Please scroll on down to the next article on this blog to understand the full context for this article.
My expanding activities in the New Salem Educational Initiative to provide a parallel structure to the Minneapolis Public Schools, from which officials of that school district can extrapolate important principles, gain exemplification in the presentation of my new book Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. In this book, I provide in highly efficient format a fully realized K-12 education, and for that matter cover topics in such a way as to consolidate and complete the education that most university graduates wish they had had.
Hence, as one of the two most important principles of the New Salem Education, I provide in this book the curriculum that the Minneapolis Public Schools should be imparting to their students as recipients of a truly excellent education. And in the September 2014 editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota I detail the other most important component of an excellent K-12 education: teacher training, for the production of the quality of teacher needed to deliver such a challenging and knowledge-intensive curriculum.
Subscribers to my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Vol II., No. 4, October 2015, will recall from the immediately preceding September 2015 edition that my motivation for writing the book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (for which I offer three additional chapters in the October edition), concerns the following:
Whenever I am reading a newspaper or journal article with a student, or training that person to take the SAT or ACT, I always end up giving mini-courses in economics, political science, psychology, history, literature, English usage, the fine arts, or natural science. This is in addition to teaching them most of what they know about math and the skill of reading at advanced levels of comprehension.
I give these mini-courses and teach these skills because the education that students receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools is so insubstantial, a circumstance that pertains to locally centralized school districts in general.
Even in the areas of math and reading, for which student assessments got so embarrassing that even the education establishment started giving belated attention, the United States fares poorly by comparison with other nations on the highly regarded PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
Subscribers to the journal will recall, too, that when reading a substantive article from the newspaper or an ACT practice reading, all kinds of topics are likely to arise. Such topics give rise to questions to my students, as in these examples for the world, American, and African American history chapters included in the most current edition of my academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Vol. II, No. 4, October 2015):
>>>>> You do know essentially what the European Renaissance was about, right?
>>>>>
You have some idea what the Cold War was, and what made it different from
conventional wars, don’t you?
>>>>>
You know that the lands along the eastern United States coast were once British colonies don’t you?
>>>>>
You’ve heard of the New Deal and the Great Depression that induced Franklin
Roosevelt’s policies--- correct?
>>>>>
You know the basic circumstances of the Great Northern Migration, right?
To these questions, as with those mentioned in the September 2015 edition of the journal, I get blank stares that lead me to take a long time just helping students to understand subjects that they should be learning in school.
I mentioned in the September edition of the journal the example of the words “liberal” and “communist” that are layered with meaning:
In the context of the examples given above, how would a student know that the New Deal was the precipitate of contemporary American liberalism--- so very different from the liberalism of Adam Smith--- without my setting the historical context and explaining the many different meanings of the term?
How would a student know that the communism espoused by Karl Marx was distorted under the rule of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders, if I did not provide huge amounts of 19th and 20th century historical and philosophical information needed to comprehend the actual dispute behind the Cold War?
Students should have learned the terms, “liberal” and “communist,” in school, and discussed these words in their different meanings and contexts. But I can never depend on a student of the Minneapolis Public Schools knowing such things, nor can I depend on them knowing those topics given under the arrow-designated questions above: The European Renaissance, Cold War, British colonialism, New Deal, Great Depression, and Northern Migration are deep mysteries to knowledge-starved students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
So all of this got so old that I decided just to haul off and write a book, to be entitled, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education:
This book is now becoming the chief reading text for my students, who are successively moving through the chapters already written, those focused on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, and African American history, literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical)--- with mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics due to follow quickly. That will be fourteen chapters covering the subjects most important to an excellent liberal arts education, of the sort that will send students forth into the world culturally enriched, civically informed, and prepared to pursue specialized training for lives of professional satisfaction.
Readers of the whole book will gain that education that most high school and even most university graduates wish that they had received.
And now my students will know the answers to the questions posed above--- and many more.
In the October edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota I offer to subscribers an advanced look at the three additional chapters of the forthcoming book, those for world history, American History, and African American history--- to go with the chapters on economics, political science, and psychology provided in the September edition of the journal.
Subsequent editions of the journal will feature the eight other substantive chapters.
My intention is to give my most avid readers an exciting journey into a world of knowledge not likely discovered very comprehensively or deeply along educational pathways traversed in the United States--- certainly not in K-12 experiences, and most probably not even at the college and university level, where even good liberal arts colleges leave much untaught, unlearned, and therefore not received as the cultural inheritance that all human beings deserve.
Those of you reading this blog who would like to subscribe to Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota may give me your email address in the “Comments” section below, and I will be in touch.
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 26, 2015
Both the Education Establishment and Most in the Education Change Movement Are Lost and Confused >>>>> We Must Revolutionize K-12 Public Education Ourselves
We can depend on no one who makes her or his living in the institutions of the education establishment of the United States having the correct answers to the dilemmas of K-12 education.
We also cannot depend on most members of the education change movement or on those occupying positions in cultural institutions of the United States: They are all lost and confused.
I am on my own.
And you are on your own--- until you join me as I wage the K-12 revolution.
Three recent occurrences demonstrate the confusion that abides in the education establishment and among cultural arbiters whose programs have implications for K-12 education in the United States.
First, the Obama administration, with Arne Duncan at the helm of the United States Department of Education, has declared that there is too much testing of our K-12 students. The administration professes guilt at having encouraged additional testing in its Race to the Top initiative, which has granted waivers from No Child Left Behind requirements to those states that generate alternative programs for demonstrating ability to hold students to high standards and improve performance of students of color by comparison to their white counterparts. This declaration of a problem with excessive testing and the administration’s culpability has come in confrontation with teachers unions (American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and the state manifestations of the two nationals [as in the case of our hybrid of those two nationals, Education Minnesota]) who abhor any move that holds teachers to performance standards.
Second, Principal Michael Bradley at Roosevelt High School in southeast Minneapolis has prevailed upon central administration officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools to allow him to shift funds from remedial instruction for math and reading to expanded programs in the arts, with the goal of increasing student interest, improving student attendance, and raising graduation rates.
Third, an organization in the American Northwest has gotten heavy funding to rewrite the entire 37 masterworks of Shakespearean drama in language more comprehensible to the contemporary reader--- doing so with more faithful renderings than the No Fear Shakespeare abominations, but nevertheless providing readers with linguistically updated versions for the “difficult passages.”
Now read carefully here as I take you through the problem with all of this:
First, here is the logical thing to do with regard to testing:
By all means continue to teach to the test. We should be testing what students need to know, so teaching to the test is no problem. Designate one test, in Minnesota ideally the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), that will provide the chief measure of student achievement. As teachers teach to the test in math and reading comprehension, they should also be teaching a knowledge-intensive curriculum, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade, to give students a truly excellent education--- and to enrich their vocabulary and knowledge bases in ways that will increase reading comprehension.
Second, with regard to the fine arts versus mathematics and reading:
There is no conflict. Backing off of math and reading instruction is a copout of major proportions, the result of teacher incompetence and curricular deficiencies. Painting, sculpture, and music should be a part of any knowledge-intensive and culturally enriching education. Any educator who maintains that there abides a math and reading versus fine arts clash of educational goals is guilty of the old education establishment ruse of creating false oppositions---- and demonstrating lack of understanding of the purpose of education to prepare students for lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.
Third, with regard to rewriting Shakespeare:
Anyone who endeavors to rewrite the works of the greatest dramatist of the English language is an arrogant fool. The whole joy of becoming adept at reading Shakespeare is being transported into a magnificent world of literary expression that jerks one out of her or his too-oft humdrum banal cultural experiences, into a linguistic world that lifts the soul and engages the brain.
So I’ve gone to work, and you need to as well.
We can never depend on anyone in the education establishment or in the cultural institutions of the general society to articulate what needs to be done in revolutionizing K-12 education in the United States or in promoting enriching cultural experiences. We need to guide educators toward the provision of an academic experience of excellence for all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors, and we ourselves need to advance high standards for American culture.
At many places on this blog, including in some of my most recent articles, I have articulated the knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum that will be necessary to impart an excellent K-12 education to students in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS); and the detailed program of teacher training under the aegis of MPS that will be necessary to secure the level of teaching quality necessary to impart such a curriculum.
I have over the last twenty years, with increasing momentum upon each passing year, created a parallel structure in the New Salem Educational Initiative from which officials at MPS can extrapolate principles for application at the level of the locally centralized school district.
And I have created many different forums--- academic journal, television show, this blog, a new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education)--- along with public commentary at school board meetings and meetings with various MPS personnel--- for the purpose of inducing change at the locally centralized school district.
We can count on no one in the education establishment to articulate a program for the needed overhaul of K-12 education. Arne Duncan, Michael Bradley, and the errant corruptors of Shakespeare serve to demonstrate how members of the education establishment and other shallow thinkers circle back to the same old controversies and make bad decisions anew time after time.
Key members of the education change community are just as lost.
So we must revolutionize K-12 education ourselves, having the guts to impel officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools toward the needed change.
We must act.
I am acting in many ways, every day.
If you sincerely want excellent K-12 education for all of our precious students, you must act as well.
If you'd like some guidance, I am not hard to find.
We also cannot depend on most members of the education change movement or on those occupying positions in cultural institutions of the United States: They are all lost and confused.
I am on my own.
And you are on your own--- until you join me as I wage the K-12 revolution.
Three recent occurrences demonstrate the confusion that abides in the education establishment and among cultural arbiters whose programs have implications for K-12 education in the United States.
