The Radical Decision That Changed Ian Rowe’s Life: Staying Put
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Ian Rowe grew up in a Jamaican immigrant family that believed deeply in education, hard work, and the promise of America. So when his Queens junior high school rapidly became all black after white families pulled their children out, his parents assumed the better opportunity lay elsewhere.
But twelve-year-old Ian disagreed, and refused to accept the idea that a school automatically became worse simply because the white students had left. For our series with Philanthropy Roundtable, Ian shares the story of his radical decision that shaped and transformed his life for the better.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.2 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, |
| 0:18.6 | the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:22.7 | Up next, a story from our True Diversity series, sponsored by the great folks at the Philanthropy |
| 0:27.8 | Roundtable, America's leading advocate for you to support the causes you believe in. |
| 0:33.5 | Today, we meet a partner of their campaign, Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. |
| 0:40.2 | Let's get into the story. |
| 0:41.9 | Take it away, Ian. |
| 0:46.4 | My parents are from Jamaica West Indies. |
| 0:49.7 | They met in the mid-1950s in England. |
| 0:56.5 | And my mom took a liking to this guy, Vincent. |
| 1:00.5 | My mom's name is Yula. |
| 1:02.5 | And he was working on a sugar plantation. |
| 1:06.3 | He was an accountant there. |
| 1:07.6 | He's very smart. |
| 1:09.1 | And they started dating when they were both very young. |
| 1:12.4 | She was 18. He was just a couple years older. And, you know, this was in Jamaica. So he used to |
| 1:19.5 | pick her up for their dates on horseback. So they had these magical dates and they fell in love with each other. |
| 1:33.3 | And at the time, Jamaica was still an English commonwealth. |
| 1:38.1 | And so my dad felt that he had reached kind of the apex of what he could learn in Jamaica. |
| 1:45.0 | So he had an opportunity to go to England to finish his schooling. |
... |
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