I was no more gifted than they were. I was a resourceful and determined teen, but every student at Morgan Village deserved to read from books our parents’ names were not scribbled in. The failure of the state to make good on its constitutional commitment to provide a quality education to every child was the problem, but I didn’t fully realize then how the mechanics of purposeful disenfranchisement worked. At fourteen, I figured I had beaten the system. I had won.
