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Biography

Awki Nji-Dawson was born in Iowa City then raised in Cameroon until the age of eight. At that time her family moved to Springville, Iowa where they became the only African Americans in town. She found herself either breaking or affirming stereotypes with her neighbors and classmates. Once she moved to Cedar Rapids, she encountered the lost feeling of being too black to be white and too white to be black. At first intent on a degree in journalism, she turned to teaching. She is now a language arts teacher in Cedar Rapids and the Director at The Academy for Scholastic and Personal Success-a high school educational enhancement program emphasizing African American history and culture.

Transcript

Date of Interview: August 7, 2009

James Hall: Good Afternoon. It’s August 7th, 2009 and today I’m interviewing Akwi Nji-Dawson. Where were you born?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I was actually born in Iowa City. And within a year, my mom and dad and I moved to Africa. And so we moved to Cameroon, Africa. That’s where my dad was born. He and my mom actually meant at Iowa State. So they were going to school there. Met at Iowa State; I was born at Iowa City; we moved to Cameroon. My sister, my younger sister, was born there and we lived there until I was about eight years old.

James Hall: And where do you call home now?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: That is a good question because every time somebody asks where I’m from, I have a hard time answering it in just one word. You know, usually people can say I’m from Cedar Rapids. or I’m from Iowa. but I have to go through the whole system because it’s hard to answer that question. I call Cedar Rapids home, but when people ask where I am from, I say that I lived in Africa until I was eight and I then I moved from there to Springville, Iowa which is a tiny town that some people who’ve lived in Cedar Rapids don’t even know exists and it’s just on the other side of Marion. And then from Springville we moved to Cedar Rapids. So, I often go through that journey, because I think that it’s important to think how each of those places shaped who I am now.

James Hall: How long have you lived in Iowa?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I’ve lived in Iowa since I was eight, so about 20 years.

James Hall: Where did you go to school growing up? At what schools did you go to?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I went to Springville Elementary. Then I went to 7th grade in Springville. 7th grade in Springville was actually the first grade in the high school building. So I was there for 7th grade and then we moved to Cedar Rapids just before my 8th grade year. And then I went to McKinley in eighth grade. And that was, it was a struggle. Going from Africa to Springville was a struggle because when I lived in Africa I was seen as a commodity. My sister and I were both seen as a commodity, meaning our mom was white. We actually had two older brothers and an older sister whose parents were both African. And everywhere we went people were curious about my sister and me. And wanted to meet us and wanted to know who we were and where we were, because we were lighter skinned and because we had an American mom. And so I grew up in Africa with that experience, which was very different than most people who grow up in Africa who are either all black or all white. I went to an international school there, where students from all over the world attended school as opposed to the public schools that were very, very bad. I remember actually wanting to go to school with my older brother who went to the public school and my mom let me do it. And she says that she just remembers me tearing back around the corner towards the car screaming and crying, “They’re beating Gert, they’re beating Gert!” because we were a little bit late. So the school systems in Africa were very different than what we have here. The culture in Africa was very different than what we have here. There’s a lot I could say there but we went from Africa to Springville and that was a culture shock. ’Cause you go from a place where I was going to school with people from all over the world, to a tiny town where my sister and I are essentially desegregating the town. I think there had been one African American family who lived there before us. And there was no handicapped accessibility in this town in the schools; there were no other students of other races or ethnicities there and so it was a very, it’s a very conservative town, and people really didn’t understand my sister and me. It didn’t help that I also swam. And so they thought, “Black people, black people can’t swim, can they?” I felt like I was constantly either a living breathing example of the stereotypes they had, or in some cases I was completely turning the stereotypes around on them and they didn’t really know what to do to me. One of the memories I have of being a new resident in Springville was when the news reporters came to talk to us at the farm. One of the things they asked us to do was balance baskets on our heads as they imagined Africans did, or as they imagined we had done while we were in Africa. And I remember I was too young to articulate how ridiculous I thought it was. But I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous! I’ve never balanced a basket on my head in my life!” And so there are pictures of my sister and me, with baskets on our heads, trying to balance them as though we’d been doing it all of our lives. It was just again, in my mind, a reminder of the stereotypes that I think we all have of various people and regions and cultures. And we have to be reminded that stereotypes are that, just stereotypes.
Living in Springville was more difficult for me than it was for my sister and I think partly because she was young enough to sort of be oblivious to the conflicts that can arise when people are close minded or don’t fully understand people of other cultures and ethnicities. So, from Springville I thought OK, we’re going to go to Cedar Rapids. We’re going to move to Cedar Rapids; I’m going to get go to McKinley where there are going to be other black students like me. And I thought this will be exactly what I have been wanting. I get to McKinley, 8th grade year and it wasn’t what I expected at all. The black kids thought I was too white, the white kids thought I was too black and I didn’t fit in anywhere. I had about two or three friends who were genuinely my friends, but beyond that it just, it felt like I was sort of stuck in a zone that didn’t allow me to fit in either place. And then, from McKinley I went to Wash [editor’s note: Washington High School] and that was when I really started to be comfortable with who I was. It got to the point where I didn’t care as much about what other people thought of me. And how I either fit into their stereotypes of who they thought I should be or how I broke from those stereotypes. It was just about being who I wanted to be.

