In the morning, she would stand on the second-floor porch of their run-down house in Memphis, staring across the road toward the white section of town. She watched enviously as the men and some of the women left their well- tended homes for work, briefcases in hand, and the mothers got their well-scrubbed children off to school.
”I would think, `Why couldn`t we live like that?` ” Maggie Comer recalled recently. ”I always thought as far back as I can remember that I wanted better. I wanted more and I didn`t see why we couldn`t have it.”
That was almost 75 years ago. Maggie Comer was Maggie Nichols then, a barefoot 10-year-old black girl whose grandparents had been slaves. She was growing up so poor in segregated Memphis that she and her brothers and sisters often didn`t have enough to eat. Because her stepfather, a sharecropper, saw no use in education, she had just six months of formal schooling.
At 16, she ran away from home to East Chicago, where a sister and two brothers had moved. She never looked back. She taught herself to read and write, worked as a domestic, married and reared five children, enveloping them in love and passing on her determination to succeed.
From the time they were babies, she taught her children that being black should not stand in their way, that they should reach for a better life. Education, Maggie Comer taught her children, was the key.
Even when she was cleaning people`s houses, Mrs. Comer recalled, she was determined to continue her own education, watching the way middle-class families lived and reared their children. ”One woman, a lawyer`s wife, gave me some 3d- and 4th-grade books, regular schoolbooks that had been hers, to read when I`d finished my work. That`s how I taught myself to read,” Mrs. Comer explained. ”I`d read whenever I had a few minutes.”
Ultimately, her never-wavering determination and a lot of hard work helped lift Maggie Comer`s family out of poverty and into the professional middle class. Her daughters both became teachers. One son is superintendent of schools in East Chicago and another son became an optometrist. Her eldest son is a doctor. Among them, Maggie Comer`s children hold 13 undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Many of her black neighbors and friends, uneducated and scraping out a living, would scoff at her ambitions for her children, but Mrs. Comer ignored them. ”People would say don`t expect too much, but I didn`t listen to that. . . . I always told my children if other people can do it, you can, too,” she said.
Nor did she let her husband`s long illness and death in 1955 from emphysema, the result of years in the steel mills, deter her. Rather than send her sons to work to support the family, she got a job as an elevator operator in a local hospital and made sure they continued their education.
James Comer interned at that same East Chicago hospital where his mother ran the elevator. He went on to become a child psychiatrist and a leading expert on inner-city education. Dr. Comer is associate dean of Yale University Medical School.
James Comer is convinced that his upbringing spurred his success and that of his siblings.
It certainly shaped his career, he said, fueling his desire to give other poor youngsters the tools they needed to overcome obstacles: the confidence and drive his parents gave him.
Now Dr. Comer has written a book about his mother`s life, ”Maggie`s American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family,” (New American Library, $18.95).
”This is the story of a successful black family,” Dr. Comer said recently, during a Thanksgiving visit to his mother`s East Chicago home.
”It`s a story that doesn`t often get told, because the focus is on those that aren`t successful.”
At the same time, Maggie Comer`s legacy is reaching far beyond her own family and has begun to touch the lives of thousands of poor black children across the country.
Dr. Comer explained that he has incorporated his mother`s child-rearing techniques into the innovative inner-city-school programs he has developed.
Implemented 20 years ago in two public schools in New Haven, Conn., the Comer model is now being used in more than 50 schools around the country, including some in Virginia, Maryland, Kansas and Michigan.
Dr. Comer`s school program promotes development and learning by building bonds that bring together children, parents and the school, he said.
”You make the children feel they are able and you believe in them,” Dr. Comer said.
”You make them want to do well and then you concentrate on the academics.”
”What we did was re-create the atmosphere I grew up with and made it available to children who hadn`t had it before,” Dr. Comer explained.
Said Maggie Comer: ”When they find out you love them, that`s the first thing. And then you go from there and teach them the other things.”
Maggie Comer is a warm, heavy-set woman who was always waiting with an apple or a cookie when her children came home from school, who always made her children feel that their ideas and thoughts mattered.
She was also the kind of mother who got on the phone and badgered steel mill personnel officers until they gave her sons, in college at the time, much-needed but extremely hard-to-get summer jobs.
