One Person Can Make a Difference
The story almost sounded too good to be true:
A young, white teacher moves in 1970 from East Baton Rouge Parish to Jackson, Miss., when her husband gets a new job.
She lands a job at a previously all-black school in the first year of full-blown integration of Jackson’s public schools. Except that the racial makeup of students at her new school is basically the same because white students are leaving the public schools.
Meanwhile, her husband is catching the dickens at work because his wife is teaching at a black school, and the frostiness and pettiness extends to the teacher outside in the community.
The couple soon realizes they’ve made a big mistake, and the husband arranges to return to his old job in Baton Rouge while the wife finishes out the semester. Her students are heartbroken.
Nearly 39 years later, the teacher gets a call from the Louisiana Department of Education. A former National Football League player wants to talk to her, and his lawyer asked the department to track her down.
Mary “Mimi” Hagan responded by making that call to former Mississippi State University and Chicago Bears lineman Tyrone Keys, now the head of a nonprofit organization affiliated with NFL Charities, that helps students pursue higher education through community service and mentoring.
Hagan said she was nearly floored when Keys asked her to attend his July 31 induction into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Keys, by then, already was a member of Mississippi State’s Education Hall of Fame.
Hagan remembered Keys from her short time in his classroom, and she also found she had written the names of her students and other sixth-graders in Dawson Elementary on sheets of notebook paper when she left. She still had the papers at her home.
What she didn’t know was how much of an impression she had made on her students and that she figures prominently in motivational talks that Keys gives to groups of young people.
And yet, on a return visit in mid-August to the Hall of Fame in Jackson, Hagan viewed the partially finished exhibit honoring Keys.
“You push a button to see his video, and he’s talking about me!” Hagan said.
Keys said last month that 1970 was a turbulent time in Mississippi, as black families and white families grappled with issues raised by desegregation of the public schools.
Hagan gave Keys and his classmates a different perspective, he said.
“Mrs. Hagan was just there for about six months, but what I remember is the courage and compassion she shared and she showed. I never forgot it,” Keys said.
After a story of the reunion appeared, Southern University history professor Charles Vincent, of Baker, said he was not surprised at Keys’ reaction because he had seen Hagan exhibit the same concern and compassion for her students at Baker’s Park Ridge Elementary School, especially the New Orleans children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Hagan and Keys also have been invited to speak at the July 2010 fourth annual Cecil J. Picard Educator Excellence Symposium and Celebration, where top Louisiana educators are honored.
“You would be such an inspiration to the educators who struggle every day to do the right thing and to make a difference in the life of a child,” the invitation reads.
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