Don’t Call It Activism
Troy LaRaviere on racial realities and the responsibilities of a school
Troy LaRaviere, principal of Lakeview’s Blaine Elementary School, has made a name for himself as the CPS employee who speaks out. Heavily critical of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, standardized testing, charter schools, and much more, LaRaviere was formally reprimanded by the Board of Education in August. He has overseen significant academic growth at Blaine, however, winning the mayor’s principal merit pay award for three consecutive years. LaRaviere, the son of a mother from the North Side and a father from the South Side, grew up with his four siblings and single mother all over the South Side. He has taught in a wide variety of schools both in Champaign and Chicago, and currently resides in Beverly. The Weekly spoke to LaRaviere recently about his childhood, his job, and his activism.
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I’m from Chicago. I went to Chicago Public Schools—four of them. Altgeld, Sherman, Carter, and Mollison were the elementary schools and then there was Dunbar High School. My mother is white and my father is black. She was born and raised on the North Side. Five of us kids. After she became pregnant with my oldest brother, Michael, she was told she had to leave the North Side and couldn’t bring the kid in the house. So she left with pretty much no high school education and had to make a life for herself. She moved to South Side, was homeless for a while, had me and my other brothers and sisters. She was the only white person for miles but it was a pretty much basic life of an impoverished single family household in the slums on the South Side. I moved all over. We were in Englewood, Back of the Yards, Washington Park, Bronzeville. I ended up going to the vocational high school, a trade school; that’s what Dunbar was for, kids who decided college was not their path.
My mother would send us to our grandparents’ house in a working class area of Auburn Gresham, now West Englewood, every weekend and all summer long, and that’s where I met a girl who would later become my girlfriend, who went to Whitney Young. She was completely my opposite: I was one of five in a single-parent household, she was an only child with two parents. She was going to college from the day she was born. We both graduated in ’87 and she went off to [the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] and I went off to the US Navy. And I got out and she kept trying to convince me to go to college.
My time in the Navy was pretty powerful in terms of me making the decision to speak up [against the Emanuel administration]. I was out there risking my life thousands of Don’t Call It Activism | South Side Weekly: