Erin Gruwell

Erin Gruwell decided to become a teacher after witnessing the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and deciding that she wanted to teach young people to react in different ways to anger and frustration. In 1993, she began teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, a school known for its ethnic and racial diversity. After intercepting a racist drawing in her class and discovering that many of her students had never heard of the Holocaust, she devoted her entire curriculum to teaching tolerance. Ultimately, she led her group of 150 “at risk” students to outstanding academic achievement. Through her extraordinary dedication to her students, she transformed a class divided by ethnic tensions into a united group, passionate about history and about making the world a better place. She left high school teaching in 1998, the same year that her students graduated, and began to teach at California State University, Long Beach. Gruwell also created the Freedom Writers Foundation, a non-profit organization that aspires to share the Freedom Writers method with other educators. Under the name “Freedom Writers,” chosen in homage to the historical Freedom Riders civil rights activists who fought against segregation in the American South, Ms. Gruwell’s students wrote about their everyday lives in their diaries, which make up much of the book. Through writing, these students found their voices and were able to share their stories of hardship with each other. Over the course of their four years of high school, their achievements were celebrated by local and national media, and their exceptional fight against intolerance was rewarded by institutions such as the Anne Frank Center USA. In 1999, they were able to publish a selection of the diary entries they wrote during their four years of high school, thereby spreading their personal tales of hardship and success through the rest of the world.