After some prodding, the entire class attends the funeral of the mother of a black student. He deviates from the standard curriculum to discuss serious issues with the students: poverty, sex, love and death. He then helps the boy to his feet, and they form a grudging respect. Braithwaite reluctantly puts on boxing gloves and, after being stuck in the face, knocks the wind out of the student. The one boy without a partner is the ringleader of the ruffians. Braithwaite responds, “Is there any young lady present whom you consider unworthy of your courtesies?”Ī turning point comes during a gym class, when the boys pair off to practice boxing. When one boy says he knows the girls too well to be so formal, Mr. Braithwaite tells the students he expects them to act like “ladies and gentlemen.” He imposes a sense of discipline and decorum on his class by insisting that girls be addressed as “Miss” and the boys by their last names. Braithwaite’s somewhat fictionalized account, which was published in Britain in 1959 and in the United States a year later, the students ignore him in the classroom, curse and slam their desktops as he speaks. The school was a laboratory of progressive educational ideas, with corporal punishment strictly prohibited - even though the students were unruly, noisy and coarse. He was the only black teacher on the faculty. George’s in the East - changed to Greenslade Secondary School in “To Sir, With Love” - were a tough lot who had grown up in poverty during and after World War II.

He wrote in his 1972 book “Reluctant Neighbors” that his hopes dwindled, “bit by bit, day by day, into weeks and months, until the only place on the whole arid horizon was a mangy schoolhouse beside a bomb-racked, rotting graveyard, and a smelly classroom with forty-six foul-mouthed youngsters.” “I was too black to be a scientist,” he once said, “and too educated to be a lot of other things.” But, as a black man from what was then the colony of British Guiana, he had difficulty finding work in his field in the early 1950s. Braithwaite was a World War II veteran and trained as a physicist at the University of Cambridge. He lived in Washington and died of a “cardiac-related event,” said his companion, Genevieve “Ginette” Ast.

Braithwaite, a Guyanese author whose book about his experiences as a black man teaching in a largely white school in London, “To Sir, With Love,” became a bestseller and inspired a popular 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier, died Dec.

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite