Tell them we are rising

the long version

Ruth Wright Hayre grew up in a close, genteel family that had prized learning since the days of the Civil War. At age ten, her grandfather, Richard Robert Wright, led by his remarkable mother, marched 200 miles to attend a school for emancipated slaves in a discarded railroad boxcar in Atlanta. When Union General Oliver Otis Howard came to the classroom and asked what message he should take back north, young Richard responded, in the famous exchange immortalized by poet John Greenleaf Whittier, "Sir, tell them we are rising.". More than a century later, Ruth Wright Hayre, like her great-grandmother, would lead children on a life-changing journey to learning. After a distinguished career as a teacher, principal, administrator, college professor, and finally as a member and president of the Philadelphia Board of Education, Hayre's faith in the power of education inspired her to take on her greatest challenge - to create the "Tell Them We Are Rising" program. With that program she issued a challenge of her own to the sixth-graders in two schools in Philadelphia's grittiest neighborhoods: graduate from high school, and she would pay their college tuition. This is the story of the family and traditions that inspired that phenomenal gift, which took 116 boys and girls through six years of public school life on the wings of one woman's determination to make a difference in their lives.