Last year, I interviewed Dr. Brenda Greene of Medgar Evers College, highlighting her award received from the nonprofit organization Advent Heralds, Inc. In this interview, she discussed her life and revealed that on some level, she was destined to become an educator. With her half Southern, the half Caribbean and initial army brat upbringing, her rigorous academic training and pursuits, and her passion to improve the quality and effect of education, Greene’s personality laid out her path before her.

“I was born in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey; my parents were living on the army post and my father served in the Korean War,” Greene shared. “My father was from St. Croix and my mother is from South Carolina, so I have the marriage between two distinct poles of the African diaspora.” Once her father left the service, Greene and her family moved to the Bronx to her paternal grandmother’s house, and then to Gowanus projects in Brooklyn. When she turned five, her parents bought a house in Springfield Gardens in Queens. When she was nine, her parents separated.

“I basically felt like I was already a single parent, being the oldest of three,” Greene said. She lived in Queens with her mother for several more years, and then moved to Brooklyn when she was 12 years old. Before that time, however, Greene had gone through a traumatic experience at a school called Our Lady of Peace, a Catholic school she attended in 1955. The school only had three black students, and in that experience, she said she encountered a racism she described as “not even subtle,” where the school only let in a few black people at a time. Her mother, who wanted her to go to a good school, was asked if she was Haitian. According to Greene, their premise was that they would be more accepting of a Haitian rather than an African American.

“The school felt that immigrants have a different attitude about education and culture and everything, and the school felt like they were not like typical African Americans, who grew up in this country and were part of the history of enslavement in this country and the Jim Crow laws," Greene revealed. "They felt that Haitians or other immigrants who came here to this country came because they wanted a better life; they believed that these immigrants would not have the same attitude as African Americans who were born in this country."

Greene added that she had felt isolated in the classroom and in her kindergarten class, she was put in the back of the room by herself and was continually isolated from groups. She said she felt that the experience was traumatic for her in terms of her self-esteem and her development, and it is something she wanted to make sure her children never went through. When she moved to Queens after the first grade, she told her mother she never wanted to go back to Catholic school.

Greene never went back to Catholic school, but she continued to go to religious instruction while in public school and found that racism was still present in Queens. While Greene considers herself a Christian, she found herself looking for “a different kind of church," briefly became part of a Methodist church, and finally settled on joining a Baptist church. Living in Queens, Greene was surrounded by a middle-class environment, but moved back to Brooklyn when her parents separated. Little known to most, writing is something that runs in Greene’s family. “My father was a technical writer, he was a self-taught man, and I called him an armchair philosopher,” Greene said. “While he was in the army, he ended up becoming an instructor on the army base, and my mother who was very bright worked for the bank and for the hospital.”

Greene said she felt that both her parents, who were bright, hardworking people, had a strong influence on the work ethic she has today. She also said as a result of growing up in a single household and being the eldest, she had a lot of responsibilities at a young age while her mother worked “the equivalent of a job and a half." After the initial divorce of her parents, Greene did not see her father for a number of years, but eventually, he returned and helped out.

Greene's father is the one who instilled in her the value of education, and the importance of leading an intellectual life. For her high school graduation, he gave her a book on Ancient Egypt, and she stated that her father always wanted her to be at a certain level intellectually, and he pushed that. It was his influence and what she calls "an instinctual need to do well in school" that let her know that at five years of age, she wanted to be a teacher. "At first, I wanted to be a nun," she laughed. I noted that I could see her as a nun, as she has the energy and calm attitude of one. “It was the service, to be giving, and to teach is what I wanted, but the Catholic Church turned me around,” she responded. As Greene spoke about being a nun, she became a little more lighthearted, and smiled more...perhaps she was a nun in another life! Greene said one of her main motivations in terms of deciding her choice of career was wanting to serve and she thought about social work and nursing, but always went back to teaching.

“I felt like college had not prepared me for what was happening in the public schools,” Greene said in a grave voice. She was placed into a summer training program that was held in what was once Sands Junior High School, and there she worked with master teachers and received her first classroom that fall at Junior High School 117 on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill.

She was put into a classroom where she was teaching sixth graders, but they were reading at the third and fourth-grade level. Her training was geared towards high school students, and she adamantly stated that she felt ill-prepared for the situation, and for a time, she grew angry at her perceived limitations. She felt that she needed to teach students at an even younger age in order to combat illiteracy.

Greene was later placed in PS 305 Junior High School on Monroe Street in Bed-Stuy. She was given a class that was previously designed for a very strong teacher who knew how to manage classrooms well, and it was filled with mostly all males and students with learning disabilities. Once again, Greene felt unprepared, and it was another turning point in her life. “I was not prepared because in this class they were reading at the first and second-grade level and they had a lot of discipline problems, and it was mostly all male, and I was just not prepared to manage that kind of classroom,” Greene sadly stated.

As the discussion shifted to obstacles of race and gender in education, Greene discussed what she has seen in the higher academic fields professionally. Greene said that because we live in a racially constructed society, as a black person, you always have to do more, go over and beyond. As a black woman, it becomes even more challenging. “When I became chair of the English Department the first time in 1992, I would go to the discipline council where all the chairs met, and you could count the number of female chairs on less than one hand, and there were no black chairs in English,” she said. “English was not an area where you saw a lot of black people going into.” She also said that this experience is changing for the better, slowly but surely. Greene said that part of the challenge is that there is racism that is built into the system, and because there are more males who go into higher education, there is a double-standard for women. “Women are expected to do more and are also asked to work in more background roles than men,” Greene said. Greene also said that women are systemically paid less than men, and these are obstacles she has observed and has had to experience.