First, the Obama administration, with Arne Duncan at the helm of the United States Department of Education, has declared that there is too much testing of our K-12 students. The administration professes guilt at having encouraged additional testing in its Race to the Top initiative, which has granted waivers from No Child Left Behind requirements to those states that generate alternative programs for demonstrating ability to hold students to high standards and improve performance of students of color by comparison to their white counterparts. This declaration of a problem with excessive testing and the administration’s culpability has come in confrontation with teachers unions (American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and the state manifestations of the two nationals [as in the case of our hybrid of those two nationals, Education Minnesota]) who abhor any move that holds teachers to performance standards.
Second, Principal Michael Bradley at Roosevelt High School in southeast Minneapolis has prevailed upon central administration officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools to allow him to shift funds from remedial instruction for math and reading to expanded programs in the arts, with the goal of increasing student interest, improving student attendance, and raising graduation rates.
Third, an organization in the American Northwest has gotten heavy funding to rewrite the entire 37 masterworks of Shakespearean drama in language more comprehensible to the contemporary reader--- doing so with more faithful renderings than the No Fear Shakespeare abominations, but nevertheless providing readers with linguistically updated versions for the “difficult passages.”
Now read carefully here as I take you through the problem with all of this:
First, here is the logical thing to do with regard to testing:
By all means continue to teach to the test. We should be testing what students need to know, so teaching to the test is no problem. Designate one test, in Minnesota ideally the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), that will provide the chief measure of student achievement. As teachers teach to the test in math and reading comprehension, they should also be teaching a knowledge-intensive curriculum, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade, to give students a truly excellent education--- and to enrich their vocabulary and knowledge bases in ways that will increase reading comprehension.
Second, with regard to the fine arts versus mathematics and reading:
There is no conflict. Backing off of math and reading instruction is a copout of major proportions, the result of teacher incompetence and curricular deficiencies. Painting, sculpture, and music should be a part of any knowledge-intensive and culturally enriching education. Any educator who maintains that there abides a math and reading versus fine arts clash of educational goals is guilty of the old education establishment ruse of creating false oppositions---- and demonstrating lack of understanding of the purpose of education to prepare students for lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.
Third, with regard to rewriting Shakespeare:
Anyone who endeavors to rewrite the works of the greatest dramatist of the English language is an arrogant fool. The whole joy of becoming adept at reading Shakespeare is being transported into a magnificent world of literary expression that jerks one out of her or his too-oft humdrum banal cultural experiences, into a linguistic world that lifts the soul and engages the brain.
So I’ve gone to work, and you need to as well.
We can never depend on anyone in the education establishment or in the cultural institutions of the general society to articulate what needs to be done in revolutionizing K-12 education in the United States or in promoting enriching cultural experiences. We need to guide educators toward the provision of an academic experience of excellence for all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors, and we ourselves need to advance high standards for American culture.
At many places on this blog, including in some of my most recent articles, I have articulated the knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum that will be necessary to impart an excellent K-12 education to students in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS); and the detailed program of teacher training under the aegis of MPS that will be necessary to secure the level of teaching quality necessary to impart such a curriculum.
I have over the last twenty years, with increasing momentum upon each passing year, created a parallel structure in the New Salem Educational Initiative from which officials at MPS can extrapolate principles for application at the level of the locally centralized school district.
And I have created many different forums--- academic journal, television show, this blog, a new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education)--- along with public commentary at school board meetings and meetings with various MPS personnel--- for the purpose of inducing change at the locally centralized school district.
We can count on no one in the education establishment to articulate a program for the needed overhaul of K-12 education. Arne Duncan, Michael Bradley, and the errant corruptors of Shakespeare serve to demonstrate how members of the education establishment and other shallow thinkers circle back to the same old controversies and make bad decisions anew time after time.
Key members of the education change community are just as lost.
So we must revolutionize K-12 education ourselves, having the guts to impel officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools toward the needed change.
We must act.
I am acting in many ways, every day.
If you sincerely want excellent K-12 education for all of our precious students, you must act as well.
If you'd like some guidance, I am not hard to find.
Oct 21, 2015
Expanding Activities of the New Salem Educational Initiative: Waging the Revolution in K-12 Public Education >>>>> Creating a Model Central School District in the Minneapolis Public Schools
Over the course of the last 15 months, the activities of the New Salem Educational Initiative have expanded greatly.
This is to communicate essentially that my aspirations to revolutionize K-12 education have taken on new dimensions:
I was already working 19 hours a day, conducting 17 academic sessions per week in seven-day weeks of small group (one-to-five students), superintending the New Salem Tuesday Night Tutoring Program (a more conventional, multi-student program for which I have a staff of wonderful assisting tutors at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church), responding to crisis situations in families and providing on-call academic instruction, mentoring those of my students who have gone on to colleges and universities, and handling all clerical and administrative tasks in behalf of the already multifaceted program of the New Salem Educational Initiative >>>>> curriculum writing, planning for specific academic sessions, development (fundraising), transport of students, mentoring for young people, counseling for families, and functioning as a resource referral for needed social services.
All of this was and is concerned with direct provision of academic and related services to students and families--- now totaling 125 people under my instruction and mentoring. This was and is extraordinarily time consuming, but I decided that doing these things was not enough if I wanted to transform the academic lives and end generational poverty beyond my own students and families directly touched by my own instruction and activity.
That is to convey, I had to make every effort to revolutionize K-12 education by working to overhaul the only viable unit of delivery of K-12 education for the masses of students in our society: The locally centralized school district.
Thus, I have now increased or initiated activity in the following >>>>>
>>>>> pounded out article after article (now totaling 205 articles) on this blog at www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com;
>>>>> made public comment at almost all of the meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, the first Tuesday of each month at the headquarters on West Broadway;
>>>>> inaugurated a monthly academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research From Minneapolis, Minnesota;
>>>>> launched a new television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison (Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN], Channel 17, every Wednesday at 6:00 PM--- and available on YouTube at the site, Holly4Grace)
>>>>> made public speeches in all available venues;
>>>>> met with numerous staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools;
>>>>> and written a now nearly-complete book entitled, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education with introductory and concluding chapters enveloping fourteen subject area chapters: Economics, Political Science, Psychology, World Religions, World History, American History, African-American History, Literature, English Usage, Fine Arts (Visual and Musical), Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
This latter work serves as a model for the Minneapolis Public Schools in making the most of Bernadeia Johnson’s legacy in launching Focused Instruction as conduit for a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum.
I detail the grade-by-grade sequence for delivery of this curriculum in the August 2014 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Articles from Minneapolis, Minnesota; cover training the excellent teachers who will be needed to deliver such a curriculum in the September 2014 edition of the same journal; and detail both these matters of curriculum and teacher training over several episodes of the television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, on MTN Channel 17 and Holly4Grace on YouTube.
Everything that I now do, made possible with many efficiencies that I have developed in those same 19-hour days, is meant to induce officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools to overhaul curriculum and teacher quality so as to become a model locally centralized school district capable of delivering a well-defined excellent education for students of all demographic descriptors.
There is no magic wand to make any of this happen. It takes great knowledge, enormous energy, and very hard work--- the latter of which my West Texas pappy always called “elbow grease.”
No one else can do this work.
Others have failed time and time again.
I must do this, in the spirit of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
And neither can you depend on anyone else:
I always tell people who complain about the government: “You’re complaining about yourself. In a democracy, you are the government.”
Similarly, don’t complain about the quality of K-12 education; rather, you must act. For systems of public K-12 education are by that very definition “public,” and you are the public.
If you truly care about public K-12 education, please take a good look in the mirror, and then get in touch with me.
I could use your help.
I am not hard to find.
I was already working 19 hours a day, conducting 17 academic sessions per week in seven-day weeks of small group (one-to-five students), superintending the New Salem Tuesday Night Tutoring Program (a more conventional, multi-student program for which I have a staff of wonderful assisting tutors at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church), responding to crisis situations in families and providing on-call academic instruction, mentoring those of my students who have gone on to colleges and universities, and handling all clerical and administrative tasks in behalf of the already multifaceted program of the New Salem Educational Initiative >>>>> curriculum writing, planning for specific academic sessions, development (fundraising), transport of students, mentoring for young people, counseling for families, and functioning as a resource referral for needed social services.
All of this was and is concerned with direct provision of academic and related services to students and families--- now totaling 125 people under my instruction and mentoring. This was and is extraordinarily time consuming, but I decided that doing these things was not enough if I wanted to transform the academic lives and end generational poverty beyond my own students and families directly touched by my own instruction and activity.
That is to convey, I had to make every effort to revolutionize K-12 education by working to overhaul the only viable unit of delivery of K-12 education for the masses of students in our society: The locally centralized school district.
Thus, I have now increased or initiated activity in the following >>>>>
>>>>> pounded out article after article (now totaling 205 articles) on this blog at www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com;
>>>>> made public comment at almost all of the meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, the first Tuesday of each month at the headquarters on West Broadway;
>>>>> inaugurated a monthly academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research From Minneapolis, Minnesota;
>>>>> launched a new television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison (Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN], Channel 17, every Wednesday at 6:00 PM--- and available on YouTube at the site, Holly4Grace)
>>>>> made public speeches in all available venues;
>>>>> met with numerous staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools;
>>>>> and written a now nearly-complete book entitled, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education with introductory and concluding chapters enveloping fourteen subject area chapters: Economics, Political Science, Psychology, World Religions, World History, American History, African-American History, Literature, English Usage, Fine Arts (Visual and Musical), Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
This latter work serves as a model for the Minneapolis Public Schools in making the most of Bernadeia Johnson’s legacy in launching Focused Instruction as conduit for a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum.
I detail the grade-by-grade sequence for delivery of this curriculum in the August 2014 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Articles from Minneapolis, Minnesota; cover training the excellent teachers who will be needed to deliver such a curriculum in the September 2014 edition of the same journal; and detail both these matters of curriculum and teacher training over several episodes of the television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, on MTN Channel 17 and Holly4Grace on YouTube.
