Multi-Culpability in K-12 Education >>>>> The Complicity of the Minneapolis Urban League, NAACP, American Indian Movement (AIM), Tribal Organizations, and Other Representatives of Groups Particularly Affected by the Wretched Quality of K-12 Education (Fourth in a Series)

Thus far in this series I have exposed the culpability of major societal entities that are complicit in the lousy quality of K-12 education in the United States.  These include members of the upper middle and wealthy classes such as those who live in the neighborhood north of West Franklin and South Girard in the Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis;  administrators, professors, and teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities;  and the print, radio, television, and internet media.

 

In this article I shake things up a bit more by exposing the culpability of those who make their livelihood at, and in many cases receive great remuneration for inhabiting the offices of, entities such as the NAACP, the (National and Minneapolis) Urban League, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Native American tribal organizations, and other groups affected by the wretched quality of K-12 education in the United States. 

 

The former two organizations came into being in 1910, during the worst post-slavery period of United States history for African Americans, the Jim Crow era of deprived citizenship and horrific lynching scenarios numbering over two thousand.  The NAACP was formed by leaders of the Niagara Movement, including W. E. B.  Dubois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and St. Paul’s own Frederick McGee;  these leaders embraced the “talented tenth” ideas of Dubois whereby an intellectual elite of African Americans would advocate for full citizenship rights for African  Americans, in contradistinction to the vocation-first, citizenship-later approach of Booker T. Washington.  The heyday of the NAACP was during  the first half of the 20^th century, a time when highly adroit strategizing first achieved successes such as the desegregation lawsuit that brought the first African Americans to the University of Missouri by beating advocates of “separate but equal” at their own game;  then Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorneys went on to attain greatest success in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that aimed directly and adroitly at the “separate but equal” doctrine, overturning the constitutional corruption that undergirded the lamentable Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case.

 

The NAACP has never again achieved that level of success.

 

The National Urban League came into being as an advocate for African American labor, those who trekked to urban centers at trail’s end of the Great Northern Migration during that same first half of the 20^th century.  In the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis Urban League affiliate was from 1948 and through the 1950s led by Cecil Newman, the founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman (now Spokesman Recorder from the originally separate Minneapolis Spokesman and St. Paul Recorder).  Newman joined Nellie Stone Johnson and other African American activists to achieve major advancements in employment housing, and education.

 

But this, too, was the halcyon period for the Minneapolis Urban League as a catalyst for change.

 

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 In Minneapolis, led by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Vernon Bellecourt, with  participation also from George Mitchell, George Mellessey, Herb Powless, Harold Goodsky, and Eddie Benton-Banai.  Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota, was an early leader in 1970s protests, including the standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973.  The American Indian Movement was successful in ending the 1950s era of termination, during which the federal government ceased to recognize Native American tribes as legal entities and withdrew from responsibility for the health, education, and welfare of Native American people.  The American Indian Movement was via dramatic occupations and protests able to reverse that policy, asserting the legal status of American Indian tribes, seeking and often securing recovery of treaty rights and lost land, acting to promote Native American culture, and pursuing a policy that asserted great independence for Native American people living on reservations while also demanding health, education, and economic development services from the United States federal government.

 

But the most vigorous assertion of basic principles by AIM came in the 1970s.

 

Past that decade, the leaders of AIM have continued to notch successes with regard to land rights, and they have effectively applied pressure for the creation and implementation of federal government programs addressing health and welfare issues.  But conditions on many reservations sustain a culture of drug use, alcoholism, violence, poverty, and low educational attainment.  There has been little clear thinking on matters pertinent to K-12 education:  While there is greater presence of Native American culture in the curriculum, achievement in reading, mathematics, and subject areas across the liberal, vocational, and technological arts has languished.

 

Leaders of the Minneapolis Urban League, the NAACP, AIM, and the Native American tribes have offered little that would address the achievement of their constituencies in either tribal reservation or public school settings:

 

The leadership of the Minneapolis Urban League has failed miserably in that organization’s own schools to provide alternative educational experiences of acceptable academic quality.  The NAACP has gone to court to secure the right of African American and other students of color to attend suburban schools when achievement levels at urban schools are inevitably low.  American Indians have been successful in gaining greater recognition for Native American culture in the curriculum.

 

But none of these actions have had enough impact to successfully address student achievement.

 

Leaders of these organizations have been just as desultory in defining the meaning and purpose of K-12 education as have other culpable parties in our K-12 dilemma.

 

Thus are entities such as the NAACP, the (National and Minneapolis) Urban League, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Native American tribal organizations, and other groups representing the constituencies of these organizations deeply complicit in the system that produces such wretched quality of K-12 education in the United States.