66 pages • 2 hours read
Miles CorwinAnd Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City High School Students
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Miles Corwin
Miles Corwin is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He becomes interested in writing about gifted students in South-Central Los Angeles after a student is shot dead, and a meticulously done school assignment is found in his pocket. Corwin is more than just an observer; he becomes involved in the lives of the students and teachers he writes about. He drives a student to court hearings and visits her in her custodial placement, and he also tries to teach the AP class during Little’s absence. He clearly cares deeply about the students he is profiling.
Toni Little
Little teaches the senior AP English class and the 10th graders in the gifted program at Crenshaw. She is from a working-class white background in California and was inspired to go into teaching by John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated when she was in third grade. She lived with one of her professors in college, and she was devastated when he broke up with her. In many ways, she still suffers the scars. She is a gifted teacher who knows how to interest the class in literature, but she is also temperamental and fights with Moultrie, Braxton, and the other teachers and administrators at school, including the principal. She allows these squabbles to interfere with her teaching duties, and is not fully present to prepare her students for the AP English exam. However, she cares deeply about her students, and they care about her.
Anita Moultrie
Moultrie teaches the ninth and 11th grades in Crenshaw’s gifted program is also the chairwoman of the English department. She believes in infusing her lessons with African-American culture and history, and she wants to make sure her students understand that they need to write and speak well to prove themselves in a racist society. She is black and grew up in Oakland, where she was inspired in the late 1960s by the community pride of the Black Panthers. She has five children, including a baby, runs a party business with her husband, and teaches Sunday school. In order to concentrate on her work, she wants to end the feud with Little. She serves as a mother figure for her students and strives to teach them about themselves and life, not just about literature.
Olivia
Olivia was abused by her mother as a child, and she put herself into county custody as a 13-year-old. She has lived in many foster and group homes, and she doesn’t accept limits on her freedom. She loves her Volkswagen, which she regards as her only possession. She is very entrepreneurial and is involved in selling candy and safety equipment to buy clothes, as she often receives no money from her foster parents. She is involved in a check fraud case and is sent to a custodial center. She is a very bright student who is able to get out of the center to attend college, first at a UC school and then at Babson, her dream school in Massachusetts. She plans to get an MBA.
Scott Braxton
Braxton is the head of the gifted program at Crenshaw, and he grew up with a demanding father who left his mother. He attended a local high school, Dorsey, after going to a majority-white middle school. He was an English teacher before working at Crenshaw, and he admires Little’s teaching. He is very involved in his students’ lives, but the troubles they face, in addition to commuting to his job and caring for two young children, exhaust him. At the end of the novel, he decides to become an assistant principal at another school.