Everything that I now do, made possible with many efficiencies that I have developed in those same 19-hour days, is meant to induce officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools to overhaul curriculum and teacher quality so as to become a model locally centralized school district capable of delivering a well-defined excellent education for students of all demographic descriptors.
There is no magic wand to make any of this happen. It takes great knowledge, enormous energy, and very hard work--- the latter of which my West Texas pappy always called “elbow grease.”
No one else can do this work.
Others have failed time and time again.
I must do this, in the spirit of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
And neither can you depend on anyone else:
I always tell people who complain about the government: “You’re complaining about yourself. In a democracy, you are the government.”
Similarly, don’t complain about the quality of K-12 education; rather, you must act. For systems of public K-12 education are by that very definition “public,” and you are the public.
If you truly care about public K-12 education, please take a good look in the mirror, and then get in touch with me.
I could use your help.
I am not hard to find.
Oct 15, 2015
A Note to My Readers on My New Book, >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education<, Before Scrolling on Down to the Newest Snippet
A Note to My Readers >>>>>
Immediately following this note, please scroll on down to the newly posted ninth snippet that I have posted on this blog from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. This book provides all of the essential information that a high school student should have as she or he goes forth to live a life of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction. The book covers the subjects of economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. Thus, my readers now have snippets from each of the first nine chapters, with five more to follow.
Many people would be glad to have the amount of knowledge contained within Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education after having graduated from a good university. Neither our high schools nor our universities in the United States are very good at delivering a comprehensive, knowledge-intensive education. Thus, when voters go to the polls, they tend to vote on emotions and impressions, rather than facts or logic; and when people sit down with a newspaper or read articles online, they are typically unequipped to comprehend the history and the context of the articles that they are reading.
The Minneapolis Public Schools and other centralized school districts deliver such terrible education to our K-12 students that I got tired of always having to deliver mini-lectures to my students on all manner of subjects about which they should have learned in school. In the midst of training them to take the ACT or to read a challenging, college preparatory article, I would have to interrupt our flow every few minutes to provide the history and informational context for an important topic covered in the article.
Although terrible, centralized public school systems are the most important unit of delivery of K-12 education. The educational future of the United States does not reside in charter schools, which typically are worse than the conventional schools of our locally centralized school systems. And the notion of vouchers is absurd: Private schools lack curricular continuity from one school to another, and there will never be enough high-quality private schools for the masses of students in the United States to attend.
Thus, we must turn our locally centralized school districts into effective units of delivery of an excellent K-12 education. I am already giving my students a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced K-12 education of excellence in the New Salem Educational Initiative, now enhanced powerfully with the ability to access the efficiently presented information in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. This book is also a guide for the establishment of a logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive education in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), the institutions of which most of my students attend. I will be pressing Interim Superintendent Goar and the MPS Board of Education to deliver an education modeled on the curriculum embedded in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, even as I educate as many students as possible via the Tuesday evening program and the seven-day-a-week small-group program of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Please scroll on down now to read the most recently posted snippet from the book, and then on down further to read the other snippets and other articles on the blog.
Immediately following this note, please scroll on down to the newly posted ninth snippet that I have posted on this blog from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. This book provides all of the essential information that a high school student should have as she or he goes forth to live a life of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction. The book covers the subjects of economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. Thus, my readers now have snippets from each of the first nine chapters, with five more to follow.
Many people would be glad to have the amount of knowledge contained within Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education after having graduated from a good university. Neither our high schools nor our universities in the United States are very good at delivering a comprehensive, knowledge-intensive education. Thus, when voters go to the polls, they tend to vote on emotions and impressions, rather than facts or logic; and when people sit down with a newspaper or read articles online, they are typically unequipped to comprehend the history and the context of the articles that they are reading.
The Minneapolis Public Schools and other centralized school districts deliver such terrible education to our K-12 students that I got tired of always having to deliver mini-lectures to my students on all manner of subjects about which they should have learned in school. In the midst of training them to take the ACT or to read a challenging, college preparatory article, I would have to interrupt our flow every few minutes to provide the history and informational context for an important topic covered in the article.
Although terrible, centralized public school systems are the most important unit of delivery of K-12 education. The educational future of the United States does not reside in charter schools, which typically are worse than the conventional schools of our locally centralized school systems. And the notion of vouchers is absurd: Private schools lack curricular continuity from one school to another, and there will never be enough high-quality private schools for the masses of students in the United States to attend.
Thus, we must turn our locally centralized school districts into effective units of delivery of an excellent K-12 education. I am already giving my students a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced K-12 education of excellence in the New Salem Educational Initiative, now enhanced powerfully with the ability to access the efficiently presented information in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. This book is also a guide for the establishment of a logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive education in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), the institutions of which most of my students attend. I will be pressing Interim Superintendent Goar and the MPS Board of Education to deliver an education modeled on the curriculum embedded in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, even as I educate as many students as possible via the Tuesday evening program and the seven-day-a-week small-group program of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Please scroll on down now to read the most recently posted snippet from the book, and then on down further to read the other snippets and other articles on the blog.
Ninth Snippet from >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< >>>>> Literature >>>>> List of Literary Gems
This is the ninth snippet that I have posted on this blog from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This ninth snippet is taken from Chapter Eight: Literature, in which I discuss forms of literature, including the novel, poetry (including the epic and the sonnet), drama, and essay. I cover literary conventions, poetic devices, constituent elements, and various genres.
Very importantly, in Chapter Eight: Literature, I establish a reading list of classics and literary gems that will serve to guide readers toward the very best literature written across the world and among people of many ethnicities.
This list of classic works of literature and literary gems from many places and peoples is given below as the snippet from my chapter on literature in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education:
I. Classical Greek and Roman Literature; Classics of World Literature; Premodern and Renaissance Classics of Europe; Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature
An excellent education in literature includes classics, works that have been read by literate and intellectually engaged people for many centuries. The student acquiring an excellent education in literature should read as many classic works from each of these categories as possible. In time, the dedicated reader will have read works from each of the major categories: classical Greek literature, classical Roman literature, classics of world literature, premodern and Renaissance classics of Europe, and Shakespearean and Elizabethan literature.
Classical Greek Literature
Aeschylus,
Oresteia
Prometheus Bound
Aristophanes,
The Birds
Lysistratra
Aristotle,
Poetics
Euripides,
The Bacchae
Electra
Medea
Herodotus,
The History
Hesiod,
Works and Days
Homer,
Illiad
Odyssey
Longus,
Daphnis and Chloe
Plato,
Dialogues of Plato
The Republic
Sappho,
Ode to Aphrodite
Seneca,
Thyestes
Sophocles,
Antigone
Oedipus at Colonnus
Oedipus Tyrannus
Unknown Authorship (Greek Literature)
Hercules and His Twelve Labors
Jason and the Golden Fleece
Orpheus and Euridice
Classical Roman Literature
Cicero,
Orations
Horace,
Ars Poetica
Lucretius,
On the Nature of Things
Marcus Aurelius Antoninius,
Meditations
Ovid,
Metamorphses
Vergil,
Aeneid
Classics of World Literature
Lady Shikoku Murasaki,
The Tale of Genji
Matsuo Basho,
The Poetry of Basho
Cao Xueqin,
Dream of the Red Chamber
Valmiki,
Ramayana
Unknown Authorship (Classical World Literature)
Arabian Nights
Beowulf
Epic of Gilgamesh
Everyman
Hercules and the Twelve Labors
Mahabharata/ Bhagavad Gita
Premodern and Renaissance Classics of Europe
Giovanni Boccaceio,
The Decameron
Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy
Gottfried von Strasburg,
Tristan and Iselda
Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
The Discourses
Sir Thomas Malory,
Le Morte d’Arthur
John Milton,
Aerogitica
Lyric Poetry of John Milton
Moliere,
The Misanthrope
Pascal,
Pensees
Francois Rabelais,
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queen
Wolfram von Eschenbach,
Parcival
Shakespearean and Elizabethan Literature
Ben Jonson,
The Alchemist
Volpone
Christopher Marlowe,
Doctor Faustus
William Shakespeare,
Tragedies
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
Merchant of Venice
Richard III
Romeo and Juliet
Comedies
Comedy of Errors
Measure for Measure
Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter’s Tale
Histories
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Richard II
II. Modern and Contemporary British and American Literature
Note: African American literature and other literature from key ethnic groups in the United States are given special emphasis in the next section.
An excellent education in literature includes reading works such as those in this section emphasizing the highest quality works to emanate from the British Isles and North America during post-Renaissance modernity, with an emphasis on classics produced from the late 17th century through our own period (the post-World War II era properly classified as “contemporary history”).
High-quality literature from prominent ethnic groups in the United States would be included in this section but are instead given special attention in the next section, appearing therefore in the list subsequent to the one given here.
Fictional Prose
Hans Christian Anderson,
Fairy Tales
Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso
Jane Austen,
Emma Pride and Prejudice
Balzac, Honore de,
Eugene Grandet
Perre Goriot
Arnold Bennett,
The Old Wives’ Tale
Charlotte Bronte,
Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte,
Wuthering Heights
Pearl Buck,
The Good Earth
Albert Camus,
The Plague
Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Willa Cather,
Death Comes to the Archbishop
My Antonia
James Fenimore Cooper,
The Last of the Mohicans
The Pioneers
Stephen Crane,
Red Badge of Courage
Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens,
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Nicholas Nickelsby
Pickwick Papers
Tale of Two Cities
Oliver Twist
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky,
Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
The Possessed
Alexander Dumas,
Count of Montecristo
George Elliot,
Middlemarch
Silas Marner
William Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom!
