Late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler started to imagine the worlds that would become best-selling books while a Pasadena public school student.
Washington Junior High School was renamed Octavia E. Butler Magnet in 2022, 60 years after she graduated the eighth grade.
Butler’s portrait gazes out at the students from murals above the library, in a second-floor hallway, and from the front of the school. Her legacy is alive in the school’s science-focused curriculum and in the annual SciFi writing contest and festival.
“I want [students] to realize that their ideas matter,” said school librarian Natalie Daily. “I think that Butler is a testament to that, you know, she was writing stuff and thinking about really, really deep ideas when she was a student here.”
Thanks to the author’s meticulous archives, which include her journals, early writings, and even her homework, students learn not just about the award-winning writer’s list of adult accomplishments, but the awkward adolescent who walked the very same halls.
“I did hear that she wasn't very talkative either, and she'd write a lot,” said eighth grader Dayana Diaz. “I felt like that's something we had in common.” Dayana's short story about the cost of war between humans on Mars and Jupiter won the school’s 2022 science fiction contest.
“People didn't believe in her,” Dayana said. “But she still made it either way and that's what I would like to do as well.”
Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, a city shaped by policies and practices that limited where Black, Latino, and Asian people could buy houses, receive health care, eat at restaurants, and attend school.
The city’s libraries became her second home. Butler wrote her first novel from downtown Los Angeles’ Central Library.
“I'm a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries,” she wrote in a 1993 column sounding the alarm about the shrinking access to public literary spaces. “I'm Black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library … At the library, I read books my mother could never have afforded on topics that would never have occurred to her.”
I'm a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries. I'm black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library.
Butler was almost 6 feet tall by the time she was 12 and as anyone who has ever attended middle school knows, being different is not always greeted with kindness.
“She knew what it was like to be what she called the out kid, like the kid on the margins,” said Ayana Jamieson, a scholar of Butler’s life and assistant professor of ethnic studies at Cal Poly Pomona, as well as the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.
Butler’s professional writing career was inspired, in part, by the idea that she could do better than Devil Girl From Mars, a “terrible movie” she watched as a kid.
“I was very lucky to be born just in time for the space race to build public support for education,” Butler said in a 1998 MIT speech. “All of a sudden there were plenty of supplies, for instance, for science education.”
Butler worked and took classes at Pasadena City College.
“I wrote and wrote, and sent things out, and collected rejection slips until I realized that collecting rejection slips was masochistic,” Butler said in the same speech. “And I took the drawer and threw them all out.”
Butler sold her first short story at 23 and when she died in 2006, she’d created a dozen books and several short stories. Her narratives often center on humans trying to figure out how to navigate a dire future that is frightening in its familiarity, rather than its foreignness.
But Jamieson said there is hope in her stories.
“No one has the right answers, but we just have to do our best ... what we can, at the time when we have to make the decisions,” Jamieson said. “I think that's really powerful.”
The board approved the naming of the Octavia E. Butler Library in 2020. Former principal Shannon Malone, who wrote the proposal with librarian Natalie Daily, said it was a “no brainer.”
The reaction from parents was so positive Malone and Daily started to explore changing the school’s name. Institutions everywhere were reckoning with who is memorialized in public spaces and who is not.
“The context of the time made it more important for us to have a school named after someone whose genius started here in the halls,” Malone said. “To recognize someone who represented the community.”
The school’s existing name carried nearly 100 years of history. Washington Junior High School opened in Northwest Pasadena in 1924. Jet Propulsion Laboratory founders Jack Parsons and Edward Forman and baseball player Jackie Robinson are among the school’s earliest alumni.
The school was also at the center of a 1961 lawsuit, in which a judge eventually ruled that district leaders had created boundaries “for the purpose of instituting, maintaining, and intensifying racial segregation at Washington.”
A 1970 U.S. District Court ruling ordered Pasadena Unified to desegregate and students were bused to increase racial diversity. The following exodus of white students to private and charter schools drained resources from the district.
“Part of changing the name of the school was to almost give a reboot to that space for people to remember that, oh, great people have walked through here,” said Malone, who’s now a district administrator overseeing schools from transitional kindergarten to high school.
Education at its best enables us to adapt in creative, positive ways. Education at its best teaches us to go on learning, and thus to deal with whatever the future brings.
Leira Ruperto graduated from what was then Washington Junior High in 2000. Her family still lives within walking distance and her oldest son is in seventh grade this year. She anticipates her three younger sons will follow.
“The schools have changed dramatically from when I was going to school,” Ruperto said. “There's a lot more resources, there's a lot more help for the kids, they do a lot more activities for the kids.”
In 2013, the school adopted a focus on science, technology, engineering, mathematics and art and in 2018 the school started a dual-language Spanish immersion program. There are also accelerated math classes, and a focus on college and career readiness.
While Pasadena Unified, like many Los Angeles school districts, faces declining enrollment, Octavia E. Butler Magnet has attracted 13% more students than five years ago.
California funds schools based on average student attendance, so more students bring more money to a school.
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.”
Ruperto said the new name can help teach students a subtle lesson.
“It's good for them to know like, ‘OK, things don't always last forever,'” Ruperto said. “Sometimes some kids kind of struggle with change.”
Ruperto’s answer recalls the gospel in Parable of the Sower: "All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.”
When Butler died in 2006, she left 398 boxes and 18 oversized folders of journals, manuscripts, notes and other ephemera to the Huntington Library, including many artifacts of her childhood.
At Octavia E. Butler Magnet’s library, students can see her picture in the 1961 yearbook, her eighth grade promotion certificate, assignments, even report cards from her time at the school.
Daily showed them to a student whose grades matched Butler’s at the time— Bs, Cs, and Ds.
“She just goes ‘Well this is very inspiring,’” Daily said. “That's what we're supposed to think. Like just the idea that somebody, she didn't have it all together in middle school yet. Look what she did.”
Daily also said the reports prompt questions about how educators evaluate student success.
“What was she being graded on? Was that appropriate? Was she being graded on the things that made her shine?” Daily said. “Was what she was capable of valued? I think those questions are just as valid.”
There’s also a ranked list of “Favorite Movie Stars.” Nick Adams, was her top-ranked actor— five stars— for his role in the TV western series The Rebel.
We asked students at Octavia E. Butler Middle School to name some of the books that got them hooked on science fiction.
“It just really shows that she was a middle school kid just like any other middle school kid,” Daily said.
There are drafts of short stories Butler wrote on her own time.
In “Evolution,” dated in July 1962, the month after she graduated from middle school, a woman finds a baby in a post-war landscape.
“It had two small hard lumps on its shoulders,” Butler wrote. “Probably some new kind of disease brought on by that war.”
The lumps grow and feathers emerge.
“It was time she thought of something to call it. Years before it would probably have had a name on the day of its birth. Now names did not matter much. There was no time for making friends,” the story continued. “A child with wings though. Such a child. deserved a name. There had been mutations before, but none like this.”
Daily visited the archives at the Huntington and said there’s about a dozen versions of the story.
“There's a lot going on in a kid's mind,” Daily said. “We really need to explore it with them and encourage them to keep pulling those threads.”
Octavia E. Butler Magnet educators are encouraged to weave the author’s work into their classrooms.
Eighth grade English teacher Roslyn Terré, a science fiction lover and aspiring writer, recently assigned students a poem based on one of Butler’s.
“They were able to say things like, ‘I am my power,’ ‘I am great,’ ‘I have skills,’” Terré said. “They each talked about their different talents and then how those talents would take them into the future.”
There's been a lot of like, feeling like I'm not Black enough, if that makes sense. Or like, I'm not enough of what I am. I don't fit into any of the boxes. And so in a lot of Octavia's works, it's quite often about characters who don't really fit into a box.
Eighth grader Brooklyn Roffman started exploring Butler’s work after the library was renamed: First, the graphic novel adaptations of her work, then “the real thing.”
In “Speech Sounds,” a disease wipes out much of humanity and those left struggle to communicate.
“I get a lot of social anxiety, and sometimes I don't really have the right words,” Brooklyn said. “So that, I don't know, felt personal to me.”
Brooklyn describes herself as a mix of African American, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
“There's been a lot of like, feeling like I'm not Black enough, if that makes sense. Or like, I'm not enough of what I am,” Brooklyn said. “I don't fit into any of the boxes. And so in a lot of Octavia's works, it's quite often about characters who don't really fit into a box.”
Daily organizes an annual science fiction contest to honor students’ short narrative, poetry, art, and graphic fiction.
“We don't want them to just be consumers of sci fi, which is awesome,” Daily said. “We also want them to be creators of it.”
Each year, every submission is collected into a book for the students.
The school also holds an annual Science Fiction Festival. This year students could make space-inspired art, code robots, and compete in a cosplay contest.
“It's just ways for kids to be engaged in both science and art, and creation,” Daily said. “To see themselves as part of all of it.”
In one classroom, mycologist Aaron Tupac laid out an array of dried mushrooms for inspection.
“Have ya’ll ever met any mushrooms in your neighborhood?” they asked.
Grayson Schnnitger watched as Tupac zoomed in on the spores of a Turkey Tail specimen with a microscope.
“I haven't ever learned about [mushrooms] before,” Grayson said. “So it was something new.”
Just one example of the middle school exploration, many students were eager to tell LAist about.
Eighth grader Maxine Molnar joined the musical theater club. She’s portrayed Linus in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and a friend to Jasmine in Aladdin.
“I've explored more of, like, what I enjoy doing,” Maxine said. “What I'm really good at and things that I also need to work on.”
Arturo Nuño has learned to code robots in an after-school club — a discovery preceded by an earlier failed after-school experiment. “This is actually a funny story,” Arturo said. “First my mom put me in Glee, but I didn't really like it.”
Sixth grader Naila Walker recently dissected a chicken leg — “It was really gross, but really fun at the same time.”
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