Keeping the Promise In his book The Promise, Oral Lee Brown tells how he set out to help one little girl and ended up changing the lives of twenty-three children. She begins her tale with a description of a child whose poverty worried her so much that his face haunted her dreams, and tells how her search for the child led her to Brookfield Elementary where she adopted a first-grade class with the promise to send them all. to college if they graduated from high school. The book discusses the influences in her life that led her to do what she did, as well as the difficulties that came with trying to help so many children with her limited resources. In the first chapter of the book titled “The Education of Oral Lee Brown,” he explains how his early life in rural Mississippi helped shape his later decisions in many ways. In the book she describes how working in the cotton fields with her family taught her discipline and how to get by with very little. It's about Miss Grace, the elementary school teacher who inspired her to seek an education in hopes of a better life. Brown also recounts an incident from her childhood - when the local sheriff beat her brothers and her father decided not to bring charges against him - that had such an impact on her that it changed the way she looked at the state she was in. grown up. as well as his view of his father as a man. Seeing his family's opportunity to make a difference in the community rejected because his father feared the inevitable backlash, Brown and his brothers became angry enough to do whatever it took to leave Mississippi. It also gave her the determination not to miss another opportunity to make a difference in the community...... middle of paper ......ce and in the fight to achieve academic success in inner-city public schools . The book looks beyond the statistics showing the impact of drug trafficking in communities like Oakland and looks at the lives of the families most affected. Although the intention of the book is not to analyze the effects of job losses, teenage pregnancies and lack of parental involvement, it successfully does so and more as it presents the stories of these young people who have had to overcome all these issues and more. . This story should serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to make a difference in their community, as well as anyone who wants to change their situation. Reference Brown, O. & Millner C. (2007). The Promise: How One Woman Kept Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Class of First Graders to College (Kindle ed.). New York, New York: Double Day.