Abstract

In this 2025 interview, Adriennie Hatten discusses her upbringing in East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, her experience attending East Cleveland Public Schools from kindergarten through graduation, and her identity as a proud Shaw alumni. She describes her academic path through Bowdoin College, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland State University, where her doctoral research examined the factors African American adults identify as critical to their high school success in a predominantly Black Midwestern district. Hatten reflects on her extensive professional career. She also highlights her long-standing connections to East Cleveland through consulting projects, university partnerships, and civic initiatives.

Loading...

Media is loading
 

Interviewee

Hatten, Adriennie (interviewee)

Interviewer

Mays, Nick (interviewer)

Project

East Cleveland

Date

11-8-2025

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

116 minutes

Transcript

Nick Mays [00:00:00] My name is Dr. Nicholas Mays. I am here conducting an interview for the East Cleveland Oral History project. Today is November 8, 2025 and I am joined by Dr. Adrian Hatten, a proud graduate of Shaw High school class of 1986. Dr. Hatten is an educator, consultant, entrepreneur and scholar whose work and career have been deeply connected to East Cleveland. [00:00:29] Her doctoral dissertation explores the success factors that African American students from East Cleveland attribute to their academic achievement. This conversation will explore Dr. Hatten’s personal and family background, experience as a student in the East Cleveland schools, professional journey, and her reflections on the city’s evolution, community, spirit and legacy. Dr. Hatten, thank you for joining me today and for contributing your story to our project. [00:01:06] Can we, can you first begin by providing your full name, age and date of birth?

Adriennie Hatten [00:01:12] Okay. My name is Dr. Adrienne Yvette Hatten. My date of birth is […] 1968 and my current age is 57 years old.

Nick Mays [00:01:23] Can you, could we, can you first introduce us to your immediate family?

Adriennie Hatten [00:01:28] Yes. So immediate, my immediate family at this state of the life starts with my three grandchildren who are my joys. They have two two year old girls and a three year old boy and also have a girl and boy twin on the way by the end of this year. Their parents include my son who was 26 years old. Currently he is working and residing in Frisco, Texas. And then I am what I call an auntie mom. I raised three nieces and a nephew the last 13 years due to the passing of my youngest sister. So I have an 18 year old male, 19 year old female who is a sophomore at Ursula College and a 21 year old female who is an amazing mom, a 30 year old who works in the food services industry and is the mom of one of my precious two year old granddaughters. And I think that’s all five of them.

Nick Mays [00:02:26] Wow. Well, thank you for that, Dr. Hatten.

Adriennie Hatten [00:02:29] Oh, my mom, I got to say my mom, my mom’s a part of my immediate family.

Nick Mays [00:02:33] Well, your mom is going to be a part of our initial conversation and our first topic. So can you, can you tell us about your, your parents, where they were born, with what brought them to Ohio and ultimately East Cleveland.

Adriennie Hatten [00:02:48] Okay, so since I mentioned my mom and because she’s still with us, my mom, her family is originally from Nashville, Tennessee. They relocated to Cleveland about two years before she was born or she was born in Cleveland where her siblings were all born in Tennessee. And then my father, her family settled in sort of around the 55th and Hough area of Cleveland. My father is from. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. His family relocated to Cleveland when he was 7 years old. He since passed away just about eight years ago. But he came to Cleveland at 7, and he was here until he passed at. I think Daddy was about 75 when he passed. So his family was one of the first families, black families, out here in Oakwood Village, where we are now. They came and bought property and settled and also brought many of the. My grandmother’s 13 siblings to Ohio along the way. So I have lots of family here in Cleveland in Mississippi, New Orleans and Tennessee.

Nick Mays [00:03:52] Thank you for that. What ultimately brought them to East Cleveland? Do you know what brought your family to East Cleveland?

Adriennie Hatten [00:03:58] You know what? What brought my family to East Cleveland was because my mother was living kind of on the east side of Cleveland and wanted to her family, her parents actually moved to East Cleveland. And so when she and my dad got married, that’s where she wanted to. That’s where she was already. [00:04:15] So they just bought a home. Got a home around the corner from my grandparents across from Rozelle, the former Rozelle Elementary School in East Cleveland. So I actually spent the first few years of my life in East Cleveland proper. And then when I was four, we moved up the hill to Cleveland Heights. And at the time when my parents bought the home, the realtor told them it was a Cleveland Heights zip code, which it was, and that’s what they were purchasing. And then a week later, when they went to register my brother, who was actually five, into kindergarten, they were told that you actually don’t attend Cleveland high schools in this part of the city due to a prior arrangement. You attend East Cleveland schools. So while I grew up with the Cleveland Heights zip code and on Caledonia, I attended East Cleveland schools from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Nick Mays [00:05:05] Do you know why or what’s that [arrangement]?

Adriennie Hatten [00:05:07] My research a few years ago led me to understand that there was a sort of an edict. Ordinance. Ordinance passed. The only other one I found similar to East Cleveland is one in the Cranbrook neighborhood of Cleveland, which is along the Garfield Heights border. They signed one similar, and it basically just redivided up the city such that around the school districts. And so in East Cleveland, what that meant is while the bulk of East Cleveland was quartered is sort of down the hill. There’s a portion of up the Hill, up Noble, up Taylor, up Lee Road that is actually Cleveland Heights zip code, but they zoned it to attend schools in East Cleveland. I think it was also, ironically, at the time when, in many ways, African Americans were spreading outside of Cleveland into the suburbs and quote, unquote, moving up the hill. So what I was able to identify is that realtors were aware of it while they were not making potential black homeowners aware of it when they were purchasing in the early 70s, late 60s.

Nick Mays [00:06:14] Interesting. So your parents lived in East Cleveland proper for two years. Did they own the home?

Adriennie Hatten [00:06:20] No, no, they were renting. Okay, they were renting.

Nick Mays [00:06:22] And then Did you say your grandparents lived in East?

Adriennie Hatten [00:06:28] But they all were renters. My parents were the first homeowner. Well, other. On my mother’s side, my parents were the first homeowners. My father’s family owned property, but my mom’s family were renters.

Nick Mays [00:06:39] How long did your grandparents live in East Cleveland?

Adriennie Hatten [00:06:41] My grandparents lived in East Cleveland until they passed away. So when I graduated from high school, I my Both grand. Two grandfathers. Well, I got. I have a big family, so I had three grandfathers. Two were deceased, but three grandmothers and two of which were still residing in East Cleveland were all at my high school graduation. So they lived in East Cleveland, all the rest of them, until they passed away. And I was in college by the time I was out.

Nick Mays [00:07:12] So how many decades or how many years would you say [they lived in East Cleveland]. 

Adriennie Hatten [00:07:16] Oh, wow. So if I was 20s, so I would say they lived in East Cleveland at least two plus decades. Probably at least 25 years.

Nick Mays [00:07:26] Would it be safe to say that you, you know, you grew up in Cleveland Heights, but your grandparents lived in East Cleveland?

Adriennie Hatten [00:07:34] Yeah, and I went to school in East Cleveland. It was kind of a superficial delineation, except when it came to competition, because Cleveland Heights high school and Shaw High School were rivals. So I was in marching band and, you know, did some other things with the sport. So there was usually, you know, there would be these rivalries and sometimes little tussles, and I’d be like, hey, I live in Cleveland Heights. I go to school East Cleveland. I’m not a part of this. Because that was the only time it really kind of came up was when it was sort of about competition with schools and taxes, because Cleveland highest taxes were Cleveland Heights taxes.

Nick Mays [00:08:16] Talk about growing up in Cleveland Heights. We will talk about your time in the East Cleveland schools. But talk about growing up in Cleveland Heights.

Adriennie Hatten [00:08:30] So while I lived in Cleveland Heights, I. I did, as we mentioned, spent most of my time in east Cleveland because my grandparents were both down the hill. So back then we used to walk. We used to Walk down the hill to my grandmother, who was immediately at the bottom of the first hill. And we’d have to get a bus to get to my other grand, to my grandfather, because he was on the East Cleveland, Cleveland border side, but still in East Cleveland. So I spent time at East Cleveland public libraries. I spent time, you know, my friends lived down the hill or in East Cleveland because part of East Cleveland was up the hill. But I moved freely between the spaces for activities, for entertainment, for socializing. So it was, it was. I really spent more time, most likely in the East Cleveland side of my life. Cleveland Heights was a pass through because my grand. Ultimately my other grandparents live in Oakwood. So we just went through Cleveland Heights to get to family members. [00:09:31] But I didn’t spend time other than the corner store. The kind of things that were like right on the Noble Road area. That was really all of the Cleveland Heights. It was a regular part of my existence. And Severance Town center. So Severance was a mall that was placed in Cleveland Heights, but not that far from the East Cleveland border. So we, if we went to Cleveland Heights, technically it was going to Severance or not, if that makes sense.

Nick Mays [00:09:56] It makes a lot of sense. So essentially you grew up in East Cleveland. What was life like growing up in East Cleveland?

Adriennie Hatten [00:10:01] It was comfortable and it was, it was, it was sort of like you just felt like the whole city was your home. So at the time that I was in East Cleveland, while my parents were kind of strict and I had to wait till about 8th grade before I could ride my bike anywhere. But people move freely up the hill, down the hill. And it wasn’t a. It wasn’t about fear. It wasn’t about like sort of the violence that is in the city now. Unfortunately, there was. I didn’t feel unsafe in my community. I was in other activities. So, for example, marching band. So when we had parades, you know, we marched through the entire city. Up Euclid, down Euclid. The Windermere Rapid Station is located in East Cleveland. And that was a huge hub for us using public transportation. And also there was a point where I took public transportation to school because the middle school was pretty far walking. So for me, I just kind of moved freely through East Cleveland. And it felt kind of insulated. And in many ways it was just. We didn’t need to go out of East Cleveland at that time. There were stores, there were grocery stores, there were pharmacies, there were restaurants. So it was, it was sort of. It felt self contained in a lot of ways.

Nick Mays [00:11:22] Coming up In East Cleveland. Is East Cleveland a predominantly African American community?

