Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 13, 1994 TAG: 9402160335
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I first confronted racism when I was about 13 years old. Before that, I was protected, loved and educated in my community. I was helping my father clean a yard on the other side of town, in South Roanoke, where he often did extra work to take care of a family of eight.
In my neighborhood, he was a giant of a man: loved, respected, admired like most black men of that period. On the other side of town, he was ``Hey, boy'' and sometimes ``Nigger.'' When I witnessed these insults to my father, a hero from my community, I yelled angrily [that] I would never allow anybody to talk to me that way.
The pain in his eyes stare in my mind every day. He said, ``Those names don't define me.'' He said, ``I am doing this so you won't have to. But don't you ever say what you will or won't do until you are responsible for someone other than yourself, especially children.''
That day at 13, I learned what it meant to be black and what it meant to be poor. I could not stop the world from mistreating me because of my skin color, but I could change my economic condition. That day I found out what I had to do. So I got myself a plan and a program.
When I stood straight and tall in Miss [Marie] Gilbert's first-grade class [at Gilmer Elementary School] and, along with 24 other little black boys and girls in racist and brutal times, I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and sang ``America, America, God shed his grace on thee.''
When I volunteered for Vietnam, I went for all Americans.
You see, my community imbued me with both a success mode and a responsibility mode. My material and psychological well-being are no more important than the freedom of all of America's children, irrespective of their ethnicity or economic circumstances.
I am not on this Earth merely to survive, thrive and achieve self-determination for me alone. I am here to enable children to live more fully, with greater vision, with a higher spirit of hope, safety and security. No matter how much I acquire for myself, I am a poor and wretched man if I ever forget my moral and divine purpose.
While I know that all the ills of our country impact in a disproportionate way on poor and black and minority children, I know as well that children from all ethnic groups, all social groups and all economic groups, are in trouble. Their troubles threaten my America in ways much more alarming than the ozone layer, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi or even the savings-and-loan situation. I worry about all the children, quite without regard to their color, because they are America's children.
I was interviewed by a Ph.D. candidate doing a study of college presidents to determine the major factors that brought us to our positions. She was talking about mentors, college grades, experiences at the master's and doctorate level, unique positions in higher education and sponsors.
I said that it was true that I was a magna cum laude graduate from Michigan State, that I was Phi Beta Kappa, that I did very well at UNC-Chapel Hill, that I taught and coached at the Air Force Academy, and that [UNC] President Bill Friday hired me twice, as associate vice president and later as vice president.
However, I said, Miss Gilbert had more to do with my having a Ph.D. than college teachers did. Miss Gilbert was my first-grade teacher. Indeed, Miss Heller, Miss Gilbert, Miss McCain, Miss Bailey, Miss Davies, Miss Allen and Miss Thelma Gun Williams are ahead of all the people who came after them. They were my kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers. If they had not taught me to read, write and to do math, along with self-respect and respect for other people, as well as a commitment to excellence without excuse and the confidence to just do it, the professors at UNC and MSU would not have ever seen me.
Since we did not have all the fluff courses that have been developed so dramatically since 1965, we were well-grounded in basic core courses and in the motivation to excell. A mainstream research scientist has confirmed what our teachers must have known. He has concluded after years of research that black students who end the eighth grade with roughly the same competence in arithmetic as white students and take five high-content math courses, including calculus, score the same on standardized tests as white students.
America tried to define us as uneducable, godless heathens, but the community redefined us with meaning, identity and feeling. We learned such values as service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence, competence and compassion, dignity and determination. We learned that in a real community, power is not determined by who you knock down, but by who you hold up.
I grew up in the community, but the community grew also in me, and has been locked inside me all the time I have been away from this special place. I care about all of America's children, because this community cared first about me. Roanoke's educational problems will not be solved in Washington or even in Richmond, but right here in this community where the children can see and touch you and where you can see and touch the children.
Overachievement was always a principal component of our cultural heritage. Now, black youngsters say that excellence in academics and behavior is only for white children. That is disgraceful.
Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Sojourner Truth, Ben Banneker, Ron McNair and Charles Drew were not trying to be white, just excellent.