As I Lay Dying
A Fable
The Sound and the Fury
Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary
E. M. Forster,
A Passage to India
Anatole France,
Penguin Island
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Faust
Nikolai Gogol,
Dead Souls
“The Overcoat”
Kuut Hamsun (Kuut Pedersoen),
The Hunger
Thomas Hardy,
Jude the Obscure
Return of the Native
Tess of d’Ubervilles
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
House of the Seven Gables
The Scarlet Letter
Ernest Hemingway,
Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea
Victor Hugo,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Les Miserables
Washington Irving,
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
“Rip Van Winkle”
Henry James,
Ambassadors Golden Bowl
Portrait of a Lady
Turn of the Screw
James Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Franz Kafka,
The Trial
The Castle
Rudyard Kipling,
Kim
D. H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers
Sinclair Lewis,
Main Street
Thomas Mann,
Buddenbrooks
Death in Venice
Magic Mountain
Herman Melville,
Benito Cereno
Billy Budd, Foretopman
Moby Dick
George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Edgar Allan Poe,
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Ligeia”
Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past
Alexander Pushkin,
The Captain’s Daughter
Eugene Onegin
Jean Paul Sartre,
Nausea
Sir Walter Scott,
Ivanhoe
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Frankenstein
John Steinbeck,
East of Eden
Grapes of Wrath
Lawrence Stern,
Tristam Shandy
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Kidnapped
"Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
Treasure Island
Bram Stoker,
Dracula
Jonathon Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels
William Makepeace Thackeray,
Vanity Fair
Leon Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
Anthony Trollope,
Barchester Towers
Ivan Turgenev,
Fathers and Sons
Mark Twain,
Adventures of Huck Finn
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Life on the Mississippi
Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Voltaire,
Candide
H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine
Edith Wharton,
Ethan Frome
Emile Zola,
Germinal
Drama
Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot
Pedro de la Barca,
Life is a Dream
Anton Chekhov,
Three Sisters
Oliver Goldsmith,
She Stoops to Conquer
Henrik Ibsen,
A Doll’s House
Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman
The Crucible
Eugene O’Neill,
Mourning Becomes Electra
Long Day’s Journey into Night
August Stringberg,
The Father
Miss Julie
Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest
Poetry (including epics)
Charles Baudelaire,
Flowers of Evil
William Blake,
The Poetry of William Blake
Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Robert Browning,
Monologue and Lyrics of Browning
John Bunyan,
Pilgrim’s Progress
George Gordon Byron,
Don Juan Lyric
Poetry of Lord Byron
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Emily Dickenson,
The Poetry of Emily Dickenson
John Donne,
The Poetry of John Donne
T. S. Elliot,
Four Quartets
Wasteland
Robert Frost,
The Poetry of Robert Frost
Edgar Lee Masters,
Spoon River Anthology
Ezra Pound,
Cantos
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound
Dylan Thomas,
Collected Poems
Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
William Butler Yeats,
The Poetry of Yeats
Nonfiction
Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica
Henry Adams,
Education of Henry Adams
St. Augustine (Augustinius Aurelius),
Confessions
Sir Francis Bacon,
New Atlantis
James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson. LL. D
Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of the Species
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Essays of Emerson
Benjamin Franklin,
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
Edward Gibbon,
History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire
David Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
William James,
Pragmatism
Carl Jung,
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason
Soren Kierkegaard,
Sickness and Death
John Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Two Treatises on Government
Karl Marx,
Das Kapital
Communist Manifesto
John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty
Michel Eyquem Montaigne,
Essais (Essays)
Sir Thomas More,
Utopia
Friedrich Willem Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
Thomas Paine,
Age of Reason
Common Sense
The Rights of Man
Alexander Pope,
Essay on Man
George Santayana,
Skepticism and Animal Faith
Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations
Henry David Thoreau,
The Essays of Thoreau (especially, “Civil Disobedience”)
Walden
Alexis de Toqueville,
Democracy in America
William Butler Yeats,
Autobiography of William Butler Yeats
Medieval and Early Modern Classics of Unknown Authorship
Lazarillo de Tormes
The Nibelungenlied
Poem of the Cid
Reynard the Fox
Robin Hood’s Adventures
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Song of Roland
III. African American Literature and the Literature of Other Major Ethnic Groups in the United States
An excellent education in literature includes reading works such as these African American, Native American, Hispanic American, and Asian American literary gems. Readers should read as many of the following works as possible, with high rewards coming from judicious selections in each of the major ethnic groupings of literature.
African American Literature
Maya Angelou,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Poetry of Maya Angelou
James Baldwin,
Go Tell It On the Mountain
The Fire Next Time
Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones),
Dutchman
Gwendolyn Brooks,
A Street in Bronzeville
Countee Cullen,
On These I Stand
Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
Lyrics of a Lonely Life
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
Nikki Giovanni,
Black Talk, Black Feeling, Black Judgment
Alex Hayley,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told to Alex Hayley)
Roots
Langston Hughes,
Selected Poems
Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
James Weldon Johnson,
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (poem and anthem)
Claude McKay,
The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry
Terry McMillan,
Waiting to Exhale
Toni Morrison,
Beloved
Gloria Naylor,
The Ballad of Brewster Place
Sonia Sanchez,
A Blue Book for a Black Magical Woman
Ntozake Shange,
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
Jean Toomer,
Cane
Gustavus Vassa,
The Interesting Narrative and Life of Olouda Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (Oloudah Equiano)
Alice Walker,
The Color Purple
Phillis Wheatley,
Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral
August Wilson,
Fences
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Piano Lesson
Richard Wright,
Native Son
Native American Literature
Paula Gunn Allen,
“Powwow 79, Durango” (poem)
Louis Erdich,
Love Medicine
Barry Milliken,
“Run” (short story)
Leslie Marmon Silko,
Ceremony
Mary TallMountain,
“Grease 9” (poem)
“Indian Blood” (poem)
Hispanic American Literature
Rudolf A. Anaya,
Bless Me, Ultima
Gloria Anzaldua,
This Bridge Called My Back
Alberto Alvaro Rios,
Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses
Gary Soto
Living Up the Street (poetry collection)
Helena Maria Viramontes,
”Growing” (short story)
Asian American Literature
Bharati Mukherjee,
“Orbiting” (short story)
David Mura,
After We Lost Our Way (poetry collection)
Maxine Hong Kingston,
Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Amy Tan,
The Joy Luck Club
Hisaye Yamamoto,
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (short story collection)
Oct 13, 2015
Eighth Snippet from >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education >>>>> English Usage >>>>> Parts of Speech
Note to readers >>>>>
So terrible is the education that our children receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools that I am writing a book to deliver the education that they should receive, moving through this book with my own students and offering it to others who want their children to receive an excellent, knowledge-intensive K-12 education.
I have found that in training my students for the ACT and in reading many kinds of literature, they have no sense at all of English usage--- because this important aspect of an excellent K-12 education gets short shrift, if indeed it gets any attention at all.
You may scroll down my blog for seven other snippets from my new book.
What follows is a snippet from Chapter Nine: English Usage, from this new book, my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education:
Fundamentals of English Usage >>>>>> Parts of Speech
Nouns
Definitiion >>>>> Words for persons, places, things, and conditions.
Two Types
1. Common nouns >>>>> names for general categories of items, without additional specificity or branding
Examples >>>>> apple, girl, car, restaurant, cereal Note: Nouns that identify conditions include the following: caution , marriage, residency, fate, and intelligence
2. Proper Nouns >>>>>> names for specific people and items, as in the names of people and brands
Examples >>>>> Red Delicious Apples, Angelic (Angelique), Honda, Raisin Bran, Target
Pronouns
Definition >>>>> words that take the place of a nouns in a sentences.
Three Types >>>>>
1. Subject pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that occupy the place of a subject in a sentence
Examples >>>>> He, she, we, they, you, it
Example sentences >>>>>
1) He seems to have decided to go fishing today.
2) She said that she would be here in an hour.
3) We are thinking of going to Mexico this summer.
4) They ran the best race of their lives.
5) You may come with us if you’d like to see the new library.
6) It came and went before I could identify it clearly.
2. Object pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that occupy the place of an object in a sentence
Examples >>>>> Him, her, us, them, you, it
Example sentences >>>>>
7) I’d like to go fishing with him today.
8) Please get this to her as soon as possible.
9) She ran with us all of the way from my house to the park.
10) She showed a lot of respect for them in her choice of words.
11) They were so happy when they found it.
3. Possessive pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that signify items belonging to someone.
Examples >>>>> His, her, our, their, your, its
Example sentences
12) His mother is so nice.
13) Do you have any idea if this is her backpack?
14) I hope that you’ll go with our family to Mexico this summer.
15) Their pride was obvious when she told them about her acceptance to the university.
16) Your essay was the best in the class.
17) Please put everything in its proper place.
Verbs
Two ways of classifying verbs >>>>>
1) Action versus State of Being
Action Verbs are verbs such as run, drive, climb, talk, and maneuver that convey motion and activity.
State of Being Verbs that link the subject of a sentence to the predicate but do not convey motion or activity; such verbs include is, are, were, was, and become.
Note: There is a special kind of adjective called a predicate nominative that follows a state of being verb in constructions such as the following:
You are kind to say so. Natasha is generous in every way.
2) Transitive versus Intransitive >>>>>
Transitive Verbs take direct objects as with the following:
She wound up and threw the ball. ("Ball" is the direct object)
Intransitive Verbs do not take direct objects, but rather appear as follows:
Water evaporates quickly in the desert.
Adjectives describe nouns, as in the following examples: delicious meal; brilliant analysis; exquisite gem; huge boulder; slow walk
Adverbs describe verbs and other adverbs, as in the following examples: quickly ran; softly sings; heavily breathe; very artfully; extremely carefully
Prepositions convey a sense of where something is positioned and include words such as in, out, under, over, through, from, to, and with
Articles are typically short words that precede nouns such as in the following examples: A book; an apple; the cpmputer; this plate; that car; those people
Note: The article, "an" appears before vowels, whereas the article,"a," appears before consonants.
