On Monday, World Teachers’ Day, friends and relatives of the late Rod Paige released the trailer for a forthcoming film about his remarkable life and career. Titled Paragraphs of a Paige, the appetite-whetting trailer can be viewed here. We at Fordham are proud to be playing a modest role in the evolution of this project, spearheaded by Rod’s family and ace filmmaker Isaac Yowman, as Rod Paige was our friend, longtime board member, colleague in the ed-reform struggle in which he played such a key role, and (for some of us) boss during exciting times at the Education Department during the presidency of George W. Bush.
The film, in fact, opens with a (re-enacted) scene in Sarasota’s Emma E. Booker Elementary School on 9/11/2001, as President Bush was paying a long-awaited visit to a second-grade class. He had just begun to read to the enraptured students when Andy Card whispered into his ear that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and that “America is under attack.” Whereupon the president excused himself from the classroom and invited Secretary Paige to take his place.
Rod was, of course, Bush’s first secretary of education, as well as the former Houston superintendent, college dean, football coach, and lifelong civil rights pioneer.
To be released in full later this year, Paragraphs of a Paige is a hybrid scripted and documentary film chronicling his life and legacy. Through cinematic reenactments, archival material, and documentary storytelling, it traces his journey from segregated Mississippi through decades in education and ultimately to Washington, D.C.
I’ve written before about Rod, his remarkable track record in Houston, his longtime service on the Fordham board, and more. But not until we entered into this film project did I really begin to know the important earlier chapters in his life, such as the day in 1967 when the Jackson State football team, of which he was head coach, played a historic game against Grambling that caused the first-ever integration of Jackson’s Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium. (Rod’s team won, Grambling’s only loss that season.) Yes, this was 1967. I was barely into graduate school.
The film trailer hints at some of these chapters. The film itself will do more. Check it out. And as you do, try to remember a time when ed-reform was high on the agenda, even in Washington, and mostly what we meant by it was that all kids needed to learn more and those yawning gaps needed to narrow.
Rod believed and worked for that—and much progress got made.
We continue to miss him.