Adriennie Hatten [00:11:29] So when we first. I would say when I would. So my brother started school. We’re a year apart. When he started kindergarten, he was probably one of maybe three or four black kids in his class at Caledonia Elementary. When I started kindergarten just one year later, I recall it was probably more like half and a half. [00:11:47] By the time I got to third grade, it was predominantly black. At Caledonia, which is the elementary school up the hill, the way East Cleveland is at the time, there were like five elementary schools or six elementary schools, one middle and one high. So it’s when I got to the middle school and then I. That’s when I really went to school with people who lived all over East Cleveland. By middle school, my class was predominantly black, the school was predominantly black, and the community was predominantly black. So I just realized that I grew up in a black city, and that experience mattered a lot more as I got older. But what it meant for me as a youngster was I didn’t grow up really thinking about. While we learned about Jim Crow and civil rights and etc. I didn’t actually feel like I was living the remnants of that era until later because we learned about our history, we learned about our culture. So what we were learning at home, what I was learning at church, what I was learning at school, and what was reverberated through the community was the same message, right? The businesses in the community supported the activities that we did. Right? You knew who those businesses were. They provided, just like you have today, sponsored activities, sponsored sports teams, provided resources when the band was going out of town and we needed lunch. So we were familiar with the businesses in our community. We were. It was still a little bit to me, I have to relate it to my Southern roots because it felt a lot like when I go to visit some of my family in Mississippi or New Orleans, where they slide in Louisiana, where they live kind of still in groups. And so East Cleveland was very similar for me, because if I didn’t know somebody, I knew a friend who lived in different parts and their parts and then their older siblings. So I always never really felt there was anywhere in the city that I could not go. And so that was just really helpful because we walked. I was at Marching Bandit, and we were at Forest Hill Park. That was a long walk, but we walked. Like, we rode rta. We walked. And it wasn’t about safety or fear. My mother was kind of fearful, but that’s just who my mom is. But in general, for me, it was it was a. What I thought other people experienced in their communities because I didn’t know differently. Right. I didn’t, I did not experience any kind of racism or I felt free to learn in my classes and in my classrooms. I didn’t feel like, oh, I’m the student that is a second class citizen or I never felt that moving through my K12 experiences.

Nick Mays [00:14:30] So you came up in East Cleveland in the 70s and 80s?

Adriennie Hatten [00:14:35] Yes.

Nick Mays [00:14:37] When do you, in your view, when did the shift happen. To what we hear a lot today? You know, the decline and blight. It can’t be one year. It can’t be like all of a sudden. Right?

Adriennie Hatten [00:14:55] Yeah. I think it. Honestly, I actually think it started back with that edict that they passed in the, in the late 60s that was intended to begin to control who was coming in the city and where were they coming. I would say that as. As suburbs were being built further outside of Cleveland, there was a white flight type thing. So folks were moving up and moving out, but they were not selling their homes. Right. So where my parents came in as homeowners, most of the people in my neighborhood were homeowners. In terms of the Caledonia area, there began to be more and more rental situations where people were using their property in East Cleveland for rent, for tax purposes and whatever. So now you started to see the owners of the homes not in this homes themselves and not upkeeping their properties. So the, the media will say, of course, when we get into systemic racism that black people don’t keep their communities together. Which is far from true. Because when you really started to look at more rental properties and then the city fighting with folks to do certain upkeep and certain advancements. That was happening. I think the other thing was you had folks who were in [and] still in control. I can remember my younger years in East Cleveland that I think there were still. A lot of the services were still staffed by white people. I think we had probably 60, 40 white and black teachers even in our schools. I saw some transition over time in terms of, you know, is the city keeping up with getting access to federal dollars that are available to it. I started to see some decline in some of that. Right. What was it, 10, 12 years ago the state took over East Cleveland school district. Don’t even know why. Did nothing beneficial except tear up our school, tear up, take away 3/4 of it and put back something that looked like a little prison and then reach out to the community to say, oh, but you can raise money too. Put a gym on or you can raise money, which I now understand is how that regulation works. The state puts back the basics and the district has to raise money for the others. That I found out out in my world now, it wasn’t shared back then. So I think that over time we started to see resources just not available in the city. And I don’t know for what reason if it was a lack of forward thinking or it was people like, I’m just here till I retire, and when I retire, I leave and whoever gets it, gets it. But people there wasn’t the forward thinking about, you know, even thinking about businesses, like what businesses do we need to bring into East Cleveland to make sure it remains viable? And it wasn’t that kind of forward thinking that I even see out here in Oakwood where like the mayor has been, had been the last 15 years, very intentional about the types of businesses and what he brings to this community. So I think that the thing I hate is because I stayed active even after I graduated in East Cleveland, working, you know, doing some volunteer work, very active with our school alumni board, a council that we started when they started doing all school reunion. So that was about.

Nick Mays [00:18:15] 2004.

Adriennie Hatten [00:18:16] Yeah, long time. I had to go my son’s age a long time ago. He was a little guy. And so, you know, I was active with that group trying to raise resources for the school. I remember when the band was going to go out, out of the country to play at the Olympics, and it’s sort of like they weren’t gonna go. And then it got. It got around to the alumni association that they had been invited, but the district was thinking about not going and the alumni association got on top of it and the students ended up going. They had new clothes, they had new luggage, they had new everything because the alumni, many of us who have been in the band were like, what do you mean you’re not going to go? So again, I just saw as the population changed, I think my own research showed me the impact of the Vietnam War on East Cleveland. When I put my dissertation together on East Cleveland, I wanted to understand what people did after they left East Cleveland schools, but also what they thought, how did it help them make decisions after? One of the first things I found out when I talked to some of the grads from 60s and 70s, late 60s and 70s, was they were like, we didn’t have a choice on what we did after high school. We were drafted and I was like, oh, so. And the females were like, well, my boyfriend was Drafted. So we got married, and so we. We both left the city. So the Vietnam War had an impact on East Cleveland that I didn’t understand because I was a youngster at the time, and it wasn’t a situation that my father had. So what I understand is that the war took the men and quite a few of the women out of the city, many of whom never returned. And then what I looked at was, understood, was then in the earlier 80s, late 70s, those who did return typically returned because they had returned with some sort of disability related to having been in the war. So you kind of started to shift the structures of the families. And that’s right around the time, I think, that the media started to pick up on, you know, to pick up on their narrative about black families not having a man in the house, right? Not talking about what are the things that brought. That took the man away. So then as we moved a little bit further, so then we get into the sort of the. The drug wars. You know, the drug. The crack, right? So now you have people who have already potentially damaged from a war, and then suddenly these drugs start pouring into our communities, and nobody seems to know how they got there. So when you look at some of those sort of societal issues, and then you say, okay, that’s what happened to East Cleveland, right? And I remember being really surprised when I thought the war piece was really surprising to me because my mom didn’t have any brothers, and my dad was the only boy, so they were not. Service wasn’t a part of my immediate surroundings. But when you really think about it, when I started working in children’s services in 1990, when I got out of undergrad, it’s like, well, wait a minute. Some of these issues are societal, systemic issues, but we would rather blame people from various cultures instead of fully understanding that there are things built into the culture that are not congruent with some of these societal issues. So, again, I go back to my own dissertation. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about success was because I knew that people from East Cleveland, East Cleveland grads are everywhere. Everywhere. I tell you, everywhere I go. I kid you not. I was in Jamaica four years ago, and there’s this guy walking in a pool with a Browns hat on, and I’m like, hey, you’re from Cleveland. He’s like, actually, I’m from East Cleveland. I went to Shaw, and I’m like, okay, now I’m over here in Jamaica, and, you know, so. But I have been many, many places, and Shaw grads are everywhere, right? And so when I was thinking about my own dissertation, I was actually in my first review, and my chair said to me, how can you talk about success in East Cleveland when there wasn’t any? And I’m like, wait a minute. I’ve been doing this project with this guy. But I said to him, well, if there was no success in East Cleveland, I wouldn’t be here right now defending a dissertation for a PhD. But that mindset and that attitude, you know, it’s like. And when I went to undergrad, and they’re like, how’d you go to a black school, come from a black school in a black city and get to this liberal arts, tiny little, you know, highly rated college? And then I’m sort of like, it’s a shame that people. But in my dissertation, I identified communalism, you know, a key part of black culture working together as opposed to competition, which is not necessarily a key part of our culture. Right. I identified that. And I’m saying to people, why? The world keeps looking at East Cleveland as sort of some folks, some folks, like, they want us to represent their stereotypes and they devalue what made our culture and our growing up in East Cleveland so valuable and so viable. You know, when you think about. I don’t want to get too deep, but that’s how we survived slavery and got all the way up to here now. Right. We have structures and we have ways of operating that when we focus on, like, go with what, you know, we survive and we sustain. So East Cleveland to me was just that real life experience. And I didn’t know it until I got to higher ed. Jumping you around.

Nick Mays [00:23:53] No, no, no, thank. You know, thanks a lot. I really appreciate. Appreciate it. And I. I already see you merging you story and lived experience with the academic, intellectual side, which is easy, Right?

Because I know initially you was like, oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, we’ll figure that out. But it’s like once you start talking, it just flows. It comes natural. Thank you. Thank you for that. So I want to pivot to the next topic, which is education with respect to your Shaw experience. But before we talk about Shaw, you attended East Cleveland schools from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Adriennie Hatten [00:24:40] Yes.

Nick Mays [00:24:40] Name the schools you attended and to the best of your ability, describe your experience at the different schools. Except Shaw.