So terrible is the education that our children receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools that I am writing a book to deliver the education that they should receive, moving through this book with my own students and offering it to others who want their children to receive an excellent, knowledge-intensive K-12 education.
I have found that in training my students for the ACT and in reading many kinds of literature, they have no sense at all of English usage--- because this important aspect of an excellent K-12 education gets short shrift, if indeed it gets any attention at all.
You may scroll down my blog for seven other snippets from my new book.
What follows is a snippet from Chapter Nine: English Usage, from this new book, my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education:
Fundamentals of English Usage >>>>>> Parts of Speech
Nouns
Definitiion >>>>> Words for persons, places, things, and conditions.
Two Types
1. Common nouns >>>>> names for general categories of items, without additional specificity or branding
Examples >>>>> apple, girl, car, restaurant, cereal Note: Nouns that identify conditions include the following: caution , marriage, residency, fate, and intelligence
2. Proper Nouns >>>>>> names for specific people and items, as in the names of people and brands
Examples >>>>> Red Delicious Apples, Angelic (Angelique), Honda, Raisin Bran, Target
Pronouns
Definition >>>>> words that take the place of a nouns in a sentences.
Three Types >>>>>
1. Subject pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that occupy the place of a subject in a sentence
Examples >>>>> He, she, we, they, you, it
Example sentences >>>>>
1) He seems to have decided to go fishing today.
2) She said that she would be here in an hour.
3) We are thinking of going to Mexico this summer.
4) They ran the best race of their lives.
5) You may come with us if you’d like to see the new library.
6) It came and went before I could identify it clearly.
2. Object pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that occupy the place of an object in a sentence
Examples >>>>> Him, her, us, them, you, it
Example sentences >>>>>
7) I’d like to go fishing with him today.
8) Please get this to her as soon as possible.
9) She ran with us all of the way from my house to the park.
10) She showed a lot of respect for them in her choice of words.
11) They were so happy when they found it.
3. Possessive pronouns >>>>> Pronouns that signify items belonging to someone.
Examples >>>>> His, her, our, their, your, its
Example sentences
12) His mother is so nice.
13) Do you have any idea if this is her backpack?
14) I hope that you’ll go with our family to Mexico this summer.
15) Their pride was obvious when she told them about her acceptance to the university.
16) Your essay was the best in the class.
17) Please put everything in its proper place.
Verbs
Two ways of classifying verbs >>>>>
1) Action versus State of Being
Action Verbs are verbs such as run, drive, climb, talk, and maneuver that convey motion and activity.
State of Being Verbs that link the subject of a sentence to the predicate but do not convey motion or activity; such verbs include is, are, were, was, and become.
Note: There is a special kind of adjective called a predicate nominative that follows a state of being verb in constructions such as the following:
You are kind to say so. Natasha is generous in every way.
2) Transitive versus Intransitive >>>>>
Transitive Verbs take direct objects as with the following:
She wound up and threw the ball. ("Ball" is the direct object)
Intransitive Verbs do not take direct objects, but rather appear as follows:
Water evaporates quickly in the desert.
Adjectives describe nouns, as in the following examples: delicious meal; brilliant analysis; exquisite gem; huge boulder; slow walk
Adverbs describe verbs and other adverbs, as in the following examples: quickly ran; softly sings; heavily breathe; very artfully; extremely carefully
Prepositions convey a sense of where something is positioned and include words such as in, out, under, over, through, from, to, and with
Articles are typically short words that precede nouns such as in the following examples: A book; an apple; the cpmputer; this plate; that car; those people
Note: The article, "an" appears before vowels, whereas the article,"a," appears before consonants.
Oct 12, 2015
Three Historical Approaches to the Attainment of Full Citizenship Rights for African Americans, with Fruition to Come in the K-12 Revolution
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey were three giants of African American leadership in the late 19th century and the early 20th century; they offer supreme contrasts in the pursuit of full citizenship rights for African America that endured as motifs of the 20th century:
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a slave on a small plantation in Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, he secured the friendship of benevolent whites in his home state (especially in the General Lewis Rutherford family, for whom he served as houseboy), learned to read and write, and trained at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced by the institution’s director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the improvement of African American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality, character, and proficiency in the manual trades. In 1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the recommendation of General Armstrong, tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, established with a curriculum very similar to that at Hampton. As an advocate of what may be called the gradualist approach, Washington counseled African Americans to forego the pursuit of full political and social rights and to accept segregation for the time being, taking training as bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone masons so as to thrive economically on the basis of terms laid down by Jim Crow. He thus advised his fellows to build thriving communities of black citizens capable of convincing even the heaviest doubters and most virulently racist in white society of their diligence and trustworthiness. The gradualist approach articulated by Washington urged African Americans to get a good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate solid citizenship and to go about their lives in ways that converted whites to friendship over time, and thus through self-help to be so successful as to undermine the assumptions of Jim Crow and to eventually end the system of that venal creature.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) came of age in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888) at Fisk University, in Nashville, and then came back to New England to study at Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned another B. A. (1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great Barrington and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Du Bois in both cases operated on Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation of an optimistic integrationist doctrine. Du Bois was the leader of the Niagara Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905. Key participants in this meeting went on to found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights, especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose, the NAACP established the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still haunting the southern landscape. The integrationist ideas of W. E. B. DuBois motivated and catalyzed all of these activities. W. E. B. DuBois and all of those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all of its dimensions: political, economic, and social. DuBois had a major platform for advancing his ideas as head of the NAACP and as editor of Crisis.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The latter was a stonemason who seemingly was descended from the Maroons, the African slaves who escaped and successfully defended themselves against Spaniards and the British in the 17th century. Marcus the son took great pride in the Maroon heritage of Marcus the father. Faced with financial difficulties, Garvey had to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter educating himself through hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and South America. During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London, meeting people from the African continent for the first time and coming under the influence of the Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali. In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s publications, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his association with his mentor’s views. He also gained great inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he found in his initial encounter with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. In 1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to Jamaica and formed an all-black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his residence and place of operations to New York in 1917. Garvey advanced the view that there was no use in trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because almost all white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. People in the Americas of African descent should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation within a nation economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to Africa. Garvey published his ideas in the UNIA’s journal, Negro World, launched numerous programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line of ships for transporting people across the Atlantic who sought return to Africa, and in 1920 Garvey led the first UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. A subcommittee from among the 25,000 attendees issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World. Amid controversy over the handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line, the United States government deported Garvey back to Jamaica; from there Garvey traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas until the end of his days in 1940.
These, then, were the three key approaches to attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the United States: gradualist, integrationist, and nationalist:
Washington’s ideas over time were absorbed by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of the gradualist self-help approach into their advocacy.
The other two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the achievement of African American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s:
The integrationist approach would be that followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement as led by Martin Luther King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and the Black Panthers.
From the 1980s until the present year of 2015, advocates of black nationalism persisted in their views and activities; those favoring the integrationist approach, though, proved capable of absorbing the ideas of black pride, self-help, and group solidarity in advancing the cause of citizenship for African Americans in all dimensions: political, economic, and social.
But that approach will never come to fruition until we get K-12 education right.
A program of action on how to do that is offered in the many articles of this blog.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a slave on a small plantation in Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, he secured the friendship of benevolent whites in his home state (especially in the General Lewis Rutherford family, for whom he served as houseboy), learned to read and write, and trained at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced by the institution’s director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the improvement of African American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality, character, and proficiency in the manual trades. In 1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the recommendation of General Armstrong, tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, established with a curriculum very similar to that at Hampton. As an advocate of what may be called the gradualist approach, Washington counseled African Americans to forego the pursuit of full political and social rights and to accept segregation for the time being, taking training as bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone masons so as to thrive economically on the basis of terms laid down by Jim Crow. He thus advised his fellows to build thriving communities of black citizens capable of convincing even the heaviest doubters and most virulently racist in white society of their diligence and trustworthiness. The gradualist approach articulated by Washington urged African Americans to get a good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate solid citizenship and to go about their lives in ways that converted whites to friendship over time, and thus through self-help to be so successful as to undermine the assumptions of Jim Crow and to eventually end the system of that venal creature.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) came of age in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888) at Fisk University, in Nashville, and then came back to New England to study at Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned another B. A. (1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great Barrington and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Du Bois in both cases operated on Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation of an optimistic integrationist doctrine. Du Bois was the leader of the Niagara Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905. Key participants in this meeting went on to found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights, especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose, the NAACP established the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still haunting the southern landscape. The integrationist ideas of W. E. B. DuBois motivated and catalyzed all of these activities. W. E. B. DuBois and all of those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all of its dimensions: political, economic, and social. DuBois had a major platform for advancing his ideas as head of the NAACP and as editor of Crisis.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The latter was a stonemason who seemingly was descended from the Maroons, the African slaves who escaped and successfully defended themselves against Spaniards and the British in the 17th century. Marcus the son took great pride in the Maroon heritage of Marcus the father. Faced with financial difficulties, Garvey had to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter educating himself through hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and South America. During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London, meeting people from the African continent for the first time and coming under the influence of the Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali. In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s publications, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his association with his mentor’s views. He also gained great inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he found in his initial encounter with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. In 1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to Jamaica and formed an all-black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his residence and place of operations to New York in 1917. Garvey advanced the view that there was no use in trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because almost all white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. People in the Americas of African descent should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation within a nation economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to Africa. Garvey published his ideas in the UNIA’s journal, Negro World, launched numerous programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line of ships for transporting people across the Atlantic who sought return to Africa, and in 1920 Garvey led the first UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. A subcommittee from among the 25,000 attendees issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro People of the World. Amid controversy over the handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line, the United States government deported Garvey back to Jamaica; from there Garvey traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas until the end of his days in 1940.
