Bernadeia Johnson, slated to be the next superintendent of schools in Minneapolis, says it wasn't easy to get where she is.
"You see success, and people don't share how they got there, and you think it just happens," Johnson said Wednesday, a day after the school board announced that in the interest of continuity, it would forgo a search and interview Deputy Superintendent Johnson alone for the vacancy that will open when Superintendent Bill Green leaves in June. "But nothing just happens. It's hard work."
Johnson, 50, will assume the reins at a critical time for urban education in Minnesota. Schools are scraping for money, the district faces a $13 million deficit next year, and the achievement gap persists.
But her history of overcoming obstacles, including segregation in her native Selma, Ala., and a personal bankruptcy in 1991, followed by her ascendancy into the top ranks of educators in the state, shows that she's no stranger to hard work.
She said her experiences have taught her that "you don't have to be limited by the color of your skin, and that everything takes a lot of work, and nothing comes easy."
She grew up in Selma, during what she called "a period in history that is written about in every history book." She attended segregated schools until fifth grade, when her mother paid a cabdriver to drive her and her siblings to a white school across town.
She said her uncle Ulysses Blackmon was one of Selma's "Courageous Eight," a group that registered black residents to vote "at a time when it wasn't OK."
She said that, as a kid, her heart often was in Minneapolis, where she'd go to visit her grandparents. Grandmother Hallie Hendrieth-Smith was principal at Willard Elementary and Loring Elementary. Hendrieth-Smith, 93, recalled Wednesday that Johnson "was a bookworm. Everybody else would be out playing, and she'd be in her room, in her bed, reading a book."
