids in Jimenez’s classes took so many trips to libraries and plays and elsewhere that Jimenez kept a permanent stash of tokens for their ventures.

“We acted out all the plays before we went,” Jimenez remembers. “The kids loved the opera more than the prom.”

It felt as if there were “sunshine coming out” of Jimenez’s room, Parker told the Daily News in 1990, and eventually, she wanted to “walk toward the light.”

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Jimenez had a vast classroom library. Parker began to dig in.

“I never said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to read Shakespeare,’” Jimenez said.

Jimenez had Shakespeare available, but she alsohad works by Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. Although the district had banned The Color Purple at one point, Jimenez put into kids’ hands books in which they saw themselves.

It was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange, that sparked a love of literature, of Black authors, Parker told The Inquirer in 1990.

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“She saw herself as the protagonist in those books. It’s what made her think she could do this,” said Jimenez, referring to Parker’s rise to power.

She made Connie Clayton cry

Parker had a loving family who did the best they could with limited resources, but her life was complicated, Jimenez said.

“She had a grandfather who was very sick that she took care of,” said Jimenez. “She needed somewhere else to go, physically and emotionally and mentally.”

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She found that, partly, in literature and in Jimenez.

“She calls me her white mother,” said Jimenez, who is still vigorous, voraciously intellectual and amusing at 81.

Parker set her sights on the Philadelphia School District’s Black History Oratorical Contest.

Her first speech was “decent,” Jimenez said, “but it wasn’t good enough for me to put in the contest.”

Parker “was furious. I said no, and she didn’t take the no. She said, ‘I’m getting there,’” Jimenez said.

That “no” made Parker buckle down to write a speech that not only won the 1990 citywide competition, but also made then-Superintendent Constance E. Clayton weep.

Parker called it “Native Daughter,” a play on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and wrote about how Black literature inspired her to rise above her difficult life circumstances.

“I, Cherelle Parker, was a child that most people thought would never succeed,” a teenaged Parker wrote. “You know? They almost had me thinking the same thing.”

She won $1,000 and a trip to Senegal, but she also won something more: the attention of powerful adults, including City Councilmembers Augusta Clark and Marian Tasco, both of whom eventuallynourished her the way Jimenez did.

Parker initially hadn’t given much thought to college, but Jimenez and others encouraged her. Jimenezeven took Parker on a visit to Lincoln University to make sure she gained admission.

“I wasn’t chancing it, with kids, you never know if they are going to follow through,” said Jimenez. “We just sat at Lincoln because I thought they were the ones that would take her fastest.”

Know your audience

Jimenez grew up in South Philadelphia, raised by her Russian immigrant father, a photographer and architect. She graduated from Little Flower High School and Temple University, where fellow student Bill Cosby would practice jokes at Mitten Hall.

She thought she knew some things about teaching when she began working in Philadelphia, at Barratt Junior High in South Philadelphia. She was a white teacher teaching the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” describing a beautiful woman to her Black students as blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Her teacher colleague Lenore Johnson enlightened her.

“She said, ‘Have you looked at your audience?’ There was no course that taught you, know your audience,” Jimenez said.

It was a mistake she did not repeat. Throughout her career, at Barratt, and at Parkway, and at Bartram High, Jimenez responded to student interests, teaching about writing and literature and life in ways that kids responded to. Sometimes, that meant using rap to reach students. Sometimes, that meant stopping mid-lesson to ask her students whether they were bored, and course correcting if they were.

Retired from teaching nearly 25 years, Jimenez is still keenly interested in teaching and learning. She’s trying to pick up Russian, and she thinks it’s vital to discuss matters of race and institutional racism, and she worries about how social media is distorting people’s world views. She thinks small class sizes are necessary, and knows that if she were still teaching, she’d be using the recent Barbiemovie as a tool to explore contemporary issues.

Jimenez treasures mementos from Parker’s years as her student, but it’s not just relics of the mayor-elect that she keeps. There are the writings of a student who went on to become a college professor, the young woman Jimenez helped realize her dream of becoming a welder — now she’s a SEPTA supervisor.

“What I’m proud of is those people that I had that became their own true selves,” said Jimenez.

She counts Parker in thatcategory.

“My hope is that Cherelle will run the city as I run my classroom,” said Jimenez.

Jimenez is confident that Parker picked up the most important lessons she instilled in all her students: Everyone can learn. Know your audience. Find ways to inspire them. Value people’s authentic voices. Work hard.

“She has a great soul, a good brain, and the sense to surround herself with good people,” Jimenez said.