These, then, were the three key approaches to attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the United States: gradualist, integrationist, and nationalist:
Washington’s ideas over time were absorbed by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of the gradualist self-help approach into their advocacy.
The other two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the achievement of African American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s:
The integrationist approach would be that followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement as led by Martin Luther King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and the Black Panthers.
From the 1980s until the present year of 2015, advocates of black nationalism persisted in their views and activities; those favoring the integrationist approach, though, proved capable of absorbing the ideas of black pride, self-help, and group solidarity in advancing the cause of citizenship for African Americans in all dimensions: political, economic, and social.
But that approach will never come to fruition until we get K-12 education right.
A program of action on how to do that is offered in the many articles of this blog.
Oct 9, 2015
How We Got to Where We Are Today in the Inner Cities of the United States >>>>> Part Two >>>>> The Great Northern Migration
Note to My Readers >>>>> Please notice that this is the second article posted at about the same time, a companion to the one immediately below as you scroll on down the blog. These articles are a two-part posting explaining how we got to the point where we are now in terms of the dilemmas faced by African Americans living at the urban core. In many other places on my blog, I discuss what we need to do to address those dilemmas, explaining that the program for action resides in the first-ever provision of a knowledge-rich K-12 education delivered by teachers possessing legitimate master's degrees (in fields of discipline other than education: no M. Ed.'s) and the pedagogical ability to impart their knowledge to all students.
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Before the Great Northern Migration that began in earnest about 1915, there had already been a trend toward movement of African Americans out of the South. Much of this movement was westward, onto the Great Plains, where Native Americans typically welcomed fellow people of color with a knowledge of English; and to Texas and onward through the southwest to California. In all of these places, African Americans worked with horses, took jobs as agricultural laborers, bought property, started small businesses, and gained the training necessary to enter the professions.
Hundreds of African Americans responded to the flyers of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who touted the abundance of jobs in “Sunny Kansas.” Known as “exodusters,” those responding to the message of Singleton 27 eventually landed not only in Kansas but also in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In the latter, black pioneers established the famous towns of Boley and Langston, and also those of Arkansas Colored, Bailey, Bookertee, Canadian Colored, Ferguson, Liberty, Lincoln City, Overton, Summit, Tullahassee, and Wild Cat.
Out on the plains, Nat Love (1854-1921) and Bill Pickett (1860s-1932) gained fame as cowboys:
Love was an expert with the rifle, the rope, and the Spanish language. He eventually published a memoir entitled, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in Cattle Country as Deadwood Dick.
Pickett was a master of many skills of the cowboy, gaining particular fame for his superior technique in steer wrestling. Such was his fame that in 1914 he was invited to perform for King George V and Queen Mary of England; and in 1954 he was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame (Oklahoma City), the first African American to be so honored.
Also gaining fame on the Great Plains were the Buffalo Soldiers, the name given to the African American Ninth and Tenth United States Army Regiments by Native Americans, who likened them to their sacred Buffalo. Amidst numerous ironies and a certain pathos, the Buffalo Soldiers worked skillfully to protect mostly white settlers who wanted to establish ranches and farms on the prairies and plains of the Midwest and West. The Buffalo Soldiers also erected forts, escorted trains, accompanied stage coaches, protected cowboys on cattle drive, mapped new areas for settlement, and built new roads. They had a hand in capturing both Billy the Kid and Geronimo, and they pursued the latter’s tough and determined Apache people over many years.
In addition to the particular enthusiasm for moving westward and southwestward from the South, a yearning abided among African Americans to move northward, as they had done as individuals and in small groups since the days of the Underground Railroad. Both the fierceness of racism in the South in late 19th century and the early 20th century; and the difficulty life in the context of a rigged economic system; catalyzed the movement North:
African Americans in the rural South mostly eked out a living from the meager returns of sharecropping. Many were not even settled enough to root themselves in a sharecropper’s existence; a great number of blacks roamed the countryside from farm to farm taking temporary jobs working in the fields for as little as $60 and seldom more than $180 per year. In the cities, African Americans hired out as carpenters, earning somewhere between $0.75 and $1.25 per hour, or as cooks earning an average $5.00 per month in 1902. African Americans also tended to work as janitors, chauffeurs, stonemasons, and barbers.
A small but very influential black middle class did form in the urban areas of the South by the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century. African Americans thrived best in fields eschewed by whites, or businesses in which whites could not or would not serve black customers. Hence, the fields of insurance, undertaking, banking, cosmetics, and personal grooming attracted African American entrepreneurs, some of whom built up sizable fortunes by seizing the thread of opportunity available to them.
Urban life in the North beckoned to increasing numbers of Americans of all ethnicities at the dawn of the 20th century. The iron and steel industries were booming, and these attracted white and black Americans, and immigrants from the various countries of Europe. African Americans faced heavy discrimination when they filed for union membership, so they were left to scramble for jobs as construction workers, doormen, and sleeping car porters, for which the competition with whites was not so fierce.
But when the black worker did manage to land a job such as a meatpacker in one of the factories of the North, the wage differential between southern rural and agricultural employment and northern industrial labor could result in glowing letter sent back home, extolling economic opportunities of the North and raising the expectations of friends and family members who might themselves be persuaded to make the move northward.
In the years after 1910, African Americans moved from the rural South to the nindustrial North in unprecedented numbers. Between 1915 and 1930, about one million black people migrated from the South to the North. New efficiencies in the burgeoning industries of the North created jobs that drew African Americans to cities that, according to the reports of loved ones and friends who had pioneered the migration, offered wages and a social atmosphere making possible lives of prosperity and freedom that were clearly denied to African Americans living in the Jim Crow South.
During the second and into the third decade of the 20th century, the industrial and service economies of northern cities absorbed into their work forces the labor of these African American migrants, who took their positions alongside Italian, Irish, Russian, and Eastern European immigrants who also flocked to the American North during these years. For these immigrants and for African Americans of the Great Northern Migration, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis were among the most popular destinations.
In 1920 in Chicago jobs as laborers (5,300), iron and steel workers (3,201), railway porters (2,540), waiters (2,315), porters in domestic or personal service (2,139), male servants (1,942), building or general laborers (1,835), janitors (1,822), non-store clerks (1,659), semiskilled slaughter and packinghouse house workers (1,490), and laborers, porters, and helpers in stores (1,210) proved to offer the best chances for African Americans looking for jobs. Others worked as tailors (371), house painters (286), carpenters (275), musicians or music teachers (254), clergy officials or pastors (215), coopers (148), plumbers (105), and lawyers (95).
Earning higher wages than they had ever earned before, and dwelling in an atmosphere that seemed freer and less overtly bigoted than that of the South, African Americans at first found their northern environs a seductive alternative to the formal restrictions of the Black Codes and the violent hatred of the vigilantes. But over time, African Americans dwelling in the urban North found whites guilty of subtle and insidious forms of racism that in the course of the 20th century caused African Americans as much misery as they had known in the frankly brutal South.
The frustration that African Americans came to feel as second-class citizens in a region to which they had come with so much hope became one of the most regrettable motifs in 20th century United States history; in time, that motif and those frustrations became manifest in the lives of the African American underclass living at the urban core, especially in in the inner cities of the North.
>>>>>
Our system of K-12 education has never properly served African Americans living at the urban core.
As middle class whites and blacks departed for the suburbs in the course of the 1970s and beyond, those who were left behind constituted the poorest of the poor. Our systems of public education, already wretched by international standards, were overwhelmed. For at least 35 years the Minneapolis Public Schools and other urban systems of public K-12 education have failed our students miserably.
The problem is us, the citizenry. We have not cared enough to think through what must me done to transform failing systems of K-12 education.
We will get nothing right until we provide young people living in our inner cities a knowledge-rich education, imparted by knowledgeable and pedagogically skilled teachers.
The time is now.
We must provide such an education via the conduit of locally centralized systems of public K-12 education.
I am exerting every effort, by all the means at my disposal, to make this happen.
How We Got to Where We Are Today in the Inner Cities of the United States >>>>> Part One >>>>> The Jim Crow South
Throughout the southern states, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops according to the Compromise of 1877, legislatures moved quickly to establish the Black Codes, laws that directly contravened federal legislation and relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. According to these codes, blacks were restricted in their rights to testify in court, either not allowed to do so at all, or only given the opportunity in cases involving fellow African Americans. The codes of South Carolina forbade African Americans from holding jobs other than those related to farming or involving menial tasks. These codes also typically forbade blacks from leaving their jobs without forfeiting back pay, which many employers retained as security against lost labor. The Black Codes in most states specified the right of employees to whip their employees; often the language reverted to the days of slavery, with the terms “master” and “slave” fixed in the codes.
The codes fixed penalties for African Americans who made gestures deemed to be insulting or speech judged to be seditious in content. These codes clearly established different standards for whites and blacks. The dream of equality of opportunity envisioned by those who had worked for Reconstruction faded. The Black Codes included provisions for a rigidly segregated society, preventing multiracial access to drinking fountains, hospitals, hotels, libraries, parks, playgrounds, sidewalks, transportation systems, and institutions of learning at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels.
Even prisoners were kept separate under the codes of the Jim Crow South: Correctional institutions and chain gangs were usually segregated according to race. Legislators in South Carolina passed a law that criminalized the action of any African American who dared to look out the same window as a fellow white worker in any of the state’s cotton mills. Florida legislators passed a law that called for different content in “Negro” textbooks and “white” textbooks. Lawmakers in Oklahoma passed legislation deeming that whites and blacks should use different telephone booths.
