Elizabeth Alston has virtually done it all. From teaching to curriculum planning to television broadcasting to designing and guiding her own educational tours of Charleston, South Carolina, Ms. Alston, a life-long resident of the city, has stood at the forefront of the educational reform debates for decades. We first encountered Alston our first Monday night in Charleston, when we attended a county Board of Education meeting. Here, Alston pushed for the remembrance of Black History Month for 2002, which the school system neglected. She also expressed concern about the lack of multicultural emphasis in the county history curriculum. At the close of the meeting, we found Alston gracious, honest, and informative. She encouraged us to "ask anything you want to."

Alston has occupied eleven different positions within the school district. In 1974, she taught the first African-American course in Charleston County and became its ethnic coordinator. Alston initially met with resistance from her students, their parents, other teachers, and the school board. It is impossible, though, not to be drawn to her magnetic, charismatic personality, and soon she established a trust and a rapport with her students that extended beyond the classroom and into the community. She sees trust and respect as a crucial basis for challenging students' often limited worldview. Alston still hears from those early students. She shared, "I even hear from the. . . rednecks."

Beyond teaching, Alston wrote the eighth grade history curriculum still in use throughout the county, which seeks to integrate multiple cultures into one fluid historical discourse. Alston sees teachers' goals of meeting state evaluation standards, which do not require knowledge of African-American history, as the biggest impediment of such a multicultural history curriculum. For the next two or three years, teachers will struggle to help their students meet these state standards, of which the students have so often fallen short. As a representative to the South Carolina Board of Education, Alston works to combat the pervasive apathy she sees among students and parents. Even on the county Board of Education, many of the members do not hold college degrees. Alston further notes that Charleston has in a sense always resorted to apathy instead of resistance when it comes to issues affecting the black community. Alston finds blacks just as apathetic as whites, just as apt to make half-hearted efforts at reform. She shares the observation that the 1960s never really arrived in Charleston and that the city still remains locked in the nineteenth century in many ways.

Elizabeth Alston acts as an inspiration for activists. Her career seems incomparable. On our final meeting with Alston, we were able to get a taste of her educational style. She took us on one of her educational tours through black Charleston, pointing out histories of overlooked areas along the way, doing her best to preserve the black community's rich culture, and succeeding in the process.