James Hall: What segregation issues did you face in Springville growing up?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: There were instances where I had heard or overheard parents of my friends using the “N” word to describe me, which was really hard because some of them were my best friends, and I knew that they were using the “N” word to describe me. We also, one of the things that we did, you asked what I did for fun when I was younger and I talked a lot about Africa, one of the things we did in Springville was we went the “N” word Knocking. And I had no idea what that meant then. I had no idea what the word meant then. I’d never been exposed to it. They don’t use that word in Africa, or they didn’t use it where I was from. And so I had no idea what the word meant, I just knew that that’s what I was running around doing with my friends. In hindsight, it’s those kinds of things that make me realize just how close minded and racist some of the people were whether they knew it or not. Even my own friends who were using that phrase to describe what we were doing may not have realized how racist the phrase was. Maybe they did, but maybe they didn’t. I think back about the fact that their parents were using it in a negative tone. So perhaps they understood there was some negative connotation behind it. But a 5th or 6th grader may not understand the full capacity of that word. One of the most vivid memories I have of that in Springville was when I was talking to a boy on the phone, who I sort of had a crush on and he had a crush on me. We hung up the phone, but he didn’t hang the phone up all the way, and I was still holding the receiver. I heard that there were voices on the other end that he hadn’t hung up the phone all the way. I overheard a conversation he was having with his parents. His mom was using the worst language I had ever heard, up until that point to describe me. She didn’t know me; she’d never met me; she just knew what color I was. I was just so shocked, and hurt and upset all at the same time. They used the “N” word over and over again. And as hurt as I was by what they were saying, I couldn’t believe how courageous my friend was. He was maybe in seventh grade and I was about sixth grade. And I say courageous because, he kept trying to defend me against his parents and was saying, “She’s not like that, stop using that word. Don’t say that.” So I just remember thinking, “Wow, he’s sticking up for me.” But even despite that I never talked to him again after that phone call and he never knew why.

James Hall: What did you do for entertainment growing up?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: In Springville or in Africa?

James Hall: Either place.

Akwi Nji-Dawson: Either place? In Springville, my goodness, we didn’t have TV’s for one, like we do here. My family happened to have one TV and then there was another family in the town that had a TV, but kids didn’t rely on technology there as much as they do here. That’s not to say we were running around in huts, because that is the other thing people imagine. We just relied on the resources we had. A lot of times we rolled inner-tubes down the hills with our sticks that we picked up off the ground, and chased them down the hill and that was fun. My sister and I and our older brothers and our older sister all played for a good year at this construction site that we called Caterpillar Hill. And we called it Caterpillar Hill, because you know how the construction equipment moves sort of like a caterpillar. So we called it Caterpillar Hill and we played there a lot. We made mud pies and it was just a lot of outdoor activities, running around catching, actually, we’d catch grasshoppers and we’d fry them up and eat them. We caught tadpoles in the creek by our house. So it was just a lot of time spent outdoors connecting with nature as one might say.

