Dec 13, 2019

Part One of a Two-Article Series >>>>> Highly-Paid African Americans and Those of African Provenance at the Davis Center Must Understand the History of Education in the United States and the Responsibility That They Bear


This communication is for those African Americans at the Davis Center (Minneapolis Public Schools central offices, 1250 West Broadway) making the following salaries:


 

>>>>>    $185,403

 

>>>>>    $154,630

 

>>>>>    $150,630

 

>>>>>    $150,630

 

>>>>>    $141,142

 

>>>>>    $133,137

 

>>>>>    $120,233

 

>>>>>    $104,007

 

All of you are African American staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools or staff members of recent African origin.

 

You dwell in a racist system in which you have nevertheless attained great monetary remuneration and perceptible heights of professional status.

 

Inasmuch as the locally centralized school district that pays you so well has the power to send more powerful brains to prison---  or to overhaul processes that allows those brains to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos, the determinants of human behavior, the intricacies of advanced calculus, the wonders of musical composition, or the current relevance of historical processes---  consideration of those latter processes becomes of special importance and a matter of supreme responsibility to you.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 

You know the first part of the story.

 

That part is the familiar phase of a long history of mistreatment and goes as follows  >>>>>

 

>>>>> 

 

Approximately 12,500,000 human beings were sold by African kingdoms such as the Ashanti and the Dahomey to eventually mostly British slave ship captains for transport to the Americas.  Of those, most slaves went elsewhere than the areas now defined as the United States---  but by the time of the Civil War, there were 4.5 million African Americans in the United States, almost all (4.0 million) of whom were slaves on the internment camps (euphemistically termed plantations) in the American South.  Abraham Lincoln was a racist who wanted to send a people he considered troublesome back to Africa but when Martin Delaney and others informed Lincoln that they were more American than he, the dialectics of the historical moment impelled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation  (1863) that freed some of the slaves;  by war’s end, what had started as an effort to maintain the Union became also a vow to end slavery.

 

The slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution;  the 14th Amendment asserted that all adults males (women would not gain full citizenship rights until processes unfolding between 1920 and 1973) were citizens, regardless of ethnicity;  and the 15th Amendment asserted the right to vote on the same premises.

 

In an effort termed “Reconstruction,” Radical Republicans during 1865-1877 made a real effort to create those conditions that would enable African Americans to prosper.  This effort witnessed considerable success in education, health, housing, suffrage, and political participation (with many African Americans serving in state governments, fourteen (14) in the United States House of Representatives, and two (2) in the United States Senate).

 

But the results were insufficient and Republican dedication waned.

 

Now begins the less publicized and certainly under-contextualized part of the story.

 

……………………………………………………………………………

 

The 1876 presidential election was in a stalemate, with electoral votes especially disputed in Florida.  The Republicans were in transition to the party of Big Business and proved willing to cut a pernicious deal:  By the Compromise of 1877, Republicans agreed to withdraw the federal troops that had been protecting African American citizenship in the South, for which the Democrats (then the party of white racists) agreed to concede to the presidential victory of Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel J. Tilden.

 

Political positions were now lost.

 

The Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the Golden Circle, and Midnight Raiders committed atrocities and initiated lynchings that between 1877 and 1965 would number 4,600---  1,900 more people than died in the 9-11 bombings.

 

The Supreme Court continued its racist history via Plessy v Ferguson (1996) and a series of rulings that made mockery of the Reconstruction Amendments and facilitated the creation of the Jim Crow and Black Codes systems.  African Americans endured conditions of the police state in the American South and faced restricted housing covenants, redlining, and many indignities in the Northern urban destinations to which they fled in the Great Northern Migration.

 

In a process running from the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision through the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and fair housing and equal employment laws of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most onerous formal legal impediments to citizenship were removed.

 

But by 1968, Martin Luther King knew that the great bulk of African Americans lived in poverty and urban blight:  He was planning the Poor People’s March on Washington when James Earl Ray blew him away.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Ironically, the civil rights advances of the 1960 s and early 1070s created the conditions that made the blight worse.  Middle class African Americans could now flee the urban core as whites did so famously.  In Minneapolis, middle class African Americans and Jewish residents (especially after the Plymouth Avenue riots in 1967) fled the North Side, leaving behind a population that was much more economically challenged.  Then, when those from even more challenged circumstances moved in from Gary, Indiana;  South Side Chicago;  Kankakee, Illinois;  and Detroit, East St. Louis, and Kansas City;  North Minneapolis and areas on either side of Lake Street in Minneapolis faced conditions typical of inner city areas across the nation from 1980 until today.

 

Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980, gang activity increased, and by 1992 the largest city in Minnesota was dubbed “Murder-apolis.”

 

Until 1973 there were no African American teachers or administrators in the Minneapolis Public Schools;  and to this day school staff in the Minneapolis Public Schools is overwhelmingly white.

 

These insidious trends accompanied the ascendance of a specious creed spouted by education professors from the 1920s forward that had taken firm root by the 1970s, an approach to education that undervalues the level of knowledge possessed by field experts and promotes all manner of jargon-infested pseudo-philosophy that is all education professors have to offer.

 

Anti-knowledge curriculum hurts young people who have been historically abused or who are mired in poverty the most.  The Minneapolis Public Schools educates no student well, but those from families with more education and financial wherewithal get a bit more home-based academics and certainly gain access to collegiate tracks more readily than those from families whose assets are of a different type.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………

 

Those of you identified above have enormous power if you opt to wield it.

 

You should recognize the shallowness of the academic portion of the current MPS Comprehensive Design.

 

You should say something on the order of the following to Superintendent Ed Graff, Executive Director Aimee Fearing, and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning:

 

Cultural relevance and cultural competence should be assumed and vigorously pursued in actuality, not rhetoric.

 

But what should be presumed does not constitute academic excellence.

 


We want for the African American young people of this school district that breadth and depth of education outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) but that we suspect academic decision-makers and teachers of this district have no ability to impart.

 

Do not get too invested in academic differentiation, projects assigned without proper contextual knowledge;  and do not pretend that students can think critically in the absence of an abundance of knowledge sets, or that teachers who lack powers of critical analysis can turn our precious young people into critical thinkers by continuing to hand out “packet” after “packet,” showing videos unrelated to course content, or stationing them in front of computers in the absence of vigorous classroom discussion that most of you lack ability to lead.

 

We want our young people to have that knowledge that Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X. possessed.

 

We want our young people to go forth with knowledge of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, geography, literature, English usage, and the musical and visual arts.

 

We care more that history is taught as it should be---  fearlessly, in full, with an account of how people of all ethnicities have fared in the highs and lows of this nation’s history and that of the world.         

 

We’ve noticed more and more African Americans acting in Shakespearean productions at the Guthrie and at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona.  We want more of our young people to be grounded in the Western classics.

 

But we also want a condition addressed by which our young people graduate without having read Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Te Nehesi Coates, Toni Morrison, and---  that greatest of all American playwrights---  August Wilson.

 

We want our African American youth to score in the 21-36 range on the ACT, to receive more academic than athletic scholarships, and to prosper as doctors, attorneys, business people, professors, teachers, and whatever profession or trade to which they aspire.  Do not track our young people on “pathways” before they are given the knowledge and have the experience to make determinative life decisions.

 

Get rid of the education professor rhetoric with which you are infested.

 

Seek the help of genuine scholars of academic fields.

 

Give our African American youth the education that wealthy parents seek when they send their children to St. Paul Academy or Brecht----  but better, with the goal of being culturally enriched, civically engaged, as well as professionally satisfied citizens.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………………

 

Those of us who spend our lives at the urban core frequently hear two very different vows:

 

>>>>>    “I’m gonna get mines.”

 

 >>>>>    “I’m going to give back.”

 

Right now there are more people getting theirs than there are those giving back.

 

We need to redress the imbalance.

 

Go to Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning and tell them what they need to hear.

 

Band together.

 

Use your power.

 

You will create the future, and the nature of that future will be determined by what you do or do not do.

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