At age 26, Michael Tubbs was elected as the first Black mayor of Stockton, California, making him the youngest-ever mayor of a major city in the United States. Over the next five years, Michael’s political stardom would rise due to his programs like the landmark guaranteed income pilot that would become the basis of dozens of other programs in cities across the country.
Now, at 31, Tubbs is releasing his first-ever memoir, “The Deeper the Roots,” as a deep examination into America’s race and class divide, through the eyes of a young Black man. It delves into his experiences code-switching between being the A-student in the IB program and the kid on the block with the newest Jordans, charts the experiences (like life-changing encounters with Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama) that helped shape his vision for America, and explores his journey from poverty to politics. His reflections are accompanied by his insights into the meaningful actions that political leaders and citizens at large can take to help advance critical issues like poverty alleviation, anti-violence efforts, racism, and criminal justice reform.
In this excerpt, Tubbs details the structural violence and poverty that he witnessed as a teacher in the same community he grew up in. He reflects on some of the students who had a profound impact on him, and explores how teaching allowed him to work through his survivor’s guilt.
First period started at 8:22 a.m., although I could never seem to get there before 8:30 a.m. The girls were screaming with laughter as they entered my classroom even later. I stepped right up to block their path. “Wait. Where are we right now? At the club?”
“Sorry Mr. Tubbs.”
“I appreciate your apology. But when you hit this door, we have to code switch, okay. We’re code switching… performing. We’re going to perform as students for the next hour.”
My students had so much potential, and I viewed part of my role as educator as teaching them ways of being, ways to maintain the essence of who they were while still learning how to read a room and act accordingly. You can be the same, but you can’t act the same everywhere, I told them repeatedly.
Aaliyah was loud, but she was brilliant. She had skipped a grade, and she loved competition, excelling at the quizes I made up that interspersed factual fill-in-the-blanks with naming song lyrics.
I turned to the rest of the students. “In today’s episode of The Wire,” I said with a grin which was my customary way of starting class, “Mr. Tubbs tries to teach his students about.” They didn’t understand the reference, so the joke only landed with me. Eventually I showed them an episode of the Wire Season 4, set in an unruly classroom in Baltimore. They were aghast. “Mr. Tubbs you play too much! We were not that bad not that bad, uh-uh, uh-uh!”
Jesus had also skipped a grade. He was no longer the quiet, athletic sixth grader in my brother’s class, possessed of great potential. Now he was a teenager with a little swagger, always sure to accessorize the school uniform with new Jordans and his Gucci belt. He tried to hide his intelligence, but I knew better. I recognized myself at that age in him, and began to understand why some of my teachers may have found me annoying. The ability to traverse different worlds, the ability to just kick it but also to perform in class—Jesus had that mastered. He was the best basketball player in the school, knew all the pop culture references, listened to exclusively trap Hip Hop and still had straight A’s. I appreciated his balancing act and recognized his hustle. So I put him on notice.
After his first week in my class I pulled him aside. “I’m going to be very unfair to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, because I know what you’re capable of. What’s an A for everyone else, will be a B for you. What won’t give you an A at Stanford, won’t get an A in my class.”
For his first paper in Sociology I gave him a B-. He was devastated. He stayed after class and asked me what he could do to improve. He took in the feedback and got an A on every paper after that. Once, when I was late arriving, I found him leading the class, reviewing the lessons and the reading I had given on police reform and stop and frisk the day before.
Although he hadn’t been at Langston Hughes when I first met his classmates, David became someone I invested a lot of time in. David was white, an Eminem kind of cool in an environment of overwhelmingly classmates of color. He played basketball, he loved hip hop, and loved to share that he only dated girls of color. The class period was never enough, for him; he lingered in my room, asking questions.
“David, bro, I got to go to City Hall.”
“Mr. Tubbs, I just need 30 more minutes.”
I was often late for meetings after school because I was helping David. He was so hungry, so determined, so eager, and I wanted to do everything I could to match his effort with resources.
It turned out that David didn’t have a computer of his own, and was homeless, living out of his car or couch surfing at just 17 years old. I took him under my wing. I marveled at his persistence, his willingness to do his best on the challenging assignments I gave him, his desire to go to college—so much so that I let him take my work laptop, use it for his papers and college applications, and bring it back in time for me to teach the next day. David was special in part because he didn’t try to be Black or Latino. He just was him.
“I’m a product of my environment, a culture of many that makes me who I am,” he explained in his college admissions essay.
None of the cast of characters that starred in my teaching career were more challenging, energizing, and frankly more entertaining than Isaiah. We had connected during my first stint at Langston Hughes, and our bond and struggle continued upon my arrival back. What Isaiah lacked in academic skills, he made up for in street smarts: he was charismatic, popular, and an athlete to boot, even as he navigated a tough home situation as he didn’t know his father at all. But some of his choices would spark major conflict between us.
He was a terrible student—terrible because he had missed some fundamentals along the way, and no one had noticed and stopped and caught him up. He also had trouble focusing; he was lazy with the stuff that didn’t come easy. But he wanted to make me happy, so he made an effort in class. The final term paper was a big deal—eight to twelve pages, half the grade for the class. Isaiah came in with a dilapidated not-even-a-real laptop, one of those children’s toy versions. You would’ve thought he was going for an Academy Award, the way he pulled the thing out his bag and attempted to turn it on, groaning and sighing. I ignored him, angry and amused but not about to validate his performance. As the bell rang I ask if he had his term paper. He brought back the dramatics: “Oh, Mr. Tubbs, I don’t know what happened, my laptop broke.”
“Isaiah. As much time and effort as you spent coming up with this old, dusty laptop, and doing this whole hour long, dramatic monologue about how it doesn’t work, you could’ve written your damn paper, bro. I’m going to give you another week. You need to finish it so you can pass my class.” He wrote his paper, or someone did.
My most serious confrontation with Isaiah happened outside school. Driving past Maya Angelou Library around 10 p.m. one night, on my way home after a long day of teaching and council meetings, I noticed a couple of high schoolers hanging on the corner. Ordinarily, I would have made a note and checked in with the police chief to see what was happening in the area, but one of the students looked familiar.
I knew that hoodie.
Seeing Isaiah on the corner in my council district after he’d taken up so much of my time and care at Langston Hughes was too much, and I pulled over and jumped out the car. “Isaiah?” I said with more bass in my voice than usual. “What are you doing on my corners?”
“Just hanging out, Mr. Tub-Tubbs,” he stumbled, clearly shocked.
I told him how it was in no uncertain terms. “Listen, I don’t need to know what you’re doing, but I tell you this: I’m not going to spend all day teaching you, then spend all night trying to make your city safe, to have you on the corner disrespecting me by standing on this corner doing whatever it is—I think I have an idea. Do you understand me?”
He nodded, sheepishly, avoiding my gaze and glancing towards his friends.
“Let me see you out here again, I guarantee I’ll call the cops. A hundred percent. You know I know the Police Chief personally. I might have him come up and have a conversation with you, Isaiah. I’ll do it with a smile on my face, too. Because this is disrespectful to me and to your future.”
“Ok, Mr Tubbs.” I heard his boys laughing in the distance when I got in the car. “Nah man, That’s Mr. Tubbs. He crazy. But he coo.”
I never saw Isaiah on that corner again.
Teaching was a labor of love, both fulfilling and draining. I thought of my students as peers of my high school self, and wanted to show up for them in ways that I wished my educators had shown up when I were younger. I brought lunches, mentored, attended games, and hosted college admissions workshops. As I had with the Phoenix Scholars during college, I worked intensively with several students on their personal essays, including Anayiah, Jesus and David. It was incredibly gratifying when Anayiah was accepted by both the University of Chicago and Howard with a full scholarship; Jesus was accepted at UC Berkeley with generous financial aid; and David was accepted to UC Santa Cruz. The whole senior class took a trip to Santa Cruz that spring, and I was proud to escort David on a tour of the school with Jesus in tow.
My time at Langston Hughes gave me the space to work directly with students who were contending with the issues that had driven me back to Stockton, namely structural violence and poverty. In my time there, what I had sensed during my first stint became even more apparent: that our kids needed someone to believe in them, to go the extra mile, and that sharing their background and identity helped me to reach and guide them. Teaching also allowed me to work through the survivor’s guilt that still gnawed at me. On many days I felt what I accomplished as a teacher was as at least as meaningful as my work on City Council. On other days, both roles seemed not enough as the challenges still arose, trauma was still ever-present, and roses were still being forced to grow from the toxic environment of concrete.
At the age of 26, Michael D. Tubbs became the youngest Mayor of any major city in American history. Under his stewardship, Stockton was named an “All-America City” in 2017 and 2018, saw a 40 percent drop in homicides in 2018 and 2019, led the state of California in the decline of officer involved shootings in 2019, was named the second most fiscally healthy city in California and one of the top most fiscally healthy cities in the nation. Tubbs currently serves as the Special Advisor to California Governor Gavin Newsom for Economic Mobility and is the founder of End Poverty in California (EPIC). “The Deeper the Roots” is published by An Oprah Book, an imprint of Flatiron Books.
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