Adriennie Hatten [00:24:49] Okay, so I started off at Caledonia Elementary. I grew up on Caledonia. That is the street where most of it is Cleveland Heights, and one corner is East Cleveland. But the school was in walking distance, Caledonia. My mom, actually, for a Portion of my time at Caledonia. A little bit later, she worked in the lunchroom. But earlier on, the thing that I remember most about Caledonia, we were the Caledonia Cougars back then, was we, you know, again, it was a place where the teachers and the families communicated. And it was sort of a seamless transition to school, to home. More importantly, we sort of had our classmates cohort. So I think there may have been two grades of every two classes of every grade, but that became sort of like my. I don’t know, you know, we bonded from kindergarten, and some of us are still friends now on Facebook and in person. Right. But so Caledonia was actually. I found out later that some people thought that the people who went to Caledonia were a little ritzy or whatever. It’s like, yeah, whatever. But we were introduced to honors programming when I was in elementary school. I had French classes at Caledonia, and I had exposure opportunities, which I loved. We went to the Severance Hall. We went to see the orchestra. We went to the museums every year, right. And I started playing my first instrument in sixth grade as a part. As a result of being exposed to these things and saying, like, hey. Convincing my mom that I really wanted to stick with it. And so I was exposed to art. I was exposed to, you know, just the whole first space of learning in a very validating environment. Right. So the beginnings of I can go anywhere and do anything. I can trace it back to Caledonia. My parents had, you know, my family began to have relationships with some of the teachers, our teachers in particular, like fifth and sixth grade, where I had, like, I think the best ones. And one. The one. One for one example, for sixth grade, if you were in Ms. Strickland’s class, every indischool school year before we promoted, she had a big party for the class at her house. So everybody was like, I want to be in this Strickland’s class because I want to go to the park. And I was in her class. I mean, she lived in Warrensville at the time, and she lived. We had a big party, but we also had a big Christmas party. And it was like food from home. Like people like potluck. We eat greens in the sixth grade classroom. So there was, again, some things to look forward to because there was culture and spirit. Spirit in the school, right? The school would have, you know, we had a gospel choir one year, and I was in the gospel choir. There would be a core stepping cores. You know, they had these just different. There was already extracurriculars in elementary school, and so we were just Exposed to so many things as a part of our Caledonia family. Ironically, when I saw my sixth grade teacher, it was 26 years ago because my son was just born and we were walking down the street and so she was just like, she got to see my newborn kid. And I’ve seen her over the years. And one of the Caledonia teachers actually is retired. Of course, she goes to my church now. So again, it started as a family atmosphere and then it was sibling groups so you could, you know, you pass. So siblings knew what was coming when they got there. My siblings were younger, so Caledonia was a. Was the beginning, I would say, of my journey as a thinker and as a person to just understand there was more to life even than just like a book. So then we went to Kirk, which was the middle school. And this is the school I indicated where the all the children from the five or six elementary schools across the state city came together at the middle school. So now you get to larger numbers, but same kind of atmosphere for me. Exposure opportunities. I remember there was a program called the Career Awareness Program in science called a C.A.P. And it was a program that we worked in concert with Tri C and the professors there. And so they exposed us to different. We did science projects one Saturday a month. There was always a field trip. I was in CAP all the way through 12th grade. There was a field trip every spring. And then we would visit a college and we would visit whatever the key science museum was. And ironically, like three of the colleges I applied to when I got ready to go to college were colleges that I had visited through the Career awareness program. And so again, just so many opportunities continuing in my music. I was in orchestra and band at that point while I was at Kirk. But getting to know other students in East Cleveland, really broadening our horizon. That was a place too, where some students who may have gone to private school in elementary school or Catholic school, they tended to come into the district at seventh grade. So then there was also people that were new. Everybody was kind of new. So it was a great time to kind of catapult us to high school. So my experience in middle school, as I said, it was just full of opportunity. And by the time I got to Shaw, I think we had 3,000 plus students at our high school. But again, you were already connected to activities and programs, but also exposed to other things. We had real vocational programming back then. So some folks were in auto mechanics, some folks were in a variety of other areas. I was in what they call, I think, college prep, but music and art and Just so many opportunities. Like there were always speakers, there are always presenters. So learning was just, you know, and I had people there who would tell us literally, like, you know, you can do whatever you want to do, you can be whatever you wanted to be. You can go wherever you need to go. Not every once in a while you have a few off shoots. Her, like, no, you need to just go over here to try to see because it’s free. But what I got in high school was a continuation but an opportunity to learn more about myself and to, you know, be pushed to look outside of East Cleveland way well, how to learn, you know, it was more. It wasn’t, it was, it wasn’t a, like number one, I didn’t have a second class citizen experience right in our school, women and men were equal and opportunities were presented to us equally. So I didn’t have to deal with kind of any of the gender discrimination per se. I did not have to deal with white students or smarter than black students. We were all black. I was fourth in my class when I graduated from high school, and that was only because learning came pretty easy to me. And as I mentioned about the family’s connection with the school, my parents were pretty strict and the only thing they would let me do was school related activities. So I was doing everything. So when the teacher came to me and said, do you want to be in a debate team? I was thinking to myself, well, I don’t know if I. And she’s like, you’ll be great at it. I’m like, okay, wait, when do they do their stuff? Well, we go here on this day. Okay, I’ll do it. And I did the debate team and I was actually very good at it. But it’s not something I was kind of a shy person at the. In high school, much quieter than I am in life now. And I, without some pushing to join some things or to participate in some things, I may not have done it right. So I understand a student who you can put a flyer up all day, but if nobody’s talking to them about it and saying to them why they think they individually would be good about it, they may not take those opportunities. So that’s how I was supported in East Cleveland. In high school, the opportunities came to me and I didn’t have to. Ironically, I was in high school during the Reagan years. So during the Reagan years, our community was hit again because many of the homeowners that were black, including my dad, were factory workers at Ford Motor Company or one of the other auto companies. And they were laid off for years. My dad was laid off from seventh grade to. He didn’t go back to work till I was a freshman in college. So our community was hit even then by the Reaganomics and the auto industry because a lot of our families, that my friends families were working in manufacturing or etc. So again, we. We persevered as a community. You know, people I think our schools doubled down on. For me, it was, well, you know, you need to apply to more colleges because they will give you money to attend. You can go where you want because you got the grades and the academics and. But that messaging is what made me apply to schools that I may not have applied to. If I said, oh, you know, my dad is not working and we don’t have any money. And, you know. But because there were staff at the school who understood the applied of the students, they made sure that they brought up different and broader opportunities to us. And that’s just an example.

Nick Mays [00:34:04] What was Shaw’s reputation during the 80s, both from inside for the students and even outside?

Adriennie Hatten [00:34:14] Well, the. The good thing, the part that I enjoyed most was we were a suburb, so we competed with suburbs, right? Music, academics, everything we did, we were with Parma, Normandy and Valley Forge. And, you know, we. It seemed like driving to those schools was like going on a vacation, but it was not that far. When I got older and realized that west side is not that far, but we competed with students. Shaker. That didn’t necessarily look like us, but it didn’t matter to us because we were highly competitive in every area. And now all the schools that we worked with or participated in, they knew that, right? So everywhere we went, it was like, here comes Shaw. We would. We would march even in the state fair in Columbus. And it was like, oh, Shaw’s gonna be here. But it was the same with our individual music competitions. You know, we’d go where we were performing as soloists, and we’d bring home all the ones and the twos. And in the speech and debate team and the mock trial, we were winners everywhere, right? So we had the. We were taught that we had to work hard, but we didn’t run into the part of America that was going, you’re. You’re a black kid from a poor city, and you shouldn’t be able. We didn’t have that. That wasn’t a part of my purview. All the way through high school, between my home, my church, and my schools, it was always just that, you can do it. You know, our motto for high school Was ready for the world, for my class. And it was like, okay, we ready? Right? And so it was really what I learned later and necessarily aligned with what the rest of the world thought. But I can tell you that when we went anywhere from Shaw, we were not ever sitting on the bus going, oh, my God, I hope that, you know, we could be competitive or it just wasn’t a part of. We had songs and mantras and chants and different things that were all just about like, you know, we were able to talk about God, so we had our God song every time we went into a band performance. But we also were a. We had. We. We supported each other. We were supported by the staff, we were supported by the community. And so it was just a comfortable environment that I wish my children could have had when they went through school, but they were not in East Cleveland, and it doesn’t exist like that today.

Nick Mays [00:36:43] Can you talk to me, talk about the physical makeup of the school versus the brand new school and what year, first of all, what year was the new school built? But you. You attended the older school, so talk about that.

Adriennie Hatten [00:36:56] Yeah, so I attended. The school I attended, I think, was the second iteration of Shaw. But we. It was a great school. It had been there since, you know, the Rockefellers were building up East Cleveland. And our school and our school gave us pride, right? Because we had spaces and places, right? We had one of the only pools left in East Cleveland at the time once the YWCA closed their pool; swimming was a part of your 9th and 10th grade requirement. We had a building that was called Corblanche. It was a separate building, but on the campus where our music department and our band department and our pool, and a place that everybody from back in the day recalls. Corb Lounge Corp. Lounge was literally a lounge where they played music at lunchtime. You could eat lunch in there. And it was a social place, but it was a place where we. We collaborated across years and grades. The only difference was you. Only the seniors could sit up on the stage in Court Lounge. So everybody could wait till they got to be the senior so they could sit up on the stage. But we had. In addition, I was in music and music theater. We had a huge auditorium. That auditorium was comparable to some of what we have down at Playhouse. And we did our productions there, which were always well attended by community and people from outside of our community. So we had spaces and places. We had two gyms at the time, two cafeterias. The main building was about four or five buildings. I mean, our School was a campus. And so while we were three to four thousand students, we were spread. So you didn’t feel like, oh, everybody’s, you know, in the same place. And so I would say I was on the alumni board. I’m trying to think when the new. So the state took over, quote, unquote, the school district. And I’m thinking it must have been in the early 2000s, mid-2005? I can’t remember the years, but the state were trying to use state report cards to take over. That’s another conversation I won’t even get into. They didn’t do anything of value when the state took over, but they made the decision to rebuild the school while the state was in control. So the state decided to take away 2/3 of the school and put back something that was subpar, to say the least. And then they invited the alum after the fact, when it was before it opened, to come and see the new building. And it was a disgrace. Our school colors are red, white and black. They are to this day because the cheapest paint companies that they could find were offering pink, yellow, orange and sky blue. All of the four floors in the new building were pink, yellow, orange or sky blue. That they had accent walls, the chairs, the counters were whatever the color was. They. And I’m telling you, we were grumbling the whole way. They did not replace the court lounge. They didn’t even need to take it down to build the new building. It just became parking lot. Did not replace it. Did not put in a new pool. They made a band room that was half the size or a third of the size of what it was. The choir room was a third the size of what it was. And they ended up with one. One gym that was a third of the size of what it used to be. And they did not replace the auditorium. They put a stage in the cafeteria. Like elementary schools. So we were like, what does. That’s what the state offered. East Cleveland. They de stroyed the spirit of the school by destroying the building. Because now you got kids that are going to Shaw, where we had, you know, for many years, their. Their parents and aunts and uncles. Our pride was in our hallways. Our pride was in the. The. They didn’t even replace all of the trophy cases with all of the trophies and the different things that have been there. And then they want to tell these kids, you should have some school pride when you sit in the orange classroom. So things. When you talk about systemic things. And this was our State and then they gave it back to the district, they gave it back to the city without having made any improvements or added any additional resources, but in fact had taken things away. So I say that all to say that, you know, one of the things that was so huge about East Cleveland was our sense of pride and our sense of togetherness. And it really was, I guess, us against the rest of the world, even if we didn’t fully understand it until we got to where we needed to be professionally and support the school the best way we can, etc. So, yeah, so I think that some of that just. It’s. I couldn’t. I couldn’t ask the student to. I know they weren’t experiencing what we experienced. Even vocational. They didn’t restore most of. We had a huge vocational programming. They didn’t put the auto mechanic program, I don’t think, back in a new building. They had some firemen class and some kind of cooking. I mean, even the programming switched with the new building because they took away all of the key areas of the old building. People used to bring their. Community members could bring their cars to the vocational program, so the students were able to work on real cars and auto mechanics like people were. And cosmetology people were getting certified with things like. So when they left high school, they could work in those things while they pursue other education. And they took away most of that under the state’s leadership.