Recently, I was privileged to have the opportunity to talk with some of my contemporaries and we were asking how our communities - isolated from America, composed of people who were despised by the very leaders of America, yet able to rear children who were able to help the black community - were able to go into white-controlled areas, institutions, colleges and businesses and perform as well as children of the privileged class - often better.
How were we able to do that? Michigan State had 40,000 white students and 500 black students [when I enrolled]. I did better academically at Michigan State than I did at Addison. Addison was tougher, so I was tougher, competent, arrogant and got all three degrees free, with academic scholarships. The kind of community I am talking about produced doctors and teachers and computer scientists and lawyers and ministers and decent human beings.
How could I ever do less than my best with these people's blood in my veins? I do what I do for children because people like them allowed me to achieve by standing on their shoulders.
My father said, ``Don't get bitter, get better.'' The greatest defense against racism and discrimination is educational and occupational competence.
I tell my black students that I understand the burden they may be carrying, but despite real or imagined maltreatment, our cultural heritage compels us to seek success as the best ``revenge,'' no matter what else may be done to confront racism. Indeed, success is the only lasting revenge that both protects the individual from future abuse and that vindicates the sacrifices our forebearers made so that today we have access to both FSU and Harvard.
The real health of a nation, a state or an individual community is determined by the condition of the children. A nation which neglects or mistreats children is immoral by definition and will not long endure. Nothing we do as a community is so directly connected to our idea of who and what we are and what we want to be than what we do for children in our schools.
Despite the continuing gap between what our nation needs from our schools and what it is getting, I remain convinced that we are fully capable of educating all children who are important to us. The fact is, we know this and know, as well, that we have not done it.
Just as I refuse to acknowledge any kind of inevitable relationship between race and test-taking ability, I reject also the notion that social disadvantages must lead to criminal or other anti-social behavior. The situation is not hopeless just because of poverty, teen-age pregnancy, unemployment, drug abuse, high drop-out rates and other ills. Leaders should not be let off the hook by holding to this notion of inevitability.
What we ought to know is that about 7 percent to 8 percent of the youth commit about 80 percent of the crimes. Yet over-attentiveness to the 8 percent and our ignoring of the vast majority of children who are moving through our schools and neighborhoods as decent, hard-working, law-abiding citizens lead many to conclude that 80 percent of our children are engaged in bad behavior.
All children are born with a capacity for and interest in intellectual excellence, even greatness. They will continue to drive toward challenging academic and social advancement until we as adults do something to throttle their drive.
If children live in a hostile world that sends them mostly signals of their worthlessness, children will begin to doubt the possibility of approval and positive confirmation from this society. So, in a form of self-protection, they pretend that they need and want nothing from the people who run the nation and the schools.
It has become clear that there are three ways that educational excellence can be withheld from children. The first is the legal separation of children into different school buildings and in different school systems with different missions and lower funding. The second is where students are admitted into the same buildings but placed into classes with widely varying levels of content and expectation. The third is to treat students even in the same class in ways that enhance learning in some and discourage learning in others.
According to a study released by MIT, the No. 1 myth in America as pertains to the education of minority youth is that many people in education believe that ``learning is due to innate abilities and minorities are simply less capable of educational excellence than whites.'' Since ``studies controlling for environmental factors repeatedly demonstrate that there is no basis in fact for this assumption,'' the debilitating conditions are social, therefore, and can be controlled by communities and schools.
One study in particular, the High-Scope Perry Project, a 23-year study of black, poor children, is illustrative that such children can become economically self-sufficient, socially responsible, nonviolent adults. In comparison with children who did not get help, the children in the study did 500 percent better in avoiding habitual criminality, 360 percent better in avoiding drug dealing, 663 percent better in earning more than $2,000 a month and 250 percent better in owning their own homes.
Where our children are concerned, we as adults must declare it to be an un-American - indeed, immoral, impractical, illegal and an act of political suicide - to permit any child to grow up poor without adequate child care, health care, food, shelter and safety from neglect, abuse and violence.
We should state in the strongest possible terms that when a child is harmed just because he is African-American, we also are harmed, disrespected and insulted.
Only when we do all these things will we, in my opinion, reflect a commitment to our African-American heritage and only then will the education deprivation equation change fundamentally, massively and forever.
by CNB