James Hall: How has the Civil Rights Movement affected you?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: You know, it’s something that again I think I could probably answer that question in a different way than other people could because my dad is African; he’s not a black American. And so while some black Americans can link their ancestry to families and people in the south, and specifically and directly to people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement in some way. I can’t do that, because my family was in Africa, the black side of my family was in Africa. The white side of my family was in Springville, Iowa farming and here and there might have had opportunities to be involved in some sort of desegregation events, but not really to the degree that you would have seen in the south. So it didn’t affect my ancestry directly, but indirectly of course it affects all of us. The Civil Rights Movement does. And I think that, one of the things I try to encourage my students to consider every day they’re in school, is, they wouldn’t be there, they couldn’t be there, if it hadn’t been for so many people who struggled through the Civil Rights Movement. And even before that to get to where we are now. So I constantly think about the struggle, the loss, the victories, the hardships, the triumphs that went on during the Civil Rights Movement to allow me the opportunity, to do what I do and to be what I am.

James Hall: Are you involved with the NAACP at all?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I am not directly involved with the NAACP. I support them with some fund raisers that they have. When mailings come asking for donations, I send in a donation. I get involved in some of the events that they put on throughout the year, some banquets that they hold and different events for students. I get involved in those.

James Hall: How did you get involved with the Academy [editor's note: The Academy for Scholastic and Personal Success]? How did that all start?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: So after I graduated from high school, I went to the University of Northern Iowa. And I was there for a year. And I didn’t really like it. I chose the school because they had a criminal justice program and a swim team. And I thought that I wanted to be an FBI Agent. And so, that’s what I thought that I was going to go to school to be, is an FBI Agent. And I realized within my first year at school that my passion was literature and writing and helping people in a proactive way, as opposed to a reactive way. And I realized if I was going to be a police officer or an FBI Agent, I’d be constantly reacting to negative situations. And I wanted to be in a situation where I could hopefully prevent people from becoming folks who do negative things. So I thought, well I love literature, I love helping people especially young people, so let me think about this whole teaching thing. And so I transferred to the University of Iowa. Because they have a very strong writing program and I no longer wanted to swim, because I couldn’t. My shoulders had given out on me my first year in college, so I couldn’t swim anymore. I thought well, I’m going to change my major, let me transfer to a different school, so I went to Iowa. Majored in journalism and English, double majored and minored in African American World Studies and enjoyed it and had a good time. I worked as a journalist for the “Daily Iowan” for three years and I was an editor there. And I had an internship in Nashville, Tennessee that I really enjoyed. I could have had probably a pretty good career as a journalist. But about a month before I graduated I decided that I wanted to start off as a teacher first. I could always write, I told myself, I could always write, but I can’t necessarily always teach, I can’t go back to teaching twenty years from now. So I called up Dr. Ruth White, who was my high school language arts teacher for two years. And I told her what I wanted to do and I asked her if I could shadow her. And she said, “Absolutely. I would love for you to shadow me, and see if this is really what you want to do.” And it ended up happening that she was retiring that year. And so I decided that that was in fact that was what I wanted to do. She was on the way out getting ready to retire and there I was. So she suggested that I apply for the position and Dr. Ralph Plagmen at Washington High School hired me. I essentially stepped in and took over all of the, most of the courses and programs that Dr. White had been in charge of. That included the Academy because in that year when I was shadowing her when she was my mentor, I also was her assistant director for the Academy. So she was the founder and when she retired from the school district she also retired from the position as director of the Academy. That’s how I became director of the Academy.

