Laura Parker

Photos by former APF Fellow William Prochna TUNICA, Mississippi – Nobody in Miss Mitchell’s Algebra I class learned much in 1993 because Miss Mitchell quit in October. No replacement could be found. The principal at Rosa Fort High School neglected to mention these facts to Miss Liimatta when she was hired the following year to teach Algebra II. An abandoned filling station in Tunica County, Mississippi advertises the area’s neglect. Miss Liimatta soon learned that the all-black public schools in the impoverished Upper Delta of Mississippi had great difficulty recruiting teachers. Rosa Fort rarely found substitute teachers, even for a day. After Miss Mitchell’s abrupt departure, her students had sat, more or less, unattended in the room at the end of the hall for the rest of the school year. Janet Liimatta was at the time 21 years old. She was fresh out of college and had signed on with Teach For America to teach in the rural South. She had grown up in suburban Baltimore, the daughter of a community college instructor, and believed

TUNICA, Miss. – Graduation at Rosa Fort High School here is one of the biggest social occasions of the year. It is usually held on the last Sunday in May, and this year, the Class of ’96 went forth at precisely 5 p.m., marching two-by-two into the gym and across the stage. Lakesha Smith, left, and Annette Conley prepare to lead the Class of 1996 into the graduation ceremony at Rosa Fort High School. Conley was the class valedictorian and plans to attend Howard University in Washington this fall. Smith graduated an honor student and will attend Rust College, the oldest black college in Mississippi. In years past, the graduates marched back out of the gym, took off their caps and gowns in the parking lot, turned onto Highway 61, the main route out of the impoverished Upper Mississippi Delta, and headed out of town. “On graduation day, your brother or your sister or your uncle would come down from Chicago or Detroit, and as soon as graduation was over, you’d be loaded up to