Nick Mays [00:42:39] One more question about Shaw and then we’ll pivot. Can you recall in particular any teachers or mentors who inspired you or empowered you?

Adriennie Hatten [00:42:52] Yes, I can. Mr. And Mrs. Warner are still some of my favorite people that I chat with. Mr. Roger Warner and Jane Warner. Jane was our college. Was our. She was a counselor. So you had a regular counselor all through four years. But Jane was like a counselor for the. Our academic. But she was academic and she was the one that really helped us when it came to colleges. But she prepared us along the way. Her husband Roger was. I think Roger was actually in the vocational or the special ed program, but the two of them together. So for example, we got to 12th grade. They knew that Shaw didn’t offer Advanced Placement courses. Right. They knew that we as students didn’t know what Advanced Placement courses were. But I will never forget Mr. Warner put together James Joyce class for a few of my friends who wanted to do it. It was after school and it was on the model of an Advanced Placement class. Right. Even though an event AP really is just sort of college level in high school, which they have at the Private schools and the rich kids schools, rich suburbs. But we didn’t have it in East Cleveland. So they offered a course that summer, that senior year, one of the semesters for us to just get us used to a college course. Jane and Roger also got us the Institute for Creative Living. They got a grant to take the. The point of 12th grade was to expose some of the honor students to different experience to build our sort of resilience, resiliency and our sort of esteem. Right. So they got this grant from the Institute of Creative Living. We went on a weekend trip in the snow to this I’mma call a resort, but it’s like an outdoor living type place. And we did snow skiing, the, not the downhill cross country skiing. It was this whole curriculum where we did activities to build trust with each other. And then we had another one where they took up, they taught us to canoe. So we had like another graded quarter where we did a whole canoeing thing. And the end of that year, right before graduation in May, April, we went on a week long camping survival trip in the Allegheny Mountains. And during that whole trip, I’ll never forget it because we had to take everything we, they got us the equipment, the supplies. And now you’re taking these kids from East Cleveland to the Allegheny Mountains. And we did. Each time we were divided into two groups. The first group saw a bear. My group didn’t see a bear, but we, we learned to camp, we learned to, you know, build our own. It was, it was all about like exposing us and making sure that we were confident enough because they also made sure that we applied to colleges that were not the usual schools. So they respected my wishes. Like I don’t want to go to school in Ohio. So three of those schools I had gone to from career awareness program I applied to them. Carnegie Mellon, Allegheny, I mean at University, Rochester. And I want. And not. And I was, I thought about Allegheny because we went to the Allegheny Mountains. But the point is, is that the Warners to this day we are on Facebook for friends ever so often we still go out and have lunch; and they were just really critical and they actually supported me and encouraged me all the way through, through college. So again those relationships that started were so important. As I mentioned, I had a couple of. I, I go out places and I’ll see people and I’m like, oh, I remember that person. Mr. Foreman was my high school principal and we, he was at our class reunion. Must have been our 35th. Well, no, it’s not my third, it’s almost my 40th, but I think he was at our 30th reunion. He came to see everybody and he was my 12th grade principal. And then my younger sisters had him too, because he was always he. He loved the Rocky movie. And because my name is Adrian, I went through all the way through with your Adrian, like it’s through the schools. But he would tell my sisters, tell your sister. I said, yo, Adrian, when you talk to her. So, yeah, so there definitely were people who even Barbara Danforth, who was on our school board when I was in the district. I think she became the board president. I ran into her over time in my career. Just she was in a lawyer. And so I ran into her just when I think I was at Children’s Services. I was ended up on a committee with Barbara Danforth. And ironically, I started working six months ago at the YWCA of Greater Cleveland. And my office is dedicated to her and there’s a plaque on the wall because she served for 15 years at the Y. So again, you, you. There’s names and people that you. I have a book. My 8th grade teacher gave me a science picture book that I probably would have never gotten anywhere else. And he wrote. And I had been his teacher’s aide, student aide that year, and I’d been through the science program for two years, and I still have the book with all the pictures. And he wrote this great message to me to encourage me that I could be whatever and do whatever. And so again, the faculty and staff at Shaw were just tremendous. I mentioned Corp Lounge. Gladys Purnell was the person who presided over Corb Lounge. And she’s living. She’s a senior, very retired. She lives in a senior building in Cleveland. And you’ll see periodically on our alumni page where students will visit her and on her birthday, we send messages. So, yeah, there are definitely different ways that I have been able to keep in contact with the people who are and who were, if they’re still here, critical.

Nick Mays [00:49:05] Well, thank you. It’s a good time to pivot. Well, before we pivot; just really quick because I don’t think we introduced your your siblings; and we don’t have to introduce them by names unless you want to, but how many siblings do you have?

Adriennie Hatten [00:49:20] So there were. It was four biologicals that went through East Cleveland schools. I’m the second oldest. My brothers are your older than I am. And then I have a sister who’s four years younger than Me. So she came through with the class of 1990, and actually I was graduated from undergrad while she was graduating from 12th grade. Was a whole family thing like who going to be where. But anyway, and then my youngest sister who passed away in 2013, was not 10 years younger than me. So we were going through East Cleveland schools and this like the first two back to back. And then a few years later, another Hatten would come through. And then on the bottom man was the last little Hatten. But then I had a family of cousins that also were going through the school. They were Hattens. They were on my mother’s side, so I had a couple cousins. They were kind of spaced out like us. But between Hattens and Cohen’s, we were kind of flowing through EC at the time.

Nick Mays [00:50:18] So you graduate what year? Okay, so you graduated in 1986. And do you go immediately to college?

Adriennie Hatten [00:50:27] Yes.

Nick Mays [00:50:27] Okay, what college did you attend and what was your major?

Adriennie Hatten [00:50:33] So I attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and I. My majors were sociology and anthropology, and my minor was women’s studies. Because at the time that I went to Bowdoin, I was thinking about being a lawyer, but it was a liberal arts college, so I didn’t have to do a specific curriculum. It was more about, of course, the reading, the writing, the thinking skills. And then I could make a declaration about law school after I finished my four year degree. That was a Warner who put me on to liberal arts too. Because one of the mantras that I do recall from Shaw was. And maybe it was societal, but it was like, if you’re black and you’re smart, you got to be a doctor, a lawyer, or engineer. That was something that was kind of preached to us as like, you got the top graduates and you gotta be. And I’m like, well, I don’t like blood, so I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t give a hoot about widgets, so I don’t want to be an engineer, so I guess I’ll be a lawyer. And literally they were like, okay, but we’re gonna make sure you look at legal at liberal arts colleges so you can really think it through. So. And I ended up going to Bowdoin, and that was the Warners too. And why was that the Warners? Bowdoin is a liberal arts small, tiny little college up in Brunswick, Maine. Very highly rated in the country, though. And they never recruited at Shaw prior to my year. And the reason they came to Shaw is that the recruiter at that Time was friends with the Warners, because the Warners were travelers and campers and hikers. And so they knew the recruiter and asked the recruiter to stop at Shaw while they were in our area. Because they only ever went to Laurel and Hawkin and those private schools in the area. So they came to our school. The recruiter, I’ll never forget the teacher said, do you guys want to go to hear about this college that I cannot pronounce or do you want to go to your calculus class? Well that was a no brainer. Of course we’ll go hear about the college you can’t pronounce. So we went. I found out that that was the college that the Warners had made that connection after the fact. But I went and we went to hear them talk. And at the time, mind you, this was 80, fall of 85, going into spring of 86, they had a program at Bowdoin for recruiting minority students. And what they said is if you get accepted because it’s so highly selective, we actually fly the students of color up in April of their senior year to visit the school. Now mind you, keep in mind my dad was not working so we didn’t go visit colleges. That wasn’t a part of what most of my friends and I were experiencing. So other than being in programs that we were introduced, the college selection was still kind of what you heard of or whatever. So anyway, long story short, me and a couple of my friends applied to Bowdoin because we just wanted a trip. We had no intention on going to the school. We were just like, we don’t have any senior trip planned and they gonna fly us up there and pay for everything. So let’s just see. And we literally applied on a. Let’s just see. Three of us got accepted and three of us went up to visit in April of our senior year for what we thought was our senior trip. And I told my mom, don’t worry, I’m not going there ma. And in the end, me and one of my best friends ended up going to Bowdoin together. And we ended up graduating from Bowdoin in 1990.

Nick Mays [00:54:01] Looking back at it, I’m wondering if you. Do you think that your experience in East Cleveland or Shaw influenced your decision to pursue sociology, anthropology or what influence?

Adriennie Hatten [00:54:23] So what, what it did, so what happened? And I don’t want to be too loquacious. But when I got to Shaw. So as I mentioned earlier, like our, our class thing was ready for the world and I got to Bowdoin and I, you know, that whole summer, people are like, you’re going to Maine. You’re going to Maine. I’m like, yeah, you know, it’s a hot. You know, they have lobby lobster, and they got the ocean and they got cherry wood, and they have small classes, and the professors seem really nice. And I was thinking, like, all those black students that were up there that weekend visiting with me, I forgot which ones were really students and which one were perspectives. But at the time, I’m like, yeah. I’m excited, you know, And I never stopped to think about I’m going up to a school that has 1300 students in it and seven black people. I never thought about that the whole summer. And so I got to the school along with my fellow eight black students, because we more than doubled the numbers on the campus. And within a first month, I was like, what the hell did I do? Because I realized Shaw was not the rest of the world. Even our piece of Northeast Ohio was not the rest of the world. The culture shock was huge. And it was huge because I realized that these rich, primarily rich white children from the east coast and the west coast, it wasn’t too much in the middle, really thought black people were stupid. A different breed, had tails, weren’t smart as them, that money made you smart or not. And I had questions that I had never been asked in my life. And some of the faculty. And for me, I started to think like, well, first of all, it was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. So I got very active in the African American society and in various committees on campus, fighting for recruitment, fighting for what was right. We did a sit in against the teacher. And all of a sudden, this quiet, relatively quiet Shaw girl became what some people call a rebel. And I’m like, I’m not a rebel, but y’ all lost your mind. So I found something in myself that I didn’t even know was there because I didn’t have to fight those battles in high school, right? So then I decided, well, first of all, am I getting the heck out of here? And then I had to go back to my. My family’s teaching and my Shaw teaching and my religion. Like, heck, no. You know what I’m doing? I’m going to show you guys better than I could tell you. So I’m gonna stay here and do what I do, right? And I did. And that I had students that would say things to me like, how could you get a better grade on the test than I did? Well, I saw you last night at the game room. How’d you get. Well, first of all, the game room was what was one of the best jobs on campus, because way back then it was paying like seven, eight dollars a night hour, and you get a five hour shift. I learned how to play pool. But beyond that, I found out in PhD years that I have a photographic memory. I thought everybody thought and learned like I did. And they were in the classroom like, what are you talking about? No, we don’t. I’m like, you don’t see your notes in your head when you take an exam and scroll through there? Like, what? I’m like, oh, okay. So what I learned is, but again, we all do what we need to do to succeed. But I had never before experienced people who assumed I could not succeed until I got to bowling. So then I started understanding class and race and ignorance and systemic racism. And that, I think, is what led me to looking at anthropology and sociology.

