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Dear Oprah:

My novel about African-American students in South Central Los Angeles was published earlier this year. It’s called A CLASS OF LEADERS and is based on my experience as a high school teacher in South Central L.A. in 1969. Because I was hitting a brick wall trying to teach American history to five of my classes one semester, I decided to teach the principle on which this country is based: democracy.

I let those students who wanted to teach, teach. They were free to teach anything they wanted. They led discussions on the important issues of the day: Black Power, the Vietnam war, capital punishment, premarital sex, the grading system, drugs and freedom. They held trials, had weekly debates, signed petitions and dropped notes and essays into the “Ideas and Complaints” box on my desk. In short, due to the democratic format, my students were learning to think!

Forty years after I began writing my book, it finally found a publisher. A CLASS OF LEADERS deserves a larger audience than it’s getting right now because it’s a bright shining light amidst the plagues of poverty, drugs, violence and police harassment that black students had to endure back in 1969, and still have to endure to this day.

Please let me know if I can send you my book.

Very sincerely yours,

Joseph Sutton

It may have taken him over 40 years to get his book published, but San Francisco author Joseph Sutton is proud and excited about his latest novel A Class of Leaders. Set in 1969 at a black ghetto high school in South Central Los Angeles, the names have been changed but the words of the students are taken from Sutton’s real life experience as a teacher.

“I was 29 in 1969,” said Sutton. “I was single, young and idealistic. So much was happening back then: drugs, the sexual revolution, Black Power, the Vietnam war…it was a very turbulent time in our nation’s history and I got caught up in it as a teacher.”

The novel is written with actual student comments taken from an “Ideas and Complaints” box that Joshua Sampson, the teacher-character in the novel, has set on his desk. “I really had an ‘Ideas and Complaints’ box for the students to freely express themselves,” said Sutton. “Each day they would write down what they thought about the subjects we discussed in class. The comments concerned the powerful social and cultural changes that were taking place as seen through the eyes of African-American students.”

When asked why it took so long for A Class of Leaders to get published, Sutton answered, “I kept sending it out and it kept getting rejection after rejection. I also kept revising it over the years—at least a dozen times. I always thought it deserved publication and never gave up on it. Finally, after forty years, it found a publisher.” —Jonathan Farrell, Sunset Beacon