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Kimi Gray's Quiet Revolution
| Article
# : |
14153 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1988 |
2,300 Words |
| Author
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David Caprara
David Caprara is a public-policy analyst with the National
Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. |
The chairman of the board of multimillion-dollar corporation leaves her office, entering not the din of traffic in the metropolitan business district, but the sidewalk of her "hometown"--the Kenilworth Parkside housing development in northeast Washington, D.C. "Hi Kimi!" calls a teenager across the road. She smiles. "How you doin', baby?"
The substantial presence of Kimi Gray--hair cropped, and dressed in a simple jumper and cotton blouse--is viewed by some as a miracle of tenacity and courage. This single mother of five who left the welfare rolls has risen to a position in which she has consulted with the president of the United States and has been invited for international speaking tours in England, the Virgin Islands, and Africa.
Her kinship with each resident of the low-income Kenilworth-Parkside housing complex is rooted in shared experiences of poverty and struggle.
Gray was raised in Anacostia, a neglected southeast Washington. D.C., neighborhood. The eldest of four children, she often "wondered why the Statue of Freedom above the U.S. Capitol, which was cast by a slave, faced toward us in the east."
Her mother and father were separated when she was seven, and her father died shortly thereafter. "Without God, my mother, and my brothers and sisters," she recalls, "I never would have made it through those early years."
An uncle taught her to read by the age of five. Therefore, she insisted that her grade-school principal allow her to skip kindergarten and enroll directly in the first grade. "I went to the principal's office, sat in his lap, and read to him to make my point," she remembers. Soon the first-grade teacher, Mrs. Dodson, was called into the principal's office to escort Gray to her first-grade class.
Love of education
Her love of education eventually brought her to the White House to receive special recognition for fostering that love among thousands of inner-city youth.
At a recent reunion, her first-rade teacher embraced her with tears, saying "I always knew she would do something like that; Kimi always knew what she wanted and was stubborn about getting
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