real eye openers, where she learned about time-outs and alternatives to corporal punishment. After Scott graduated from Baby College, she wanted more, so she enrolled Yanice in Harlem Gems, an all-day pre-K with a 4:1 child-to-adult ratio. After half a year in the program, Yanice was shining, learning the basics of reading and math, singing songs in French, coming home armed with words like “astronomy” and “meteorologist.” Scott hoped Promise Academy would mean more of the same. She couldn’t stand the thought of sending Yanice to a regular Harlem public school after this.
In the second row, right next to the aisle, Wilma Jure sat wearing an “I Love New York” T-shirt and a red nylon jacket, her head bowed in an anxious prayer. Jure wasn’t here for her own child. She was praying for her niece, Jaylene Fonseca, a four-year-old who was a classmate of Yanice’s in Harlem Gems. Jaylene’s mother, Jure’s sister, was living in the city’s shelter system for homeless families, and most nights, Jaylene slept with her mother in a shelter on Forty-first Street, then spent the day in Harlem Gems. Jure sometimes felt that the Gems program was the only thing keeping Jaylene alive.
In the front row, Virainia Utley sat with her daughter Janiqua. Utley was something of a model parent in the Harlem Children’s Zone. Janiqua was in the Fifth Grade Institute, an academic club that the organization ran here at PS 242, and her three younger siblings—Jaquan, Janisha, and John—were all enrolled in the afterschool computer- assisted reading program. Utley was the vice president of her tenants’ association, which was part of Community Pride, the Harlem Children’s Zone’s community-organizing division, and she was a regular presence at Zone events. She had been talking for months about Janiqua going to Promise Academy.
Onstage, Ken Langone, the board member, was reaching into a plastic bucket filled with ticket stubs. As at many Harlem Children’s Zone events, one of the lures Canada had used to pack the house tonight was a raffle. Langone, an owlish, balding man in his late sixties, read the winning numbers into the microphone like he was calling a church bingo night, and one by one, parents came to the front to display their tickets and collect a twenty- five-dollar gift certificate from Old Navy, the Gap, or HMV, the music store. The winners looked happy, and there was mild applause for each one, but the audience was beginning to grow a little restless, and the noise level was rising again. It was approaching 7:00 P.M., and not a single child’s name had been called.
But Canada still wasn’t quite ready to spin the drum. He called up one last guest: Rev. Alfonso Wyatt, a friend of Canada’s since the early 1980s and now a minister on the staff of the Greater Allen Cathedral in Queens. Wyatt was on the school’s board of trustees along with Langone and Druckenmiller and Kurz, but not because of his fundraising acumen. He was there for less tangible reasons—a moral authority, maybe, or maybe it was just that unlike the businessmen, all of whom were white, Wyatt shared a culture and a history with Canada: the peculiar joys and sorrows of inner-city black activism in the post–civil rights era. Wyatt and Canada were a decade or two younger than the men who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr., the generation that now made up the nation’s civil rights establishment; their perspective was shaped not by Selma and the March on Washington but by what followed: Black Power and busing riots, drugs and AIDS and hip-hop.
Wyatt pulled the microphone from its holder and walked to the front of the stage. He wore a white turtleneck under a dark suit jacket, a modified version of a clerical collar. A stylized cross hung around his neck. “Some people don’t believe that there are folks in Harlem who really care about their children,” he began, his voice a sonorous baritone, his cadence deliberate, straight from the pulpit. “They don’t believe that on a day when it was raining all day, that they would come out and that they would sit and that they would wait. People don’t believe that there are folks who don’t mind being inconvenienced.” As he warmed up, the attention of the crowd, which had been wandering, was pulled back to the front of the auditorium. “But I know that the people here in this room don’t mind waiting. Because if they can wait a
“Let me hear somebody say it,” Wyatt called out, and he led the crowd in a chant: “You! Will! Not! Have! Our! Children!”
“Let me hear somebody else say it,” Wyatt cried, and the parents shouted again, louder:
“You! Will! Not! Have! Our! Children!”
“Let’s make some noise in this place!”
AND THEN THE drawing began, starting with the kindergarten class. Doreen Land, the academy’s newly hired superintendent, read the first name into a microphone: “Dijon Brinnard.” A whoop went up from the back of the auditorium, and a jubilant mother started edging her way out of her row, proudly clutching the hand of her four-year-old son. Land smiled and took the next card: “Kasim-Seann Cisse.” Another whoop, some applause, and then, a few seconds later, “Yanice Gillis.” Yasmin Scott clapped her hands and leapt to her feet.
At the front of the auditorium, Canada congratulated each mother (or, occasionally, father) and child. Proud parents shook his hand and introduced their children, beaming on their way back to their seats. In the front row, Wilma Jure was praying harder than ever, her eyes shut tight, her lips moving, reciting one supplication after another. And then Land read out, “Jaylene Fonseca,” and Jure’s eyes flew open, and the next thing she knew, she was on her feet, hugging Canada, tears brimming in her eyes, and then running out of the auditorium to call her sister with the good news.
As the evening wore on, though, the mood in the auditorium started to shift. The kindergarten lottery ended, the chosen students trooped out to the cafeteria for a group photo, and the sixth-grade lottery began. In the front row, Virainia Utley sat with her daughter Janiqua, listening to the names and trying not to worry. But the lottery numbers were rising—fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six—and Janiqua hadn’t yet been called.
After Land read out the one hundredth name, Canada took the stage again and explained to Utley and the other remaining parents that it wasn’t likely there would be room for their children in the sixth grade. Land would read out the rest of the names and put them on a waiting list, he said, but this part wouldn’t be much fun. He encouraged everyone to go home. Land went back to reading names, and Utley and Janiqua sat and listened, still in their seats, as the waiting list grew and the number of cards in the drum dwindled. By the time Land got to the eightieth place on the waiting list, they were just waiting to make sure Janiqua’s name was called. Maybe her card got lost or stuck to another card.
The room was thinning out, and the only remaining parents were angry ones. They were lining up to let Canada know how they felt. One by one, the parents came up to him to find out what could be done to get their children into the school, and he had to tell each one the same thing: nothing. Nothing could be done. One disappointed woman spat out her complaint to anyone who would listen. “I think it’s not fair, and I want someone to know,” she said, her voice loud and bitter. “It’s
Finally, at number 111 on the waiting list, Janiqua Utley’s name was called, and her mother rose, took her by the hand, and started up the aisle to the back door.
AS WORKERS BEGAN sweeping up coffee cups and deflated balloons, I sat down next to Canada in the front row of the auditorium, off to the side. I had by this point been reporting on his work for almost a year, following him to meetings and speeches and events around the city. But I had never seen him look so exhausted; he was overwhelmed, it seemed, not only by the emotion of the evening but also by the enormity of the task ahead of him.
“I was trying to get folks to leave and not to hang around to be the last kid called,” he said. “This is very hard for me to see. It’s very, very sad. People are desperate to get their kids into a decent school. And they just can’t believe that it’s not going to happen.” His eyes were watery, and as we talked he dabbed periodically at his