Nick Mays [00:58:03] In what ways?

Adriennie Hatten [00:58:05] In what ways did I experience it?

Nick Mays [00:58:07] No, no, you said, then I started understanding race and class.

Adriennie Hatten [00:58:10] Yeah, I started understanding that people thought that people who went to public schools weren’t as smart as them. I. That, that if you didn’t take AP classes in high school, how the heck were you going to succeed in college? And I’m like, I’m thinking we’re all here because we, we met the requirements, we got accepted. People would ask me, what sport do I play? I’m like, first of all, Bowden doesn’t recruit on sports because they got plenty of money. First of all, it’s not even the criteria. But, but second of all, what do you mean by no, I don’t play? I didn’t play any sports. So I learned the stereotypes. I learned about how we had whole classes of people have–have whole classes of people in this country who don’t even believe their own science. Right? Science tells you that biologically we’re all the same, but people still don’t believe clearly their own science. So I ran into some things that, I mean, when the girl asked me, did I have a tail, I’m like, what? And then the other girl told me she never had seen a biracial child before. She was from Maine, and she never saw a biracial child before. Biracial children were running all over the southern part of Maine because there was a huge military base up there at the time and the Bath shipyard. And let me just tell you, they were lots of them. But the girl told me, who grew up in Maine, she had never seen one a biracial child because her father told her that when a black person and have a white person have a baby, it comes out polka dotted. And she had never seen a polka dotted child. Now here’s a woman in Bowdoin College with. So I’m trying to tell you I realize how deep ignorance and chosen ignorance. I learned to distinguish maliciousness from true ignorance. Like we studied history, I studied civil rights. My classmates had never studied it. They didn’t have to know who Martin Luther King was. So I learned that in East Cleveland they made sure February was, you know, we, we were in it for kindergarten Black History Month and what it. But I’ve learned that it is not a part of the curriculum in many school districts. It wasn’t then and it still isn’t now. So again I’m going oh. So I began to understand how to think about the problems by. By junior year I was like, hey, I didn’t come here to teach. So all these ignorant questions, go read and figure it out. Now if you got some honest I can help you with a little. Okay, but I’m done with. I tried to help you learn. I ain’t come here to do that. But if you step in the wrong lane, we’ll have a conversation. But I was active all the way through, still active on the Bowdoin alumni board. Now they have a black alumni board that is in its fourth year that they just started four years ago. But so when I think about my majors, I thought I still not sure I want to go to law school though. I came out of Bowdoin with the like I am not sure that I, you know, with my sociology, anthropology and women’s studies and beginning to understand these issues and the way people think and the things that influence influenced them. It didn’t push me to law. So I said I’m not gonna go straight to law school. I’m take a couple years off to work and then I’ll decide what school I end up going to for graduate school.

Nick Mays [01:01:26] So you graduate from the university from, from undergrad, what year?

Adriennie Hatten [01:01:31] I graduated in 1990, magna cum laude. Because that was the first. I was the first black person that many of the white folks in the audience ever saw they graduate magna cum laude for Bowden. Because I’m like, I could show you better than I could tell you. And I don’t use it as a bragging thing, but it was a part of my, my resolve that you guys need to understand we all people, but it is what it is because it still ain’t been too many in my category since. But yeah. So I graduated in 90. 1994 years.

Nick Mays [01:02:04] And do you go directly into graduate school? If not, what do you do?

Adriennie Hatten [01:02:08] Nope. I took, I said I’ll take a couple years to. Because I really could not. I wasn’t convinced that law school was the thing for me. So I actually had planned to stay in Maine and work a while and I came home and told my mother that spring break and she started losing it. She like, I let you go for four years. You got, you got to come home. So by the time graduation came six weeks later, I’m like fine, I’m coming home. But I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to relax and think about it. Well, long story short, one of my aunts was like no, they’re hiring at the children’s services. They kept telling me about children. I don’t want to be a social worker. They kept telling me, kept telling me. So I applied with the hope that I could just shut everybody up; and surprisingly I got an interview and I was like, oh shoot, now I gotta, you know, go to this interview. But I’m just not going to answer the questions real well because I don’t want to be in social media worker. And then I went to the old county building to go to the interview and I won’t mention the guy’s name, he may not even be alive now. But I went in an interview and I sat down prepared to not answer the questions very well. And his first question to me was when can you start? And I did not have an answer for that. I think I bought myself four weeks or five weeks; and next thing I know I was at Jane and the Hunter Children Services as a social worker and responsible for trying to help people with child abuse and neglect. And I have the first job, but I that’s where I started and at children’s services. After about two years of being in the field, maybe almost three, three, I decided law school is not for me. So I decided to go to the nonprofit management program and maybe doing MS at Case. I started the first. What is now called the Case review unit. I started that when I was there at CMS at the county.It was the first supervisor there and it was about bringing collaborative partners in a community together to really help families succeed. So point being, while I knew I didn’t want to, my interaction with interactions with juvenile court while at Children’s services confirmed that the law was not for me because I said, the law is crazy. And they don’t care about black people. And people who do the law don’t really care about the outcomes. They just care about whatever point they’re trying to make. And it’s destroying my black families. So law went out the window. And today I’m so glad that I made that decision because now I think law and government is literary fiction. And I’m glad I didn’t dedicate my career to that. So. But I did realize I’m not a direct services person. Person. Like I thought, I don’t want to do social work.

Nick Mays [01:04:48] Really quick. Did you. Did you like to, like, go to people’s homes sometimes and have to extract kids?

Adriennie Hatten [01:04:52] Yeah.

Adriennie Hatten [01:04:53] Yeah.

Nick Mays [01:04:54] Like, so you were.

Adriennie Hatten [01:04:55] Yeah, I was someone that, you know, I’m 22 years old and I got to go to your house and say, sometimes I gotta take them now. Other times, if you don’t do A, B and C, I’m gonna take them. And the bigger part that I enjoyed was trying to work to reunify the family. So that was where I saw the challenges with the legal department. And that’s where I was like, whoa, this is crazy. The law is not.

Nick Mays [01:05:17] So did you work there for two years?

Adriennie Hatten [01:05:19] I worked. I did six whole years in children’s services. The first two and a half I was a direct services social worker. The last 3.5 I was a supervisor. And my supervisory role was starting that new case review unit. And that is where I finished my degree at Case while doing that position. And once I finished my degree, then I was like, okay, time to get out of.

Nick Mays [01:05:42] What inspired you to go to Case.

Adriennie Hatten [01:05:44] So I went to Case initially because when I thought or when I decided I didn’t want to do law, they had the master’s in social work that had an administrative function. And then I found out Case had the non profit management program, which at the time was a partnership between the business school, the law school. and the social work school. So I was going to do a master’s in the social work administration and a certificate in the non profit and end up switching it all–not doing any of the math, any of the social work degree, got the M and O, which now is still a part of the Mandel school at Case. So that was where I said that CASE was the one school that my mother wanted me to go to when I left Shaw. And I said, Ma, I’m not going to school on an RTA bus line. And that was our battle. Like, 10th, 11th, 12th grade. I’m like, I’m not even going to school in Ohio. But, Case, the program itself, when I found out about it, it just seemed like it would take me to sort of that next level of looking at systems and making it better for people, but not doing the direct services. So that’s why I chose the case school. How’d you do that? What was that like? So you graduate from case, and what’s the next step for you? The next.

Adriennie Hatten [01:06:59] So, yeah, I did work in school all the way through my master’s, and I said, okay, now I have the nonprofit management. I’m really into organizational development and planning. So I left and went to Catholic Charities in their planning department within a year after I got my master’s, ironically. Well, if you know anything about social work and children’s media, social services, very draining. And I knew that it was. It was. Even the role that I was in. Whatever was on the news the night before was on my desk in the morning. Whatever happened to a child, whatever. And seeing systemic challenges and daycares and all, you know, the. At the time that I was in Children’s Services, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office did not choose to prosecute sex abuse allegations made from 14 or older teenagers. So we were seeing lots and lots of sex abuse that there was no prosecution. And I’m like, there you go with that law thing again. They can make that choice. So, yeah, so then I started into my organizational development and planning career after leaving Children’s Services, and again, being a systems person, I think some. Again, back to what I learned in high school, how to think about things, how to be a critical thinker that just got reinforced, but also about solutions. Like, my thing is, we can talk about the problem all day, but if we’re not gonna get to some strategies and solutions. My attention span can’t handle all that because it’s not the longest anyway. So bringing some of my own knowledge of, you know, again, when I got to Children’s Services, East Cleveland families are all over the caseload, because now you had. It was coming out of the war, it was coming out of the crack addiction phase. And it was, you know, so I’m like, gosh, now I’m seeing a demise of a community that I grew up in. And there wasn’t. I hadn’t done my PhD research yet, so I didn’t understand all the factors, but I knew that was not the community. But then I’m looking at the systemic side. That’s this putting people in situations where there’s no way they can meet the requirements to get their kids back within the time frames. And partners that don’t collaborate effectively. So if the partners can’t work together, how are the family going to work with the partners? So that’s when I started off; that kicked me into the nonprofit administration space, because you can, you know, it’s not that nonprofit and for profit are so different. Everybody has a bottom line. It’s a matter of what that bottom line is. But also to me, it’s about valuing the individual individuals who do the work as much as it is about who we’re trying to serve. So that’s been sort of a mantra for my career all the way through. It’s like people are learners and people need to be authentic, to be productive. And if they are and they feel safe in a space, then everybody benefits. So I’ve always kind of looked at it from the personnel side and the individuals, and that’s even how I tied it in my PhD to go into that program.