James Hall: And like how did you get involved with the summer program at Wash like for the summer schools?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I actually don’t do anything directly with Wash for the summer school programs there. The academy is the summer school program that I run. It’s a six week summer school program. It includes all students in the district, even Marion students, students who go to Prairie and every once and a while we’ll have Iowa City students in the program, too.

James Hall: What would you say your biggest accomplishment has been in your life so far?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: Personally, I have to break it up; personally and professional. Personally my biggest accomplishment has been raising my two daughters. I’ve got a two year old and a four year old, and the enjoyment I get from reading poetry by Langston Hughes to them or Maya Angelo or singing songs. For the longest time the song that woke my two year old up in the morning was “What a Wonderful World” by Louie Armstrong. And I’d play that every morning and she got sick of it and wanted “Veggie Tales” on instead. I try to constantly in small ways, remind my daughters that they don’t have to be, preoccupied with trying to fit into this mold that society tells them they should be. And I’m constantly trying to encourage them to just figure out who they want to be and what they want to do. And be kind to people. So personally that would be my biggest accomplishment.
Professionally, I think that every student I work with through the Academy and at Washington High School as a teacher is hopefully somebody who I am shaping in some way to be better than they would have been had they not encountered me. That’s one of the hardest things about teaching. Is because I don’t see the results of what I do right way. You know. The kid might get a B or an A, or a C, or D in the class. But ultimately I want to know that that student is a better person, because of his or her experience with me as their teacher. It’s fantastic if they’re going to be better readers and writers, and that’s my goal with them. But if they can also be better people, then I’ve really done my job. I’m also a writer and so I’ve published a couple of things I’m proud of, too.

James Hall: What would you say your happiest and saddest memories have been in your life so far?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: My saddest memory was really coming to an understanding of the relationship between my mom and my dad. There is one time that I remember my dad crying. It wasn’t over anything major, but I remember it and I remember how painful the situation must have been for him. And the happiest moment, little things make me happy so I can’t really pinpoint a happiest moment, because little things make me happy every day.

James Hall: If you could change anything that you have done in the past or what you could have done in the past, what would that be?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I think. I have two regrets. I tell people this all the time, two regrets. One is when they were trying to figure out what musical instrument every student in sixth grade was going to play, they didn’t let me play the drums. They had me beat out a little rhythm on the table and I couldn’t quite get it right. And so they assigned me to the trumpet, and I really wanted to play the drums. And I think even now that one of my regrets is that I never pursued learning how to play the drums. But it’s not too late. I’ll maybe pick that up at some point. The second regret would be that I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to take a swimming coach seriously, when he thought that I could be a state champion in a particular event. And I thought he had mistaken me for somebody else and so I completely disregarded his comment. In hindsight I realized that he was probably right because I went on to college to actually specialize in that event. And I looked back and I realized that had I swum that event in high school, I could have been in the top three at state, my senior year. But those are small regrets. You know I think I in the long run, I look back and it’s like those are two small things that really in the long run, haven’t made much of a difference in my life I don’t think. If those are the two regrets that I can call on then I’m happy with that. But I’m not one of those people who’s going to say that, “I don’t have any regrets.” ’Cause I think we all walk through life making choices where at some point we decide they may not have been the best choice.

James Hall: What would you like people to remember about Akwi Nji-Dawson?

Akwi Nji-Dawson: I hope that people will remember that I worked really hard every day to impact students and young people in a positive way. Particularly African American students, especially in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where we don’t have nearly the number of positive role models in the African American community that we would find in a big city. I think it’s important to, in any way we can, to get young students to think about the importance of being confident in who they are, appreciating where they come from, appreciating their past and feeling a sense of responsibility to themselves most importantly, but also to their culture and to their community. If they do that, they will be good people.

James Hall: Well thank you for coming in and letting me interview you today. I appreciate it.

Akwi Nji-Dawson: Absolutely. You’re welcome. Thank you.

James Hall: Thank you.