JD Sweet was the kind of teacher to embrace the controversy of his subject. History, he will tell you, is chock full of controversy, so there is no point in shying away from it.
47 years after joining Central Kitsap High School as its sole black educator at the time, his outright refusal to ignore the discrepancies and differences of opinion throughout social studies and history has made him one of the district’s most treasured educators and a man who will be sorely missed by many when the school bells ring again this fall.
“It won’t hit me until August. When everybody’s prepared to go back, I’ll notice it even more,” he said.
Sweet retired from classroom education in May. He had served as a social studies teacher at Olympic High School the last three years, but before Olympic and Klahowya Secondary School were built, Sweet taught at CK High in 1977.
His arrival in Kitsap brought on “all the stuff you can imagine” for a black educator of the time, though race had been less of an issue in his brief career prior to then.
“My first year I taught in California, and so there were people of color teachers all over the place,” he said. “When I came up this way, I wanted to work in Tacoma or Seattle because there was more diversity, and there wouldn’t have been an issue there either.”
Neither district was hiring, and on the advice of his father, he made his way onto the Kitsap Peninsula. His search brought him to the CK School District, which had infamously hired Ester Wilfong in 1952, fired him after finding out he was Black and rehired him after the district’s then-superintendent Carl Jenne reached out to the Washington State Board Against Discrimination.
Sweet may have been fortunate to not face a similar round of oppression from his employers, but his presence still generated its fair share of controversy. He dealt with name-calling, harassment, slurs and disrespect from select colleagues and parents.
“There were people that just weren’t used to a person like me being in any position of power or authority over them or their kids. There were some folks who, just because their world was so white, they didn’t know what to make of me.”
Even his students of color had trouble adapting after Sweet said they had become accustomed to white culture and grew up in majority-white friend groups.
A need to consider all the facts of history drove Sweet to teach beyond the “canned curriculums” of social studies and take the facts and conversations usually relegated to test papers to the eyes and ears of his students. “Things like race, prejudice, discrimination, oppression; those things came up,” he said. “I talked to them about me growing up in the segregated South and what that looked like. We weren’t too far away from that in ‘77, so kids could understand a little bit and actually talk to someone who lived it and experienced it.”
Honest and hard discussions and debates were what kids could expect from Sweet’s classes. Classes regularly challenged kids who would fall back to “parroting their parents” to begin developing informed opinions and ideas. The goal was not to come to an agreement but to see how each student got there, Sweet said. “I don’t want to hear what your mom said or your dad said. I want to hear that you thought about it and that you’ve come to your own conclusion.”
Sweet’s classes tackled the most controversial ideas, the touchiest of subjects beyond what some thought would be appropriate for school, but students saw him go a step further in perhaps his most infamous classroom conversation when he invited a communist to speak in the latter years of the Cold War.
“I remember I ran into Satchiko Anderson. I can’t even remember how we met, but I asked her if she’d be willing to come in. I got the students prepared with the focus of the basic overview of communism and what questions they have to ask her, not me.”
Of course, the news of her arrival leaked. News that “the communist is coming” reached the press and left the community unsettled and angry, but Sweet said in this example among many others that the students were much better than the adults.
Continuing, he said, “The public thought that if this person came in that it would influence people to become communists, but what I wanted was students to hear someone and then challenge them. They did, too.”
It would not be the last time his methods turned the heads of some parents and colleagues throughout his decades of teaching in Kitsap, and Sweet knew and was OK with his style of teaching not being right for every student. Yet upon news of his retirement, it was then he saw the full impact he had on his former and current students.
“Somebody was listening, man,” he said with a smile. “Somebody was paying attention.”
Sweet may still find himself in the classroom from time to time as a substitute teacher at Olympic in the first few years on the outside looking in. Off school grounds, he plans to remain engaged in district issues and also spend more of his time on his comic book series titled “The Ring Masters.”