When prompted about whether or not she has had to teach other professors how to function in a non-white environment, Greene said that she has taught professors from different racial and ethnic environments to think about what it means to be an American from their perspective, (they might not necessarily think about race), and to understand what it means for students who are not Caucasian to be an American. Greene said that she has raised these issues because some professors have never thought about issues such as privilege and race.

Greene also discussed her experience of teaching about race and privilege to a non-Black audience as a visiting professor at Staten Island University and an adjunct graduate professor at NYU. “At NYU, I was working with teachers, mostly white, who were placed at schools in the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy and didn’t have successful strategies on how to teach,” said Greene. “So I taught a course on cultural literacy, a course on basic writing pedagogy, and a course related to multi-dialecticism.”

Greene's destined professional career has consistently entangled her with people in the public eye, but she shared one unique encounter, “I don’t know if you want to put this in there, but one of the students I had at NYU was this young woman who was very bright and very sharp. She was from Indonesia and she said, ‘it was important to talk about these issues, these are such critical issues.” We were talking about the culture wars and race,” Greene said.

“She said to me ‘you have to meet my brother; he would really enjoy this,' and she said she was going to share some of the readings with him. I used to love to hear her stories of what it was like growing up as a person of color in Indonesia,” Greene continued. “Several years later one of my students wrote me and said, ‘do you know who her brother was?'" It turned out that Greene’s student was Maya Kassandra Soetoro-Ng, sister of the current President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

“I first met Dr. Greene in 2001 when I came to the college to be interviewed by the P &B board, to start working here, and when I initially thought of her, what I still think of her, was that she is very committed to the college,” said Dr. Susan Fischer, a popular English professor on the MEC campus. Fischer has collaborated with and worked with Dr. Greene on projects for the Center for Black Literature, on the English department curriculum, and on the English BA program, which Greene developed.

Fischer said that the Center for Black Literature, the National Black Writers Conference, and the symposium that Greene holds when not holding the Black Writers Conference, are activities that not just important for the English department or the college, but they are important on a “grander scale." “They bring to the college a wide array of authors who are known nationally and internationally,” she explained. She said the conferences expose students and non-students alike to writers they would not have otherwise had the opportunity to hear from. She said it is a different experience, meeting a writer face to face, rather than just reading the book.

Fischer said that when you read a text, can put a face to a text, and interact with the writer, it adds another dimension to the writing, and the work Greene has done has allowed for that experience to happen for students. “Under Dr. Greene’s leadership, we are working towards creating programs, developing new courses, and making sure there are new faculty bringing levels of expertise to the department," Fischer explained. "We’re constantly looking at the curriculum, and what we’re looking for is to provide more intellectual engagement with our students." Fischer went on to say that many of those in the English department would like to see a greater development to the already great array of activities in the department, and that is what Dr. Greene and the English department are working on.

“My work relationship with Dr. Greene has been very professional; she seems to know exactly the direction of the center, what things are needed, and she has her pulse on what’s going on in the literary world and how literature and education can combine to make an educational experience richer for students and for the community,” stated Clarence Reynolds, assistant director of the Center of Black Literature at Medgar Evers College. Reynolds said that the Center has many programs: reading programs, literary programs, and quite a few collaborative programs with other organizations and cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

With the programming they do at the Center, Reynolds said that they have just as many adults and community members as they do students who attend the programs held by the Center, and at times, even more so. Reynolds said that as the executive director of the Center for Black Literature, Dr. Greene is excellent at getting people to recognize the vision and mission of the Center. She also knows how to and who to reach out for to grants, and since the Center isn’t primarily funded by the College, a lot of the funding comes from proposals written by Greene.

“I attended the University of Maryland at College Park for undergraduate school, and I wish that there had been something like the National Black Writers Conference on my campus because I think it’s important to realize just how vast, how rich, and how important our black literary contributions are to the literature of this country,” Reynolds said. While discussing the uniqueness of the Center, Reynolds said that this Center is “the only one of its kind," and he hopes that in the future, there will be more centers like it where they can collaboratively plan programs and pool their sources together.

“It was standing room only for when Angela Davis came to the College, and I remember the president of MEC, Dr. Crew, walking out and saying to me ‘yeah, this is what I am talking about at Medgar!” Reynolds quoted. Reynolds also said that when people come to the events and they’re well-attended, it gives him a good feeling, because he knows that they understand what is happening at the Center is something that everyone appreciates and everyone gets it. It is significant. Reynolds went on to say that he is proud to work alongside someone like Dr. Greene, who works tirelessly to promote the mission of Medgar Evers College and the Center for Black Literature.

Brenda Greene has lived an interesting life. She has gone from being a self-motivated, young girl with a passion for reading and education, to becoming a staple and moving force in black empowerment and learning in the community. Through education, the arts, wisdom, and intelligence, she has in her own way continued the movement towards the betterment of society for 42 years. It has been not only a journey of self-discovery for her on a personal level, but also a journey of accomplishment and empowerment. What is most inspiring is that Brenda Greene has surrounded herself with like-minded individuals, and has easily shown that there is strength in numbers.