The school board in Laurelton, Queens had a plan for the racial tension at Junior High School 231: open an annex a few miles away, in a town that hadn't integrated yet. Every white family transferred. Ian Rowe's parents — Jamaican immigrants who came to America in 1968, his father one of the first Black engineers at IBM — assumed that wherever the white kids went was where the better education would be, and told him he was going too.

He was twelve, and he had never once challenged them. What gave him the nerve was his sixth-grade teacher, Linda Talish, who had put him in the school play and who talked about her own Jewish heritage with a reverence he couldn't name at the time but knew he wanted. She never told him what to do. He watched how she carried her community and drew his own conclusion. The night before the transfer papers were due, he stood in the living room — his father in the recliner, his mother on the sofa — and begged, and cried, and asked why, if everyone left was Black, that had to mean it was bad. They said yes.

In this conversation with David Begnaud, he talks about that night, about the schools he now runs in the South Bronx and the four virtues his students recite every morning, about the teachers union that sued to stop him from opening, and about the argument that has made him one of the most contested figures in American education — that systemic barriers are real, and that telling a twelve-year-old the system has already decided his life is its own kind of harm.

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ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
The Person Who Believed In Me is hosted by David Begnaud, founder and CEO of Do Good Crew and often called "America's storyteller." In each episode, David sits down with world-class guests to ask one simple question: Who believed in you before the world did? Big names. Honest stories. Relatable takeaways. Different paths — same question.

David is also a CBS News contributor and host of the weekly segment Beg Knows America, which airs every Monday morning.

Host: David Begnaud

Guest: Ian Rowe

Executive Producer: Olivier Delfosse

Booker: Sully Bloch

Director of Photography: Foster Parks

Live Production Technician: Joseph Gabay & Will Whitley (Statik Creative)

Social: Maxim Trofimenko, Kylee Anderson, Gracie Pekrul

Theme Music: Slipstream

Post-Production: Longwave Digital, David & Luana Co.

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