The term, “Jim Crow,” which came to refer to the laws and practices pertinent to rigid segregation in the South during 1877-1954, is mysterious as to its origins. The term may have been derived from a slave trader named Jim Crow, or to a slave who escaped such a trader, or to a lame dancer known in local folklore by such a name. One story specifies that the term’s origin is traceable to an African American slave named Jim, whose very dark skin pigment led boarders in his owner’s hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, to add the additional appellation, “Crow.”
The name is also connected to a silly minstrel show character created back in the late 1820s by the white performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice (1808-1860); the character, presented in black-face, was a stereotypical buffoonish slave who danced and sang as he went about the plantation. The story goes that Rice had heard an African American singing and dancing a number called “Jump Jim Crow.” One version has it that Rice witnessed a lame black man named Jim Crow (or Crowe) perform for fellow workers at Thomas Crowe’s Livery Stable at 3rd Street in Louisville, Kentucky. Another version has Rice witnessing a similar performance by a youth in Cincinnati, Ohio. The dance was in any case incorporated into Rice’s routine and other minstrel shows, with numerous variations.
In time, the term came to be applied to the legalized system of segregation that took shape in the years after Reconstruction. The laws that established legal segregation in the South flowed from the imaginations of whites who similarly held a stereotypical view of blacks; thus did the term, “Jim Crow,” seem appropriate. The term can be used to refer to the whole system of segregation and discrimination that contravened federal law but which somehow the Supreme Court--- the highest judicial body in the United States with the authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws--- found ways to uphold.
The most portentous of the Supreme Court rulings came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case was brought by African American Homer Adolph Plessy against Louisiana Judge Ferguson, who had found Plessy guilty of an 1890 state law requiring separate accommodations in public facilities for blacks and whites. Plessy had been arrested for failing, during a 60-mile ride from New Orleans to Covington, Lousiana, to move to a different car as requested by a white passenger. The Supreme court ruled that as long as railroad car accommodations (and, by extension, facilities of many kinds) were “separate but equal,” the law calling for segregated facilities was consistent with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the months and years immediately following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, legislated their movements down the path to a fully segregated and cruelly discriminatory South. And the right to vote that is clear to anyone who reads the 15th Amendment faded with the enactment of poll taxes and literacy tests:
Poll taxes were fees placed on the right to vote, thus discriminating against most African Americans in their general condition of poverty, and also against poor whites.
Literacy tests were designed to prevent those with limited or no ability to read from voting. The prospective voter might be asked to read a section of the state constitution. A similar outcome was achieved in states that did allow the illiterate voter to ask that the section be read aloud to her or him, whereupon she or he could demonstrate understanding of the law with a proper interpretation. The accuracy of the interpretation was then left to the judgment of a white official, who invariably ruled against the responses of African Americans. Sometimes questions ranged into the realm of the ridiculous: A “wrong” answer to the question, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a prospective African American voter home without casting a vote.
Other means were used to deny African Americans the right to vote. These included violence or the threat thereof. Alternatively, and in an attempt to re-enfranchise poor whites who could not pay the poll tax or meet property qualifications, a number of states enacted “grandfather laws.” These laws made possible the vote for someone who could not meet economic or property qualifications to gain suffrage only if his (only men could vote until 1920) ancestors had voted before 1867 of some other date chosen prior to Reconstruction; such a law clearly made impossible the exercise of voting rights by the overwhelming number of African Americans in the South.
A number of states used “good character tests,” necessitating that an African American who sought to vote bring with him a white individual willing to vouch for his good character; there was little chance that a white citizen in the Jim Crow South would do so. Any African American who opposed Jim Crow, or strove to organize others to do so, would face a community of white employers and business leaders commonly resolved to deny her or him ca job, credit, or mortgage.
In many southern towns and cities, organizations known as White Citizens’ Councils determined matters pertinent to jobs and credit, ensuring in each case that African Americans were limited t certain kinds of jobs and kept firmly under behavioral control. Hate groups did terrible damage to African Americans in communities across the South, becoming such a force of disorder that the United States Congress felt compelled to pass two Force Acts (1870 and 1871) and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) that proscribed judgment and executions outside regular legal proceedings. Even some southern states passed laws with the expressed purpose of curtailing the most egregious forms of violence perpetrated by hate groups.
The Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the President to use military force and to impose martial law in those areas where terroristic groups were active. But as of the Compromise of 1877, United States troops had no regular presence in the South, and local police and militia forces did not have the staff, money, or time to protect the lives of African Americans; moreover, southern law enforcement officials often either sympathized with the sentiments and activities of hate groups, or they were too cowed by them to take any action. In time the organization of hate groups did wither due to internal stresses rather than vigorous government action. But the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the terrible legacy of lynchings serve as testimony to the lack of ability and inclination n the part of federal and state governments of the United States to protect African Americans from criminal violence.
Lynchings became part of the terrible reality of life during the Jim Crow era: Statistices compiled by the Tuskegee Institute show that from the first recorded lynching in 1882 through 1968, at least 4,743 people saw their lives end in this brutal way. During these years, nine states recorded over 200 lynchings; those states included Mississippi (581 lynching during 1882-1968), Georgia (531), Texas (493), Louisiana ( 391), Alabama (347), Arkansas (284), Florida (282), Tennessee (251), and Kentucky (205).
By far, African Americans were the most frequent targets, but the statistics reveal that in some geographical areas whites were also lynched with considerable frequency. In Texas, 141 (28.6%0 of those lynched were white; this was similar to the overall national pattern, in which 1,297 (27.4%) of those lynched were white.
But in most southern states, the targets of lynchings were overwhelmingly African Americans (over 90% in Georgia), Mississippi, and South Carolina [97.5%], but in several northeastern amd western states where African American populations were low, whites were the most frequent targets. In Arizona, all 31 of those lynched during 1882-1968 were white. These data indicate a disturbing tendency toward generalized violence in American life that, when paired with particularly virulent prejudices, fell most heavily on African Americans.
The key components of physical and economic control that had undergirded the slave system also constituted the foundation of the Jim Crow system. In the countryside, where most southern African Americans lived, the economic terms of life lay in the sharecropping system. Sharecroppers had to pay for their cabins, clothes, food, tools, work animals, and such items as flour, salt, and sugar. Most of these items were sold to them on credit by the landowners to whom they owed their labor; when their crops came in, a large portion of their profits went to pay for the items that had been purchase on credit. Landowners frequently earned high interest on loans, and they sold goods at prices above market value. Sharecroppers fell steadily into a level of debt from which there was no hope of extracting themselves.
But African Americans were not always passive actors in schemes of landowners. Some black farmers were so adroit in their labor that they could use their productivity as leverage against an overweening landowner. In rare cases, such leverage could be used to ratchet down rents, interest rates, and prices enough that a bit could be saved. An ingenious and extraordinarily diligent African American farmer might save enough to purchase land from a poor farmer or a landowner who had fallen on hard times. This same farmer or that agriculturalist’s descendants might invest in a wagon to haul goods, expand into other entrepreneurial endeavors, and maneuver into position for the purchase of more land. In this way were a few small fortunes made, so as to expand familial wealth in the South, sponsor family members who might want to go to college, or to realize the dreams of those who sought a better life in the North.
A remarkable motif of African America during the Jim Crow era is in fact the creative response to life under the most daunting conditions: African American Baptists in South Carolina, Georgia, and florida organized their own association in 1866. Black Baptist churches from across the south held a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880. Black Presbyterians also formed churches of their own, and in 1870 African American Methodists organized the colored Methodist Church in America. Pastors in these churches manifested an animated style that influenced white pastors and transferred to the purposes of secular speechmaking. African American choirs sang with great fervor; black gospel joined a tradition that included the work songs of the slaves, each traveling pathways of influence that eventually produced jazz and blues.
Southern food is one of the main forms of purely American food. Its progenitors were African American slaves in the kitchens of the Big House and sharecropping farmers who invented tasty dishes with the produce from their own land, game from the hunt, and plants gathered from the woods. With artful applications of spices, herbs, and animal fats, African American cooks produced excellent tasting and nutritious food that became part of the great American tradition.
African American rural folk could generate lives real substance and joy while living in the most humble cabins, under the most stringent of economic conditions, and enveloped by the hate of the white majority:
Stories were told on Saturday evenings around the fire in an otherwise cold cabin in January: Children huddled together while daddy regaled them with another hair-raising tale of creatures lurking in the woods of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Georgia.
There as poetry in those words, even as there was poetry in the everyday cadences of a people who through some combination of ancestral inheritance and immediate environment boomed out with metaphors brilliant enough to make the best classically trained poets green with envy: hot as a depot stove, skippin’ over the due, easy like Sunday morning.
African Americans represented the best of the Old South. Through participation in the church, in the creation of song and dance, in the acquisition of culinary brilliance, in their ability to make crops grow whether the plot be the richest in the South or the most hard-scrabble, in their artisanry with wood and iron and needle and thread, they kept the Old South full of crops, they enabled the trains to run, they saw children grow strong and confident and secure, and through their sheer hard work they ensured that even a people who hated them beyond any logical understanding would thrive.
But having given so much of value while receiving so much animosity in return, striving for lives of greater material circumstance and civic sustenance, many African Americans of the South began to search other locations for work and residence. This search led to migrations both westward and northward, ultimately emphasizing the latter in the great movement known as the Northern Migration.
The codes fixed penalties for African Americans who made gestures deemed to be insulting or speech judged to be seditious in content. These codes clearly established different standards for whites and blacks. The dream of equality of opportunity envisioned by those who had worked for Reconstruction faded. The Black Codes included provisions for a rigidly segregated society, preventing multiracial access to drinking fountains, hospitals, hotels, libraries, parks, playgrounds, sidewalks, transportation systems, and institutions of learning at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels.
