Walker draws the title of her book from a moment during Byas’ interview for his first position as an elementary school principal. His questioners called him “professor”—a title he liked so much that “I decided then and there if someone thought I could be a principal, I should learn what it was all about.” The incident proved prophetic, because Byas, throughout his life, would continually broaden his own skills and perspective both through continuing education and by becoming active in state and national professional societies.
His years at TC—the only school in the country that would admit him without teaching experience—were a critical part of those experiences. “I came seeking, and TC came teaching,” he says. “I learned that even the best schools were 50 years behind in their philosophy. And in Georgia, they must have been 200 years behind.”
After more than a decade working in Gainesville, Byas resigned and became superintendent of the Macon County, Alabama, school system, where he made a name for himself by eliminating the school’s deficit in less than two years. Simultaneously, he earned a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, commuting part-time, by dint of a Ford Foundation fellowship.
In the early 1970s, Byas was recruited to work as Superintendent of Schools in Roosevelt, New York. “To make a long story short,” he says, “they wanted someone with experience eliminating a deficit.”
He stayed in Roosevelt at the Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School for more than a decade, until his retirement in 1985. When he left, he says, the budget had long been in the black. At the last school board meeting he attended at the school, he received what he felt was an incredible honor.
“They renamed the school from Teddy Roosevelt to Ulysses Byas Elementary School, and I ain’t dead yet,” he says. “It was one of the crowning moments of my professional career.”
The newly retired Byas and his wife moved back to Macon. As he approaches his 86th birthday, Byas revels in the accomplishments of his children and four grandchildren. As for his own, he uncharacteristically summarizes them in a single sentence: “My greatest accomplishment was to be a champion of black students.”
Published Friday, Dec. 4, 2009