Becky joins Oprah
An Irreplaceable Role Model Moves On by Tony Rotundo
When people at PA tell the story of Becky Sykes, they usually start with Becky working the Academy switchboard and end with her serving as associate head of school. While that’s a true story, it misses the larger arc of her life and overlooks experiences that helped make her such an exemplary person. Her parents’ values and their professional lives had a shaping influence on her and so did a childhood spent in segregated Shreveport, Louisiana. Becky’s story properly begins with an extraordinary African American family in the Jim Crow South.
“She did the work not for accolades or applause…but she gained gratification in knowing and seeing fairness and equity in action and becoming the community norm.”
Becky’s mother, Rebecca, was a sharecropper’s daughter. “My mother always worked,” notes Becky with pride. Employed for many years as a dental technician in Shreveport, Rebecca Miller became a caseworker with the Community Action Program in the 1960s and rose to become director of Head Start for the parish (county) in which Shreveport is located. Both Becky and Elwin speak of life in segregated Shreveport with deep feeling. They recall the sense of pride in the African American community. Elwin remembers that African Americans always dressed up to go downtown. “It was a way to indicate dignity and respectability,” he says. Within their own neighborhood, where they had limited contact with whites, black people of different social classes lived comfortably side by side.
Still, for all the positive memories, segregation was still segregation. Life under Jim Crow could be terrifying, especially at the peak of the civil rights movement. Elwin and Becky Ernest Miller, Becky’s father, came from a Louisiana family remember the police riding on horseback into churches that valued education. He worked his way through Southern where civil rights rallies were happening. And for Becky, the University in Baton Rouge. As Becky notes, “He arrived racial terrorism hit closer to home. Black teachers in the Jim with one suit and two shirts, which he washed and ironed Crow South were seen as figures of dignity, leaders in the every night.” Young Miller became Southern’s first Negro African American community. So when the white police All-American football player and accumulated an acaforce wanted to maintain the old order in the face of the demic record that earned him a place at Teachers College, civil rights movement, they called black teachers out of their Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree. schools and beat them up, hoping to shame them in front His successful teaching career led to his appointment as of the community that they led. When the police came for principal of a segregated junior high school in Shreveport. Ernest Miller, though, he refused to go outside and instead Navigating the white bureaucracy of the school system took invited the police into his school. They declined the invitaspecial gifts, but Principal Miller managed to get control of tion. This landscape of danger was part of the world that the hiring at his school so that he could assure high qualBecky and Elwin traversed from their earliest years. ity in his faculty. He pressed hard for an academic program that gave his students the same preparation for college that High aspirations and a sense of service must have come students at white schools were getting. He served as a junior naturally in the Miller family; Becky wanted to go North high school principal from 1950 to his retirement in 1977, to an elite women’s college and become a doctor. As a high presiding over the construction of a new building and later school student, she went to a summer science program at over the integration of his school. Louisiana State University with high school students from
—Bobby Edwards, former dean of Community and Multicultural Development and associate dean of admission
Andover | Fall 2013
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