Even prisoners were kept separate under the codes of the Jim Crow South: Correctional institutions and chain gangs were usually segregated according to race. Legislators in South Carolina passed a law that criminalized the action of any African American who dared to look out the same window as a fellow white worker in any of the state’s cotton mills. Florida legislators passed a law that called for different content in “Negro” textbooks and “white” textbooks. Lawmakers in Oklahoma passed legislation deeming that whites and blacks should use different telephone booths.
The term, “Jim Crow,” which came to refer to the laws and practices pertinent to rigid segregation in the South during 1877-1954, is mysterious as to its origins. The term may have been derived from a slave trader named Jim Crow, or to a slave who escaped such a trader, or to a lame dancer known in local folklore by such a name. One story specifies that the term’s origin is traceable to an African American slave named Jim, whose very dark skin pigment led boarders in his owner’s hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, to add the additional appellation, “Crow.”
The name is also connected to a silly minstrel show character created back in the late 1820s by the white performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice (1808-1860); the character, presented in black-face, was a stereotypical buffoonish slave who danced and sang as he went about the plantation. The story goes that Rice had heard an African American singing and dancing a number called “Jump Jim Crow.” One version has it that Rice witnessed a lame black man named Jim Crow (or Crowe) perform for fellow workers at Thomas Crowe’s Livery Stable at 3rd Street in Louisville, Kentucky. Another version has Rice witnessing a similar performance by a youth in Cincinnati, Ohio. The dance was in any case incorporated into Rice’s routine and other minstrel shows, with numerous variations.
In time, the term came to be applied to the legalized system of segregation that took shape in the years after Reconstruction. The laws that established legal segregation in the South flowed from the imaginations of whites who similarly held a stereotypical view of blacks; thus did the term, “Jim Crow,” seem appropriate. The term can be used to refer to the whole system of segregation and discrimination that contravened federal law but which somehow the Supreme Court--- the highest judicial body in the United States with the authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws--- found ways to uphold.
The most portentous of the Supreme Court rulings came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case was brought by African American Homer Adolph Plessy against Louisiana Judge Ferguson, who had found Plessy guilty of an 1890 state law requiring separate accommodations in public facilities for blacks and whites. Plessy had been arrested for failing, during a 60-mile ride from New Orleans to Covington, Lousiana, to move to a different car as requested by a white passenger. The Supreme court ruled that as long as railroad car accommodations (and, by extension, facilities of many kinds) were “separate but equal,” the law calling for segregated facilities was consistent with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the months and years immediately following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, legislated their movements down the path to a fully segregated and cruelly discriminatory South. And the right to vote that is clear to anyone who reads the 15th Amendment faded with the enactment of poll taxes and literacy tests:
Poll taxes were fees placed on the right to vote, thus discriminating against most African Americans in their general condition of poverty, and also against poor whites.
Literacy tests were designed to prevent those with limited or no ability to read from voting. The prospective voter might be asked to read a section of the state constitution. A similar outcome was achieved in states that did allow the illiterate voter to ask that the section be read aloud to her or him, whereupon she or he could demonstrate understanding of the law with a proper interpretation. The accuracy of the interpretation was then left to the judgment of a white official, who invariably ruled against the responses of African Americans. Sometimes questions ranged into the realm of the ridiculous: A “wrong” answer to the question, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a prospective African American voter home without casting a vote.
Other means were used to deny African Americans the right to vote. These included violence or the threat thereof. Alternatively, and in an attempt to re-enfranchise poor whites who could not pay the poll tax or meet property qualifications, a number of states enacted “grandfather laws.” These laws made possible the vote for someone who could not meet economic or property qualifications to gain suffrage only if his (only men could vote until 1920) ancestors had voted before 1867 of some other date chosen prior to Reconstruction; such a law clearly made impossible the exercise of voting rights by the overwhelming number of African Americans in the South.
A number of states used “good character tests,” necessitating that an African American who sought to vote bring with him a white individual willing to vouch for his good character; there was little chance that a white citizen in the Jim Crow South would do so. Any African American who opposed Jim Crow, or strove to organize others to do so, would face a community of white employers and business leaders commonly resolved to deny her or him ca job, credit, or mortgage.
In many southern towns and cities, organizations known as White Citizens’ Councils determined matters pertinent to jobs and credit, ensuring in each case that African Americans were limited t certain kinds of jobs and kept firmly under behavioral control. Hate groups did terrible damage to African Americans in communities across the South, becoming such a force of disorder that the United States Congress felt compelled to pass two Force Acts (1870 and 1871) and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) that proscribed judgment and executions outside regular legal proceedings. Even some southern states passed laws with the expressed purpose of curtailing the most egregious forms of violence perpetrated by hate groups.
The Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the President to use military force and to impose martial law in those areas where terroristic groups were active. But as of the Compromise of 1877, United States troops had no regular presence in the South, and local police and militia forces did not have the staff, money, or time to protect the lives of African Americans; moreover, southern law enforcement officials often either sympathized with the sentiments and activities of hate groups, or they were too cowed by them to take any action. In time the organization of hate groups did wither due to internal stresses rather than vigorous government action. But the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the terrible legacy of lynchings serve as testimony to the lack of ability and inclination n the part of federal and state governments of the United States to protect African Americans from criminal violence.
Lynchings became part of the terrible reality of life during the Jim Crow era: Statistices compiled by the Tuskegee Institute show that from the first recorded lynching in 1882 through 1968, at least 4,743 people saw their lives end in this brutal way. During these years, nine states recorded over 200 lynchings; those states included Mississippi (581 lynching during 1882-1968), Georgia (531), Texas (493), Louisiana ( 391), Alabama (347), Arkansas (284), Florida (282), Tennessee (251), and Kentucky (205).
By far, African Americans were the most frequent targets, but the statistics reveal that in some geographical areas whites were also lynched with considerable frequency. In Texas, 141 (28.6%0 of those lynched were white; this was similar to the overall national pattern, in which 1,297 (27.4%) of those lynched were white.
But in most southern states, the targets of lynchings were overwhelmingly African Americans (over 90% in Georgia), Mississippi, and South Carolina [97.5%], but in several northeastern amd western states where African American populations were low, whites were the most frequent targets. In Arizona, all 31 of those lynched during 1882-1968 were white. These data indicate a disturbing tendency toward generalized violence in American life that, when paired with particularly virulent prejudices, fell most heavily on African Americans.
The key components of physical and economic control that had undergirded the slave system also constituted the foundation of the Jim Crow system. In the countryside, where most southern African Americans lived, the economic terms of life lay in the sharecropping system. Sharecroppers had to pay for their cabins, clothes, food, tools, work animals, and such items as flour, salt, and sugar. Most of these items were sold to them on credit by the landowners to whom they owed their labor; when their crops came in, a large portion of their profits went to pay for the items that had been purchase on credit. Landowners frequently earned high interest on loans, and they sold goods at prices above market value. Sharecroppers fell steadily into a level of debt from which there was no hope of extracting themselves.
But African Americans were not always passive actors in schemes of landowners. Some black farmers were so adroit in their labor that they could use their productivity as leverage against an overweening landowner. In rare cases, such leverage could be used to ratchet down rents, interest rates, and prices enough that a bit could be saved. An ingenious and extraordinarily diligent African American farmer might save enough to purchase land from a poor farmer or a landowner who had fallen on hard times. This same farmer or that agriculturalist’s descendants might invest in a wagon to haul goods, expand into other entrepreneurial endeavors, and maneuver into position for the purchase of more land. In this way were a few small fortunes made, so as to expand familial wealth in the South, sponsor family members who might want to go to college, or to realize the dreams of those who sought a better life in the North.
A remarkable motif of African America during the Jim Crow era is in fact the creative response to life under the most daunting conditions: African American Baptists in South Carolina, Georgia, and florida organized their own association in 1866. Black Baptist churches from across the south held a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880. Black Presbyterians also formed churches of their own, and in 1870 African American Methodists organized the colored Methodist Church in America. Pastors in these churches manifested an animated style that influenced white pastors and transferred to the purposes of secular speechmaking. African American choirs sang with great fervor; black gospel joined a tradition that included the work songs of the slaves, each traveling pathways of influence that eventually produced jazz and blues.
Southern food is one of the main forms of purely American food. Its progenitors were African American slaves in the kitchens of the Big House and sharecropping farmers who invented tasty dishes with the produce from their own land, game from the hunt, and plants gathered from the woods. With artful applications of spices, herbs, and animal fats, African American cooks produced excellent tasting and nutritious food that became part of the great American tradition.
African American rural folk could generate lives real substance and joy while living in the most humble cabins, under the most stringent of economic conditions, and enveloped by the hate of the white majority:
Stories were told on Saturday evenings around the fire in an otherwise cold cabin in January: Children huddled together while daddy regaled them with another hair-raising tale of creatures lurking in the woods of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Georgia.
There as poetry in those words, even as there was poetry in the everyday cadences of a people who through some combination of ancestral inheritance and immediate environment boomed out with metaphors brilliant enough to make the best classically trained poets green with envy: hot as a depot stove, skippin’ over the due, easy like Sunday morning.
African Americans represented the best of the Old South. Through participation in the church, in the creation of song and dance, in the acquisition of culinary brilliance, in their ability to make crops grow whether the plot be the richest in the South or the most hard-scrabble, in their artisanry with wood and iron and needle and thread, they kept the Old South full of crops, they enabled the trains to run, they saw children grow strong and confident and secure, and through their sheer hard work they ensured that even a people who hated them beyond any logical understanding would thrive.
But having given so much of value while receiving so much animosity in return, striving for lives of greater material circumstance and civic sustenance, many African Americans of the South began to search other locations for work and residence. This search led to migrations both westward and northward, ultimately emphasizing the latter in the great movement known as the Northern Migration.
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