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Transcript
My name is Danielle Jackson. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood outside of the city on the outskirts. Actually worked in the city, but for some reason they felt it was important for me to be able to operate in a white community. It was a very, very, very hard transition. We lived in North Versailles and then we moved out to the area. It was called Robinson and at the time when I first got there, it was first developing, so there weren’t a lot. Like the mall wasn’t there yet. A lot of the different things that are there now, they weren’t there. It was. It was up and coming. Trying to make friends, not having people who look like you is often times very hard. My first is school my teacher put me on the wrong bus because she refused to believe that I lived in the community that I lived in and she sent me to. It wasn’t really a bad community, but a community with more black people. When I moved to the neighborhood as a child. Oftentimes it was very hard because it was me and maybe three or four other black students amongst 300 white kids. It was like, you know, you’re too black to be white and you’re too white to be black. I was in this war going back and forth and who I wanted to be until one day I realized who it was that I wanted to be and that actually helped me to overcome battles that I face every day in my career life, everyday life. I’m black, and I’m proud.
So when 1997, our parents, we went to a small church in Homestead. It was a AME church and one day my dad, he was just tired of this church. You know, he was like, I’m not growing. I’m not growing spiritually. My mom was like, we’re not growing as a family spiritually, so we just kept driving, and we ended up on the Hill at Macedonia over on Bedford. That’s where I met a lot of my friends. I start getting connected. I started networking and that’s the church I grew up in. I’m actually still there now, so the Hill has always had a special place in my heart. My first job as a teacher was at Miller and then I moved over to Weil and then once I had to get a permanent job, Westinghouse was what was available. I loved the school to death. But I was heartbroken when I had to leave the Hill District. I wanted to be in the WNBA. I thought I was going to be a basketball player, but I was really bad at basketball, so I moved on and I tried to come up with what I call more realistic goals and that’s when I decided I wanted to become a teacher. So for me, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t know what type of teacher. I didn’t know what subject, what age, but I knew that I wanted to be just like my mom and my grandfather and pursue education. So my grandfather was actually the first African American track coach, principal and teacher in Mercer County, which is not far from here, and my mom, also following in his footsteps and she taught at Shenley for 30 plus years up until Shenley closed and then she retired from Obama. So I am real big on education. Education has always been stressed as importance in my household and that is why I am where I am today. And I am. I’m currently a math 7th grade math teacher at Westinghouse. Oftentimes I think about being a principal. So I think after so many years as something I’ll start to study and look into. I love working in Pittsburgh public schools. I love working with the urban community. So I think for me, I just want to be able to branch off of being more than just a math teacher.
What inspired me, and I think it was just having a strong woman as a role model in my household and my dad was present, but my mom really made sure to stress how important it was to be a strong African American woman and to always give 110%. When I played volleyball in high school, my dad would come down to the court and he would always say you have to do better than your people around you because they’re waiting for you to fail at any and every time and that was something that I took through my entire college career and my career. Now I know that I always have to give 110% because I never know who’s watching. I never know who’s looking. I never know who wants to see me fail. I think that I am the change that I want to see and that I see it in my kids every day as I watch them progress in something even as small as a simple math test. Just seeing them build skills of being able to pursue and push forward and persevere.