The Comer children worked from the time they were children, all the while learning the important relationship between self-esteem and holding a job. Once, Mrs. Comer recalled, she and her husband took the children to buy school clothes. Each child was to pay for his own, out of his earnings.
But the store clerk assumed that a black family buying so much merchandise would need credit and ushered them into an office to work out a payment plan, Mrs. Comer recounted.
When she and her husband realized what was going on, she had her children pull out hard-earned dollars from their pockets to show the store officials they could indeed pay for the clothes. It was a proud moment for the entire family.
”The man couldn`t believe it,” she said.
”I always felt we did our best for them and they`d turn out well,” Mrs. Comer continued. But equally important, she added, was having confidence in herself. ”If I hadn`t believed in myself, I wouldn`t have been able to make the children believe they could do it,” she explained.
Dr. Comer said one aim of his program has been to get teachers and parents working together to inspire that same confidence in themselves and their children.
Twelve years into the programs at the New Haven schools, academic performance there-once among the worst in the city-had surpassed national averages, and truancy and discipline problems had dropped markedly, Dr. Comer said. He added that the program is now being introduced in all New Haven schools.
Some of those first children in the program have gone on to medical and law school, Dr. Comer said. Several of their parents returned to school and completed their educations, becoming teachers and social workers, among other occupations.
”Once all of the elements are in place, the program is fantastic,” said James Rutter, superintendent of schools in Benton Harbor, Mich., where the program began five years ago in elementary schools serving about 5,500 youngsters.
”These are good, sound techniques,” Rutter said. ”They work.”
An important element is the mental health team, Dr. Comer said.
It helps the school staff to deal with behavior problems, recognizing they may stem from a traumatic experience or unmet needs at home, Dr. Comer said.
Too often, Dr. Comer explained, educators simply don`t realize how ill-prepared inner-city children are to enter school.
They may not have adequate social and language skills, enough food or heating, or even a bed of their own.
Dr. Comer recalled one anxious child living in a shelter, worried where he would find his mother at the end of the school day because the family had moved around so much.
”It occurred to me that it must be terribly difficult to go off and learn and not know where you`ll find your mother that evening,” Dr. Comer said.
Expectations at home and at school may be drastically different, exacerbating these children`s difficulties, Dr. Comer said. Parents who failed at school may be antagonistic toward teachers` efforts and convinced that their children are being set up to fail.
Teachers, in turn, may have no understanding about the dynamics at home that are working against the children`s success at school.
Dr. Comer recalled an incident from his own childhood when an assignment had called for a trip to the library. Three other black children in the class had never been to the library, and their parents, fearful of public institutions run by whites, were afraid to take them there. The teacher, not knowing any of this, castigated the children for not having completed their assignment.
”Now 40 years later, it`s the same problem, only worse,” Dr. Comer said. ”In the old days, blacks felt disenfranchised but that they couldn`t do anything (about their situation).
”People still feel that way but now they`re angry,” Dr. Comer continued. ”They feel entitled (to a better life) but they don`t know what to do. They feel (trying) won`t pay off or they look at someone who tried and didn`t make it.”
Dr. Comer grew up with lots of people like that. They were the ones who led him first into psychiatry and then into the public schools. In college and medical school, he explained, he began to wonder why he and his siblings were doing so well when equally bright youngsters they had grown up with were falling by the wayside, having problems with depression and alcohol, ending up in jail and on welfare.
Ultimately, he decided, they were failing because they were so deeply depressed and beaten down by their poverty and they had no one-as he and his brothers and sisters did-to bolster their spirits and give them the support they needed to keep struggling.
”That`s what matters to a child, to know they have a welcome place,”
Mrs. Comer said.
Dr. Comer recalled coming home after one very difficult semester at Indiana University. He had endured considerable racism at the predominantly white school, was depressed and ultimately had failed physics, required for medical school admission.
His mother told him she wanted him to do well but cautioned that he shouldn`t ruin his health, that his family loved and needed him more than they needed a doctor in the family.
That was enough, Dr. Comer said, to help him snap out of his funk: ”I was important,” he explained.
Maggie Comer, meanwhile, proudly tells a visitor that she has attended 26 graduations for her children and seven grandchildren, several of whom already have graduated from college.
”It makes me feel real good that I`ve laid the right foundations,” she said. ”I`ve put my goals in my children.”
Her job is finally done, she added with a smile. ”I`m just enjoying life now.”