Nick Mays [01:10:02] What’s next after Catholic charity?

Adriennie Hatten [01:10:04] Oh, geez. Catholic Charities, I think, was CEO gc, which is now Step Forward Community Action Agency for Cuyahoga County. And I was doing planning there. I was developing resources in the community so the organization could be effective. And that’s when I really started managing the federal grant forehead start and you know, kind of really looking at solutions and strategies and what that looked like. So I think I was at CEO GC a few years. And then I said, you know what? I guess if I’m get a PhD, I probably better think about it. So it was 06 that I decided to start my PhD program. So you figure from 96 to 06, I did see OGC and Catholic Charities. And then I decided to go back to school one last time because I said, I’m getting old. Ha. Little did I know back then, but I thought, I’m getting old. I better go.

Nick Mays [01:10:59] Are you having children in between?

Adriennie Hatten [01:11:03] I had my. I had my. I actually got married and had my son within three years after my Masters. So by the time I went back for my PhD in oh six, I was divorced and just had my son who was in first grade, started kindergarten. So I went to school kind of. I had. Yeah, I had my Masters before I started a family. And then my son actually grew up in the PhD program a couple years. He knew all the professors, he knew all of My study groups. He knew the coffee shops. And I laughed because he started off with like a Spider man backpack. And when I graduated with my PhD, he was coming out of sixth grade with his like, you know, Nike backpack or whatever. But what I remember most is that he was such a support at that time it was just the two of us and he was such a support. Even into. In my PhD work, I was. He was. I was doing a variety of things. He had to be a little bit of a latchkey kid. But he learned how to cook while I was in dissertation phase and working because I was working as well. And I recall that he would call my mom and tell her what he was cooking and the cinnamon he was putting on the chicken and whatever. But needless to say, he was more proud of me finishing my dissertation. I think that he even gave a hoot about graduating from sixth grade. And I only say that to say that as moms, you know, we have to live out our life and our life is an example. And we also have to think about the example that we are placing for our children. Right. So that was a. A twofer.

Nick Mays [01:12:47] So you start Cleveland State a PhD program, including what, 06 in 06. Are you working during this [time]?

Adriennie Hatten [01:12:57] Yes, I was initially working at ceogc, I think the first year, but I was a. And then I was a graduate assistant. No, I was a graduate assistant the first two years. I stopped working at CEOGC or went to part time at the first year. And then it was like, I can’t do all this because I was also doing some entrepreneurial stuff on the side. It’s like, wait a minute, wait a minute. I can’t do all this. So I did the first few years I worked as a graduate assistant. When I got to dissertation, that’s when I got a job as a program officer at the Sisters of Charity foundation of Cleveland. So I finished my dissertation while working full time at the foundation.

Nick Mays [01:13:35] What’s your PhD in?

Adriennie Hatten [01:13:37] It’s from Cleveland State is in urban education. So it was a joint program between the education school and the Urban Study School and intent. Initially it was really an emphasis on adults and learners and organizations. While I was in the program, it kind of shifted more to pedagogy, you know, just the teaching piece. But they let me formulate my program so that it could continue to build on my nonprofit masters and really begin to look more at how organizations can support the individuals learning to benefit the, to improve the outcomes of or the mission of the organization. So I kept the nonprofit focus and I ultimately focused on education policy for my dissertation, which again, has proven to be useful because policy and advocacy is something that kind of crosses the sectors, if that makes sense. So it took six years. I got my degree in 11, so almost five for five years or so.

Nick Mays [01:14:44] Give us the elevator pitch on the dissertation topic.

Adriennie Hatten [01:14:48] My dissertation. So higher ed taught me what I would. What I learned is when I say ready for the world. And I always. I realized higher ed wasn’t really ready for us. And it was us. When I say African American people. In my opinion, higher ed is the keeper of the crypt of some of the American philosophy. [01:15:11] Right. And unfortunately, systemic racism is evidence in higher ed. It’s evidence in research and research design and it’s evidence in the lack of qualitative research as it relates to people of color, which I’m glad to be a part of this. And it’s evidence in. I was an advocate of critical race theory and it was a theoretical framework for my dissertation in 2011 because Derek Bell said we need to question why we think and what we think. I think that we needed to do that in systems all around America because as black people, we are messaging and are, you know. We need to right size some of the damage that I think research has done. So I haven’t come through Bowdoin and started at Shaw, realized that, you know, I need to. I’m sitting in this education class the very first semester because we started with basic education and I’m looking at. They had me reading this book called the Mismeasure of Man, I think is what it was. And it was going through the history of racism in education. It started with, like, I remember the chapter that started with when they used to count the number of buckshots that could fit into a black skull and say it was less than the number of black buckshots that could fit into a white skull. I looked at some of the early IQ use of IQ as a way to try to validate racism in science. And so I was sitting in that first semester and I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute. They’re talking about me. They’re talking about me and my friends, like my peers that grew up with me. And we are all over the world doing all kinds of things now. But listen to what they’re talking about in this class. It’s wrong. It’s setting up the stereotypes. And now I understand why our school systems can’t address the needs nowadays because they are looking at it all wrong. But I had to sit in that class and I realized in the second semester they were talking about social foundations and we had this whole class that talked about what children cannot do at a can or can’t do at certain ages. And I had a niece, one that I ended up raising later, didn’t know I was at the time; my 21 year old was 2. So we had to do this project to observe a young child and write. But all the time I’m looking and I’m going, all the stuff they’re telling me in this class is not true for my niece. My niece can speak, my niece can think, my niece can. So I ended up using her for that project. And what’s funny is there was that song out Unbreakable. I think it was Mariah Carey. But I observed my two year old niece. Well, you know, she’s right, she’s playing and she’s singing it. And I was, I wrote that paper, that first paper and I basically said: I don’t know what these people have been talking about that I’ve been reading about, but it is not true of all children. It is not true black people that I know and it’s not true of my black niece. But it began me, it started me to say as I kept going through it, I’m like, oh, is that what they think of us? Our culture doesn’t value education? Or is that what they think of us? We have so many other social issues to deal with that we can’t prioritize our own right? People would say to me they were starting to use first generation. That term has come up in maybe the last 10 years, right? And I was like, oh, so I’m like, so they think because my parents didn’t go to college I wouldn’t able to be. Wouldn’t be able to be successful? They didn’t understand how much of supporters and champions my parents were. They didn’t understand that my mother was digging up 22 cent for me to take the RTA to Kirk on a Saturday to be in the career awareness program in science because my dad was at work. So I got to my dissertation because I’m like, I’m looking at school reform that’s talking about everything but what really matters. When I was in East Cleveland, when I went to East Cleveland schools, we collectively held each other up. We collectively worked together, we collectively shared experiences. Our community supported us. Our parents were engaged. We had different ways of engagement, but they were engaged. So I created My dissertation because I’m like, I need to get the voices of Shah High graduates into this research space because I need to see what do they say were critical to their success because then maybe school reform can focus on some of those things. So I did a qualitative researcher research project interviewed, found some grads from the 60s, 70s and 80s, late 60s, when the college was primarily black and the city was primarily black. And I started talking to them about what does success mean to them, thinking about high school. And I started talking to them about what were some of the things that they thought were really critical to their education. And that’s how my dissertation evolved. Now, I wasn’t allowed to put the name of the city in the title. It was a policy.

Nick Mays [01:20:28] Well, really quick, what did they say? One, and then two, what was your, your finding?

Adriennie Hatten [01:20:35] So what they said, I’m going to try to remember because I should have reviewed this: but that parent engagement and that the support, student to student support, and the community support were the three things that they recall were critical to their success, which I defined as graduating from high school.

Nick Mays [01:20:59] Did that match your own experience?

Adriennie Hatten [01:21:02] It, it did match my own experience. It matched my own experience in the sense that many of them talked about the activities that they were a part of in the high school. Many of them talked about individuals in the staff or the faculty who were supportive. They talked about the exposure opportunities. They talked about how they support, supported each other. And I have friends today that I went all the way through high school with. I have some really close friends to this day. And we’ve gone through families and lives and deaths of parents and and all kinds of situations. And those relationships started in East Cleveland schools. So yeah, it did match my experience, but it matched to me as well. For a country to say we’re looking at school improvement but not focusing and taking away those things, right? Saying, well, none of that matters. What matters most is standardized testing; saying, well, we can’t partner with the community for all these random reasons. And then certain parents, maybe they don’t have the background check and all these things that didn’t really matter and taking away resources to provide those exposure opportunities. So it was very it in opposition to standardized tests and more standardized tests and more ways to study for standardized tests. And so you keep wondering why we keep missing because we are not going to what people who you say you’re trying to help; you’re not building on their experiences. And that was really the outcome of my research.

Nick Mays [01:22:34] So ultimately your research and Dissertation concluded what?

Adriennie Hatten [01:22:38] It concluded that the factors that they contribute to success are parent those relationships with the community, the school have a relationship with the parent and students being able to support and promote each other. So therefore, if we really want to impact school improvement, we need to find ways to address these three areas.

Nick Mays [01:23:00] Can you share briefly what you learned about the history of East Cleveland in your research?

Adriennie Hatten [01:23:07] What I learned in my research about the history, specifically when I talked to the graduates from the late 60s and early 70s was the impact of the Vietnam War. I learned when I asked them, how did your experience at Shaw help you think about your next step? I think that was around or think about what you should do next in life. And I had a couple of my original folks saying we didn’t have a choice because we were drafted in the Vietnam War. The ladies were saying, my boyfriend was drafted. So we got married right after high school and then we moved outside of the state to wherever. We got sent with the military. And many folks never came back to East Cleveland, which was the interesting thing. So they, the military, while that was a way out, it also took away some of their choices. But they are the ones who taught me about people who did return to the city, returning because of medical challenges and mental health challenges related to the war. And so that was my first time really thinking about the impact of the war on who were my peers, because again, some of these grads were 10 years my senior or more. And I’m like, oh, I was coming through school with people who were being impacted by the war. I wasn’t because maybe their aunt and uncle got sent away. So, yeah, that one was interesting. And I learned about again, it solidified the sense that people were very consistent. You’re Talking about late 60s, 70s and 80s pointing back to the same factors, which says that Shaw was on East Cleveland was on to something. The schools were on to something. And they really looked at it from a cultural relevance perspective. And that was a part of my research. If you think that people can’t support their students because they don’t have a degree, that’s just a whole, you know, it’s going to impact the attitudes that teachers even have towards families. And when I worked in the school district later, I saw it. Boy, did I see it. I’m like, if you don’t respect the students, you don’t respect the community that you’re working in, how are you going to teach their children? And people didn’t make that connection.

