McKenna has consistently touted the importance of educating Black students even as their numbers in LAUSD have shrunk dramatically over the decades, from 23% in 1980 to roughly 7% today, the result of larger forces — immigration, out-migration, gentrification — that continue to reconfigure the city’s Black population. But for McKenna, the numbers don’t alter at all the urgency of the cause. Nor do the right-wing legal attacks on diversity efforts, which resulted this year in the district softening the strictly Black focus of its Black Student Achievement Plan. The move distressed many advocates of the program as an ominous sign of things to come; McKenna said it’s simply more racist pushback on racial progress that he’s seen his whole life. “Yes, we only have a few schools that are predominantly Black, but the problem is the same: Most teachers don’t know how to teach, and they still don’t know how to teach Black kids,” he said impatiently. “We’ve got to fix that.”

McKenna’s activist profile got a permanent boost in 1986, when a young Denzel Washington portrayed him in the TV movie “The George McKenna Story.” The film followed McKenna’s uncompromising, frequently controversial and ultimately successful efforts to turn around Washington High School, back then a notoriously gang-ridden campus in South Central that was best known as the birthplace of the Crips.

The Hollywood story has framed McKenna ever since, though at the gala he focused much more on describing, often in intimate detail, the larger story of his life and community. Like a lot of folks of his generation, he has a sense of purpose that was forged growing up in the segregated South. In his hometown of New Orleans, as a Creole from the city’s seventh ward, he experienced that segregation uniquely: Though they had some status among Black people by virtue of being lighter-skinned, Creoles were more than Black enough to be segregated by the wider white world. 

But often whites couldn’t distinguish who was who, or what was what, something McKenna experienced to surreal effect in Los Angeles. In his first teaching gig as a math instructor at Gardena High in 1962, the administration assumed he was a white man. One day, McKenna overheard some white students in his class discussing a recent event involving Martin Luther King Jr. They freely used the word “nigger.” “I sat them down and said, ‘Wait, wait, let me help you out. How would you feel if your math teacher was a Black man? I’m a Black man.’” McKenna said they were deeply embarrassed, but not necessarily ashamed — that is, distraught to be caught expressing their racism to a Black teacher, but not distraught about racism itself.

News about McKenna’s “real” identity spread quickly, and within three days he was evaluated and found to be doing unsatisfactory work — even though there had never been a hint of professional trouble — and was transferred to Jordan High, a largely Black campus in Watts that the district considered bottom of the barrel. For McKenna it was something else. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he recalled. “It was like segregated Louisiana. I was back home amongst my people.” He remained at Jordan for eight years.

McKenna taught and did administrative stints at significantly Black junior high and high schools — Foshay, Bret Harte, Horace Mann, Mt. Vernon (now Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Middle), Dorsey. “Every school I went to needed fixing,” said McKenna. “But I was glad. If I’d been sent to the Valley or some white school you would never have heard from me.” He fell in love with Dorsey, which he called a “fun” school. “I got control of the kids, but the white principal was scared of them,” he said. “They thought I was principal.”

Fear of Black students is a huge obstacle that gets in the way of teaching them, McKenna observed, hindering their success. He said it’s a fear we can’t afford. As a math teacher he saw how he could break down Black students’ own deep-seated fear of raising questions by bringing them and those questions to the chalkboard, putting the chalk in their hands and shepherding them through solving each problem methodically before arriving at an indisputable answer. Watching them go through this process, he said — watching them do — was transcendent.

Teaching Black students requires not some specific formula, said McKenna, but a specific mindset around expectations and follow-through that must be shared by teachers and principals alike. “With Black students, some teachers don’t set levels of intellectual achievement, so they focus on managing and disciplining,” he said. “The result is that the teacher is frustrated and the student is frustrated. The key is in the teacher’s capacity to be successful, rather than just be a caretaker.”

McKenna called his 10 years at Washington, between 1979 and 1988, “the best experience of my life.” After that he moved on to become superintendent of Inglewood’s school district and was out of the classroom for good, something he still harbors a certain ambivalence about. “Being superintendent in Inglewood was a great experience, but the politics were terrible,” he said. “The school board was an obstacle that dictated too much.”

After subsequent posts in Compton, Pasadena and L.A. — as deputy superintendent twice before returning to L.A. as regional superintendent — he retired in 2004. It didn’t last. That year he was tapped to run for the L.A. school board seat after the sudden death of trustee Marguerite LaMotte. District 1 covered what was left of the shrinking Black student population in L.A., and constituents wanted an experienced and well-reputed figure like McKenna to replace her. He shared their concern, though not their enthusiasm for his own candidacy, chiefly because he hated politicking. “I’m not good at fundraising,” he said flatly. “Getting on the phone, asking for money. It’s a humbling experience.” Once on the board he was further disillusioned by other political realities, such as the fact that the majority of its members who were elected to advocate for public education were supported by charter schools.

Opposition to charters is not surprising for a public-ed true believer like McKenna, but other views speak to the characteristic willingness to go against the status quo. He is unapologetic for supporting school police, though abolishing them became a standard position among many Black activists post-George Floyd. “It’s true that Black kids are overdisciplined, and I oppose that,” he said. “ But they need discipline. Who’s going to do intervention if there’s violence? And cops get to know kids. Their presence is a deterrent to gangs,” something he said he learned at Washington. He added: “A society without oppression is great, but until then we got to deal with reality.”

Nor does he support colleges banning assessment tools like the SAT because of alleged racial bias. “Why can’t we teach kids to pass that?” he said heatedly. “Getting rid of assessments gets rid of Black excellence. It sends the wrong message of ‘these poor Black kids can’t learn.’”

Though he’s fought for integration — he participated in lunch counter sit-ins in New Orleans — McKenna is still galled by the L.A. phenomena of Black and brown students being bused in huge numbers to the district’s primarily white campuses on the Westside and the Valley starting in the ’80s. He understands parents opting for the best possible setting for their kids, but in the case of the busing program — known as Permits with Transportation — he saw something insidious at work. “Black people are still capitulating to white supremacy,” he said. “We think, ‘If we get around white people our lives will be better.’” One-way busing depletes local schools, he said, but it also depletes the mind. “Chasing white people should not be an objective. I was determined to prove that you could get a real education at home, that you didn’t have to run away from yourself.”

Staying put has had its own challenges. At Washington, he counseled young people not to use profanity, to treat each other with respect; often he would pay home visits to parents to talk to them about it (it worked). He also refused to ignore the “bad” kids, calling schoolwide assemblies when a student died violently, which happened all too frequently. “I’d tell them at the assemblies, ‘We lost another kid,’” said McKenna. “‘You didn’t know him, but his life is worth remembering.’”

But the educational crisis in L.A. nobody has an answer for is the ongoing disappearance of Black people themselves. It’s startling to realize that as McKenna leaves, all the campuses he worked at turning around, that he strove to fix, are no longer substantially, or even minimally, Black. It’s a fact situated within a larger crisis of students exiting the nation’s second-largest district in huge numbers during the COVID pandemic; LAUSD’s student population has plummeted from a peak of 750,000 two decades ago to about 400,000 today. Even if students returned, the percentage of Black students would likely remain anemic. “I don’t look forward to the day Crenshaw High (an historically Black campus) finally turns around because it becomes white, because of gentrification,” McKenna noted dryly. 

Meaning that its improvement would be credited not to the presence of Black achievement, but to the absence of blackness altogether. It’s that assumption that McKenna said must be fought, still.