40-year-old Dennis Henderson has experienced racism and abuse of police power first-hand. Now he uses those experiences daily in his teaching, arming his Pittsburgh Charter School students with knowledge of the justice system.
Henderson, like 99 percent of his charter school students, is black. In June of 2013, he was wrongfully arrested and jailed for an innocent comment made to a police officer. From an NPR profile:
Henderson yelled, “Wow.”
The car stopped, and a white officer asked if he had a problem. Henderson requested the officer’s badge number and hit record on his cellphone. The officer told him to put the phone down. When he didn’t, the officer arrested him.
Henderson was charged with disorderly conduct, obstructing the road and resisting arrest. Images of him, handcuffed, hit the evening news.
“My mom said, ‘I just saw your teacher on TV.’ And I was surprised because I wouldn’t think Mr. Henderson would be on the news,” Sharae says.
The city later determined that the officer had been in the wrong, and reprimanded him. Henderson sued over the incident, and the city settled. At one point the proposed settlement was $52,500.
“He’s a teacher, and he works with young, predominantly African-American students,” an American Civil Liberties Union attorney told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at the time. “He’s concerned about what would happen if they were put in the same situation he was put in.”
Henderson now relays the sad lesson to his students: “If you are African-American, you’ve got to make sure that you are extremely good to get the due recognition that you deserve.” He advises his students against “sounding ghetto,” and teaches them “how to stand up straight and how you shake people’s hands,” according to student Sharae Blair.
He trains them in mock trials and teaches them the importance of the court system.
“It made [his teaching] better — because he had an experience with it,” student William Taylor told NPR. “And I think he can teach us more lessons because he had more of an experience than just reading about it.”
Read NPR’s full story here.