Nick Mays [01:25:18] Wow, that’s fascinating. You shared with me a conversation about your dissertation title. Do you care to share that with us today.

Adriennie Hatten [01:25:26] Yeah. I can share that. One of the interesting thing was, as I said, I was sitting in my classes in my PhD program thinking, they’re talking about me, they’re talking about our city, they’re talking about my friends. And that’s when I began to say, I want to use East Cleveland as a subject for my dissertation. Before I knew exactly what my research questions were, I knew that one of the ways for me to add value and to help even address and illuminate the best things about my community was to use my dissertation. Because people tend to use their dissertations around something that matters. And I ran into the administration, ran ahead. I butted heads with the administration and education program because they said I could not use the title, the name of my city in my dissertation. They would not let me say East Cleveland in the title or anywhere. So my title is something about in a small Midwestern herb. All black suburb.

Nick Mays [01:26:27] The title explains.

Adriennie Hatten [01:26:28] Yes. But they would not let me use the word East Cleveland, Cleveland anywhere. And mind you, this, there was this chair who, who stopped me in my first defense to say, how can you talk about success in your title when there was no success in East Cleveland? And I’m standing there with my mouth open and I said, well, if there was no success in East Cleveland, I wouldn’t be standing here doing a defense. I was so. I remembered. I was, I was so. I was almost flabbergasted. But you’re not gonna get the best of me standing up because I’m from East Cleveland. But the mere fact that he’s saying, how can I talk about graduating from high school in East Cleveland? But again, that for me and he representing the college would not let me say the name of my city. Now every person, if I, if I put. I still have documents. I recruit it through the Shaw High School Alumni association and got referrals from people that I knew to get participants in my qualitative study. The data that I. I use to talk about the dynamics in the community is all E.C. And even why I chose to do graduates from the 60s, 70s and 80s. I explained in my dissertation how the current 2010 East Cleveland was not that 1986 East Cleveland; and why I wouldn’t have picked. I did not pick graduates from the 90s, because I felt like they were part of a very different shift in the community and, it could change the dynamic. So I even talked about that. But yeah, so I knew that I had read other dissertations that mentioned places but I was not allowed to mention East Cleveland. And it came interesting to me. I appoint with another individual. So if people want to look up research in on East Cleveland, my dissertation will not come up because I have not mentioned East Cleveland in it. So unless they ask me or I hear somebody saying I’m doing worse. And I. When I hear people talking about work that they’re doing, I tell them, hey, look up my dissertation. It could be helpful. But they really barred me from being situated in the real sweet spot in the academic world by not allowing me to use the name of my city in my degree, my dissertation. [01:28:53] So, yeah, that, that was again, the impact, you know, but yet he wanted me to. I’ll never forget. He wanted me to find an article that had written by somebody in Shaker about some problem in East Cleveland. And that man kept saying, you need to look up that one. I finally. And when I got to the final edits, he still said, you haven’t mentioned that article. I told you. And I, I literally found it put in one halfway decent sentence and cited it because it was. I can’t remember, it was an earlier study that basically indicted East Cleveland in some way. And I’m like, that’s all you got. But now you got a whole dissertation if you want to use it. [01:29:35] It just doesn’t say EC but it is, it is easy.

Nick Mays [01:29:38] Wow, great stuff. All right, we’re going to pivot. I want to talk about. So you, you receive hooded. You Receive your PhD. What is your career path moving forward?

Adriennie Hatten [01:29:53] Well, after my PhD, let’s see, let me think. I was working in the foundation. I was working in Sisters of Charity Foundation. President Obama was in office. I was an education program officer building an education initiative in the central neighborhood of Cleveland, one of the communities as it has the highest concentration of single women, mother and babies and elders and public housing. [01:30:19] And, you know, so President Obama was in office. Arne Duncan was his education secretary, and they were moving to emulate the Harlem Children’s Zone from New York through the Promise Neighborhood Strategy. So they rolled out. We’re rolling out a Promise Neighborhood Strategy, which was really about bringing all the partners together to come together to address education, health, sort of like what I did with the children’s services with the case review unit. [01:30:47] So anyway, so I was working with some of the national folks and just really we were struggling, working to build this pipeline for the central neighborhood. Did that for a couple years. What we have now isn’t. What they have now isn’t exactly what we conceptualize but it was the beginnings of just bringing people together. [01:31:09] I built a A middle grade exposure strategy, is what I built for our education strategy. It’s central building on my experiences at. In East Cleveland. I’m like children need to have opportunities to do arts and sciences and all these other things which had not been a part of the school program in our neighborhood where I was right working. And so I start, I. I went back and I thought, well, there’s partners out here that are looking at, you know, building up their sort of social, an internal motivation. There’s partners that are out here that are all saying if you catch middle schoolers and you build up their self esteem and you build up their curiosity, then they’ll be successful after high school. But you got to catch them in middle school. So I was doing that work and then I actually pivoted a little a few years later because I became an auntie mom and I went from one to five children and three schools and a whole bunch of stuff. So it kicked off my entrepreneurs entrepreneurial career. [01:32:13] And that’s when I launched my biggest, longest effort at being a consultant. Being able to help organizations to identify issues and concerns, to do strategic planning, to do staff development and grant writing and just the whole sort of nonprofit space which I started that around 2013 and pretty much have been doing it ever since within that space thinking about how can I help students in higher ed because that’s still where my heart is. Doing some teaching at Cleveland State and John Carroll in the urban programs and non profit programs primarily because again understanding that it’s very difficult for black students to make it through higher ed because of some of the systemic issues that I saw and experienced through my education experience. So teaching to be a way to be a support and a give back. So I did some of that. I did also have broaden my sort of philanthropic and volunteer service talk about that. So I currently I have just wrapped up as five years of president of the Mandel School alumni boarded case and being the president, really helping the alumni to understand that we need to make sure that the experience of all students that come through the college is positive. Helping and supporting the college with recruitment and programming and also really re engaging alumni into the college so they can be a support for other students. So while I was doing that, I also simultaneously became a part of the new black alumni board at Bowdoin College which during COVID with George Floyd and some of the various things that were going on, colleges were needing to step up and say how Are we going to address this issue that’s plaguing our country? Black alumni we had went back for a 50th year reunion in 2019 of our African American society and realized that they things hadn’t changed much on campus for the students and they were dealing with some of the same challenges that we dealt with, you know, 20, 30 years ago. So the college moved to start a black alumni board. I’ve been an inaugural member of that board for the last four plus years and chairing their DEI committee. Yes, I can say it, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee because I’ve been doing training on that the last several years in Cleveland to try to get our agency up to par. So I have found doing service with the schools that I attended but again trying to make sure the environment is different when other students come come through and would love to quit seeing America ebb and flow. Ebb and flow when it relates to issues to us and let’s just make successes and keep going forward. So I so those are my sort of higher ed volunteer spaces. I now was recently appointed to the alumni council for the entire Bowdoin College. So I’m a part of that group. I have served on the boards of three credit recovery schools in Cleveland for about 11 years now. [01:35:25] I am currently president of the boards for the three schools: Old Brook, Main and Parma and Regent, which are all on the Lower east and Lower west side and one is in Parma schools. And again I’m on the board of credit recovery schools because I say to them I believe that we need options first. [01:35:48] It is not because I believe that charter schools are better or credit recoveries are better. I’ve also worked for public schools. I worked for CMSD for about four years in performance before my PhD. But my point is, is that I think that we need to have continuums and we need to have options so that every child has a place and if you don’t figure it out to 18 that I need to get it together, you still have school. [01:36:11] So I serve on those school boards as well and have had various board membership of sort of smaller nonprofits. But those are the primaries right now.

Nick Mays [01:36:22] Talk about volunteer or even professional connection with East Cleveland with these Cleveland Public Library, the charter Union alumni.

Adriennie Hatten [01:36:34] So in my consulting, I have done some consulting with the East Cleveland Public Library in the past. Really around I think that engagement was around really figuring out different ways to engage with the community. I’ve also worked with Cleveland Public Library, but again as libraries are have been trying to decide how Best to serve and represent. I’ve worked with East Cleveland. I also was a part of a citywide initiative initiative called MyCom and it was really a youth development initiative and it was a multi city. So East Cleveland was represented in that. And I was a part of the. I think I was doing data and outcomes, but really working with them to.

Nick Mays [01:37:11] In your professional capacity?

Adriennie Hatten [01:37:14] Yeah, I did that as a consultant. I volunteered with the. My volunteer primary work with East Cleveland Studio Alumni Association. I’ve been a part of that. That for some years now. We do. I’m not an officer right now. Got enough officer roles. But one of the things that people always hear about is the Labor Day All Shaw class reunion picnic at the park. But what they don’t realize is that every year we have a scholarship banquet on the Friday of alumni weekend. And it is really. That is the dollars that we provide just for student scholarships that usually are announced at the park. But so the alumni association, I think I mentioned earlier, has supported the students when the band has gone to China and different other needs. But we also really emphasize raising money for the student scholarships because we want to make sure that that’s never a barrier. So that is my primary advice. Voluntary work with ec. It’s related to the alumni group.

Nick Mays [01:38:10] Now I want to pivot with this question and talk about future development and revitalization efforts in East Cleveland. As of right now, we have the Circle East. So there’s a project going on. It looks like there’s going to be more external development. Do you support that? Or if not, what do you think about future development in East Cleveland and complicated for us, if possible.

Adriennie Hatten [01:38:40] So what I think is I’ve watched different initiatives. I’ve watched the different politicians that have gone through. I’ve watched the infighting and the lack of trust from even in the council. I think that if I had my dream druthers or something, I would say stop everything, right? Get all of the folks who think they’re leaders, formal or informal, into a space and start at square one with some visualizing, maybe some appreciative inquiry to figure out what we want to see in East Cleveland and where we want to go. Because I think that the agendas get diluted because the goals are diluted. And I think that in many ways we have to. I don’t want to be too political, but it’s like you got to do what you know to do, right? And so often. I also write for this online magazine, Beyond Behind, Beyond Cleveland, Behind Cleveland. And I Wrote an article recently talking about kind of like a pantry, right? You want to make, you want to cook something, or you don’t know what you want to cook. So you open the pantry and you don’t see nothing. It’s stuff in there. And my teenagers taught me that I don’t see nothing. You just look and you see stuff you don’t see. You have no idea what you want to cook. But then when you look at it again more closely and you start thinking about, okay, wait, I do have the noodles, and I do have the sauce, and I do have. You realize, wait, I do have what I need here to make a meal. And so I think that I use that analogy to say that we have what we need if we know and understand what’s in our pantry. And I think East Cleveland in many ways has suffered from all these opinions and perceptions. And instead of, like, working through and tossing out what doesn’t matter and replacing it with what we want to be known for, what our goals ought to be, and getting open as opposed to closed, to addressing those needs is really important. Like, I never was an advocate of East Cleveland signing on. I just read something today that makes me a little concerned. But I’m always wanting to say, no, we don’t need to become a part of Cleveland because Cleveland can’t handle their own issues. So all we’ll do is get lost in their issues. But we do need to have some more effective processes to think through and strategize about what we need to do. So, as a grant writer, which is something that I do a lot, foundations look to support strategies. So if you cannot generate an effective, well thought out, documented strategy, they’re not even going to fund you. But if you could generate that for East Cleveland, I do think you could find some funding to begin to move forward.

Nick Mays [01:41:50] Like a master plan.

Adriennie Hatten [01:41:52] A master plan that begins with a philosophy that we can all agree to, and it’s got a supersede relationship. It just annoys me when I hear people trying to pinpoint the person that messed up East Cleveland. It’s a collective. It’s a collective, right? And so I think that if we’re going to engage outside entities, partners, it still has to be around this common plan or strategy that we have, because otherwise we just get more agendas that keep diluting. I think that I wonder sometime, will we ever be able to restore East Cleveland to what some of us may think are the glory days? I think we have to figure out how to make it a viable community. What is the Basis of that viability, you know, where are we going to be able to tap into? [01:42:53] I mean, if you got space and you got place and with gentrification going on right now, everybody does really want to get close. Closer to the lake. I think East Cleveland could. Could figure out how to create. I was just in Cincinnati a couple weeks ago downtown. I was amazed at how they have recreated Cincinnati with modern buildings and different kinds of housing and shopping and spaces. And I’m like, east Cleveland would be that part right across from Covington and that little bridge. And I’m like, east Cleveland could do that. We only have so many square miles. But I just find it hard to figure out whose agenda is ever leading. And because I don’t like to play politics all the time, sometimes I’m like, I ain’t trying to figure it out. But I think it would be helpful to everybody involved if we could get to some common. And we almost. I heard a term recently that I love harm and repair. I think there’s a process of harm. Harm happens, but you have to have a process to repair or else you keep kind of hurt people. Hurt people. So I think East Cleveland is kind of plagued by hobbling along with angst and animosity and grudges and lack of information and clarity. And if it doesn’t address those and the state takeover, it never helps.

Nick Mays [01:44:16] So what are. What are some misconceptions about or a misconception about East Cleveland or East Clevelanders? And then two, do you think East Cleveland and East Clevelanders are hurt by the majority of the narrative centering around blight, poor city in the world. Violent. The most violent city. So, yeah.

Adriennie Hatten [01:44:52] So two things. One, I don’t know if I mentioned is one of the things that I that also interrupted the viability of East Cleveland was when the folks would. With gentrification and folks moving out of East Cleveland but still owning their properties and turning them into rental properties and not maintaining them. Right. So landlords and I noticed they. I know they’ve started to identify some properties and tear them down because they didn’t know who the owner was and the thing fell down. But I think that the reality that there are people who have a stake in East Cleveland who don’t live in East Cleveland is just an important piece. But the lack of focus on that builds on the stereotype or promotes the stereotype that black people tear up whatever they have. Right. But I’m like, wait a minute now. We had Rose, we had all these other towns that got tore up for us in the south, they just blow it up. In the north, they just destroy it from the foundation. So I think that if I were living in East Cleveland right now, it would be difficult because I would be feeling like I needed a. Always try to fix everything because I know what it used to be or what it could be. I think that one of the things I noticed about the school district when I was doing some volunteer work is that because of the concept of open enrollment in the state of Ohio, many of the children that go to East Cleveland schools don’t even live in East Cleveland. So they say, I go to Collingwood, I get kicked out of Collingwood, I can just enroll in Shaw. Say I go to Shaker, and I have a problem. So the open enrollment, which Bedford school districts and a couple other inter ring school districts are struggling with, but with that open enrollment, while it was intended to put more butts in the seat, you also do not add people to the community. So people don’t acknowledge and realize right now that the school district is educating percentage of kids that don’t even live in the community. So even when you think of the importance of community involvement and family engagement and parent engagement, you don’t even have that in many. Like we used to have it. And I think people don’t realize it. Like, when I went to Caledonia, everybody went to Caledonia, lived on Houndsdale. You know, there was this couple of Neil View Grayton. Like you knew the streets and then the teachers and the families knew the community. We don’t have that now. So I think that part of the narrative about East Cleveland and then the narrative about East Clevelanders is flawed and it’s got to be difficult, right? Because I know some professionals who live in East Cleveland. They’re folks who are maintaining their properties and they’re. But it’s that. That you never hear about that. Like, you would think that there are no homeowners left and that if they have a home that’s falling down and you know, so. So the positives. And I think part of that is on East Cleveland because you gotta. One thing I’ve learned in life, you gotta tell your own story. So you grow up kind of like being taught you need to be humble. You need to be humble. But humility sometimes is a negative if it causes us not to tell our own stories, because then there’s a gap. And then when there’s a gap, other people feel that gap with their stories about us. So I do think that it would. I would love to see Someone and I. That’s what I like about this project. Beginning to point out what are the strengths and the positives of the space. Because one of the things I was telling somebody recently when they were talking about, I said, you do realize that most people living and working right now were not here for the civil rights movement. They weren’t even alive. So when you’re saying to yourself, why don’t they know that we. We could do this, we did it before, because they weren’t here, care. So those of us who are. Or. Nah, I was on the cusp of it because Martin Luther King and them died a couple months before I was born. But the point is, my mother, I tell her all the time, and she tells my young people in our family about what their experiences were, her experiences in the off riots. Because you got folks in a workplace that should be addressing things, and they don’t have the history and they don’t have the institutional knowledge. So a project like this one, I think you’ve got people who might find themselves in East Cleveland right now. They have no knowledge about what East Cleveland used to be, what Shaw used to be, what used to be the. Because when they tore down the school, they got rid of a whole lot of the memorabilia as well. But so I do think. So I would just say that I think we need that these kinds of projects are important because you’ve got to have pride, you’ve got to have a sense of, we’ve done it before, we can do it again. But if you don’t know that we’ve done it before, and you just come in here, you think, oh, my gosh, we don’t. You don’t even have a vision. I have a vision for what it could be. And then finally, if you could speak directly to current East Clevelanders in general, young people, students, what message would you share about their current dynamic and the future?

Adriennie Hatten [01:50:03] I think that kind of goes back to my last point because I think that some of the things that were poured into us in East Cleveland schools, like self esteem and our history and self confidence and a little bit more about. But the world may not agree because I didn’t. So they don’t have to get their head bounce around like I did the first semester of college.But I think that we have to rebuild. We have to build the students so they can be the adults we need them to be. Right? And it doesn’t just happen that it could at 47, but if it starts at 6, 7, I got my grandbabies. They are all under they’re all under three, but I’m teaching them already emotional maturity. Right. I’m teaching them. Wait, let’s slow down. Grant’s gonna talk you through. You know how to get that top on that, like, don’t get up. Don’t get upset. Throw a tantrum and throw it down. No, no, no. Let’s walk through it. Right? I think we need to pour into our young people what they need to become what we want them to come to become. Like, we’re just like, oh, throwing the spaghetti on the wall and see if it’ll stick. And then we’re upset. But if we don’t take. And this is part of legacy, and I think we need to take responsibility for helping. I always say, yeah, there’s a lot of games in the world, right? But the key is to understand the game so you can play and play well. So I believe in being very honest. Yes. There are some people who are going to hate you just because of your color. There are some people that hate you. Everybody doesn’t support you because you do. Well, everybody’s not happy because you can figure that Rubik’s Cube out faster than them. Tell them my age. But. But. But you can’t let that stop you, right? You can’t let analysis paralysis stop you, because now you’re so caught up in what they said about me that I can’t move. But you also have to understand your own strengths and your own own value that you add. And that’s how you play the game and play well. Know the game, be honest. Tell them. Because one of the things that used to upset me, I learned in higher ed, frustrate me is I would see people who would have beat themselves up. They would beat themselves up because this. This person said something about them or, you know, I can’t believe that you think you’re smarter than everybody else. Well, wait, why are they saying that to you? Well, they’re saying that to me because I got the highest grade on the exam. Okay, well, hold up. So I’m telling you now, throw off whatever they said and let me help you understand where they might be saying it and how you can handle it. So I would say that I think it isn’t even. I need the young people to be open to receive, but I need the elders to be willing to pour. That’s what I would say.

Nick Mays [01:52:57] And then finally, you have a lot left. But what do you want your legacy to be in terms of your work in life?

Adriennie Hatten [01:53:05] You know what. It’s interesting because when you think about that, we have like five generations in the workplace right now, right? And I do some training on that sometime. I realized when I went back to the, when I went to the YWCA just six months ago, after years of consulting, I wanted the older people in the workplace because most of those who can’t retire and. But I realized a 30 year old person said to me because I was like, maybe it’s just time for me to go sit down. And he said to me, no, auntie, our generation needs your generation in the workplace because we really don’t know what to do. And I was like, oh, okay. You just made me feel really welcome. But the reality is when I look at the five generations, we all need each other, right? So there may be, maybe I can’t figure out some of this technology, but I can tell you what we did 12 years ago, not to make you be bound by it, but so that you can use the knowledge from what I’m telling you to create what we need today, right? So I think that for me, I’m realizing more and more. And then I was also telling somebody recently, we fought for a lot of things and we’re in a country right now that doesn’t have that institutional knowledge. And this is not the time to get out of the game. It is a time to step up our game because those who have it need to fill in those gaps. And sometimes you got to break things down to build it right so that when you build it right this time it can be sustainable so we don’t have to keep going back and forth around the same thing. And my last belief is that laws do not change, change values. And so what I see in America right now is that misperception that because we had a law, we changed how people thought and how people think really matters. But we’ve got to influence it. If we, even if we’re not in a position to make all the changes, we are often in a position to influence. So I think the rest of my career is realizing that I can have impact through influence and enjoying life too at the same time.

Nick Mays [01:55:18] Wow, Well said. Well, Dr. Hatten, thank you so much for your work, your contribution to society at large of East Cleveland, the world. Thank you for contributing to our project and take care.

Adriennie Hatten [01:55:36] My pleasure.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS