Third Major Communication to MPS School Board
If the Minneapolis Public Schools as an administrative and academic entity is ever going to transform itself into a model centralized school district, decision makers at the district must approach the service of students from economically challenged circumstances in a fundamentally different way.
The academic and personal relationships that I have forged with young people and families of North Minneapolis via my numerous roles in the New Salem Educational Initiative have transformed the lives of those I have been fortunate to meet and know and love. Those seriously interested in educating the children of the very poor should read carefully the following account of a single Saturday in the life of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- from which there is much that can be extrapolated for application by the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The names used in the account given below are data privacy pseudonyms.
A Saturday in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative
Part One: 9:00 AM
Ginger Taylor-Myers splits time among three different residences in North Minneapolis. Her maternal grandmother lives on 6th Street North not far from the intersection of West Broadway and Lyndale Avenue North. Her father lives on Thomas Avenue North, a block southwest from the intersection of 26th Avenue North and West Broadway. From either of those residences, either Russell Wilson or Tom Brady could throw a football to a waiting receiver positioned in front of the Minneapolis Public School administrative building at 1250 West Broadway. Ginger’s Mom lives at a location that would provide Russell and Tom more of a challenge, inasmuch as she lives on Aldrich Avenue North in far North Minneapolis; the two quarterbacks might prefer to station their receivers at Jenny Lind K-5 school.
Ginger was at her dad’s house on this particular Saturday in January 2015. She had company, a friend I’ll dub Monica Freeman, also a Grade 5 student at Jenny Lind. I have known Ginger since she was two years old, and she has been a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade K. From the time that Ginger was a toddler, living at the time exclusively at grammy’s, I would pick her up, swing her around, and begin to teach her informally by speaking to her with a subtly sophisticated vocabulary and running additive and subtractive exercises by her on my fingers. She loved all of this and was proverbially chomping at the proverbial bit to start the program by the time she reached kindergarten.
Ginger asked me on that Saturday morning if Monica could come along, and I said that she could--- but would have to study separately since Ginger and her cousin Barnard would be continuing their reading of Macbeth. I have also known Barnard Williams, who lives at the 6th Street North address of grammy, since he arrived in the world, and he, too, enrolled in Grade K. He began reading Shakespearean literature with me when he was in Grade 6 at Olson Middle School, and he is now on his fifth work of the Bard: He previously read King Lear, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Hamlet.
Ginger first read Shakespeare with me as a Grade 4 student: She read Hamlet as a Grade 4 student, played the part of Osric in my compressed version of the play (all original language, emphasizing the most important scenes in a thirty-minute presentation) at our June 2014 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, and traveled with me to Winona for the Great River Shakespeare Festival to witness a first-rate take on the dilemmas of the Prince of Denmark. Barnard has already accompanied me to Winona on three occasions (for performances of King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; he was in the audience at the Guthrie with me for Othello). He has played the part of Kent in King Lear and the part of Laertes in Hamlet in my compressed versions at the banquet.
So Ginger and Barnard, whom I have known for many years, are traveling high in the academic cosmos; Monica, whom I just met on this particular Saturday, is doing fine as a conventional Grade 5 student but not anywhere close to being able to sit and read with the same alacrity as Ginger and Barnard. So I told Monica that I was so happy to have her along and would have some important assignment for her once we arrived at the church (New Salem Missionary Baptist Church at 2507 Bryant Avenue North, where I do all of my academic instruction with students).
As we made our way from the 26th and Broadway intersection to pick up Barnard at the 6th Street North abode, I quizzed Monica on multiplication tables that Ginger and Barnard have known since Grade 2. Monica, in Grade 5, came up short on the products (multiples) of at least five sets of factors, so I knew that this was where we would start once we got to the church. Barnard piled into the car at about 9:15 AM, and over to the church and down to our basement classrooms we went.
Monica sat in one room, going in logical sequence through the problematic multiplication factors, quickly getting those under control. We then successively practiced double and triple-digit multiplication, division by two digit-numbers into dividends of three digits, decimal application of these skills, and addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers--- all skills concerning which Monica felt insecure but in performing with me she emerged confident after our two hours together. She asked if she could participate in my program, and I said that I was mighty full but that I’d make space for her. She wrote out her mom’s phone number and is now attending weekly.
My work with Monica was all done as quick, intensive check-ins as I read Macbeth in another room with Ginger and Barnard. The three of us were at the point in the play at which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are implementing their plan of assassination on poor King Duncan and setting the guards whom the inebriate up for a fall. This is all engaging stuff, and at the end of the two hours these two young people, whom I love as if they were my own, and with whom I indeed interact as I did with my son Ryan Davison-Reed when he was at the K-12 stage---- were disappointed that we had to leave after two hours, even though we were headed to Taco Bell for lunch.
Part Two: 11:30 AM
We swung by 6th Street North again and picked up Barnard’s brother and sister, Natalie and
Desmond. The six of us went to Taco Bell for lunch, at which I sat and worked with Natalie (Grade 1, Jenny Lind) doing mental math and writing out vocabulary items on my yellow pad. Natalie counts backwards from 20 with great skill and can apply that skill to higher starting points in subtractive exercises; similarly, she can count to a hundred and beyond, so she can perform the mental addition exercises that I give her adroitly. Natalie, for example, added 7 to 45 with the correct outcome of 52; and she took 8 away from 72 to get 64--- all in her head.
I sketched out the words freedom, pause, family, mother, father, residence, compare, grandmother, and wisdom for her on my yellow pad--- and before we departed what I call “Taco Shells” (my malapropism for Taco Bell, to mess with the kids’ brains and bring a smile to their faces as they correct me), Natalie had learned definitions as necessary and spelled all of these words correctly.
I then drove Barnard and Natalie to grammy’s; I took Monica and Ginger to the latter’s dad’s house.
“Nice to meet you today, Monica,” I told my new student. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Gary,” she returned. “Don’t forget to call my mom.”
“Hey, wassamatta, you think the ol’ man can’t remember nothin’?” I joked.
“I just meant---“
“Bye-bye, Snodgrass,” I said to Ginger, using the silly name with which I’ve addressed her since she was knee-high to a tadpole.
“Good-bye, Harry,” Ginger said with her own chiding appellation.
I acted like I was going to get out of the car to chase the girls and they both squealed with delight as they ran to dad’s front door and I drove away with Desmond still in the car.
Part Three: 12:30 PM
I’ve known Desmond since he was an approximation of humanity in his momma’s womb. We went down to the same room at which I had read Macbeth with Ginger and Barnard. I ran him through his multiplication tables, on which he started in Grade 1 and mostly mastered in Grade 2. He’s still perfecting the inevitably most difficult factorial sets to remember: 6 x 7, 7 x 7, 7 x 8, and 8 x 8. By the time that we departed that day, Desmond had these under control. He is among only five students in his Grade 3 class who has all of the multiplication tables through nine committed to memory.
Desmond and I also read some lively stories that are part of the compilation put together by scholars and teachers working to produce What Your 3rd Grader Needs to Know: The Fundamentals of a Good Third-Grade Education under the editorship of E. D. Hirsch. We read “The People Could Fly,” “The White-Bone Demon,” and a selection from One Thousand Arabian Nights ("Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”) . We then did some explicit vocabulary work form those selections, including words as follows: staggered , overseer, snarled, scroll, monk, demons, feast, niche, wondrous, and precious. Before I ran Desmond to grammy’s at 2:00 PM he could define and spell all of these words.
Part Four: 2:30 PM
I went back over to the church for a few moments to put some materials in order and then went by three different homes to check on matters of concern to the families of my students. One child had been acting out in his Grade 1 class at Nellie Stone Johnson; another (Grade 7 at Northeast had gotten in a fight that week and been suspended for three days. These two students are relatively new to my program; these sorts of difficulties tend to abate upon several years of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and they almost never start for children whose families I have known for a long time.
My third visit came when I went over to the new residence of a family whose members I have known for a decade. The New Salem Educational Initiative participants are now Grade 9 and Grade 10 female students at North High School. The family is dysfunctional in the extreme and presents me with my gravest weekly challenges. North is the eighth school that these girls have attended in three years. Their Mom is chronically volatile, mercurial, and occasionally abusive. The Grade 10 student met a guy on Facebook who raped her, got away with it, and left her with emotional scars several depths below those she already had. I talked momma out of a diatribe-laced funk as I worked with the Grade 10 student on the introduction to an essay and led the Grade 9 student through the logical steps of an algebra problem of mid-level difficulty.
This latter family seemed less likely to cut each other’s throats as I headed over South to pick up a brother duo (Marco, Grade 5; and Mateo, Grade 7) and their cousin (Maria, Grade 7), all students at Folwell.
Part Five: 4:00 PM
Hispanic kids make up about 35% of an otherwise African American student contingent of participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Marco, Mateo, and Maria have familial roots to Mexico; their parents have periodic immigration issues and at times have had to leave the United States for as many as three months at a time. These three have participated in the New Salem Educational Initiative for four years each in the cases of Marco and Maria, a total of five years in the case of Mateo.
Maria is razor-sharp mentally but at times has been inattentive to homework. She fell far behind on assignments as a Grade 6 student, caught up during that academic year (2013-2014), and has mostly charted a better course during this academic year 2014-2015.
Marco is academically gifted but psychologically spacey and still bears separation anxieties due to a long absence by his mom when he was in Grade 2. But he is inevitably cheerful with me and a genuine mathematics whiz, having learned his multiplication tables with me during Grade 1, read Hamlet with me at Grade 4, and now proceeding to algebraic tasks conventionally learned at Grade 9 and now being introduced in Minneapolis Public Schools classrooms during grades 7 and (more intensively) at Grade 8.
Mateo is an interesting case of a student who entered my program at Grade 2, was lost in a residential netherworld wherein even I could not locate him (I maintain multiple phone numbers and generally know when the families of my students are moving), and then reemerged into the light of my universe in Grade 4. Mateo is not as intellectually gifted as younger brother Marco, and when he first reentered the program he had fallen two years below level of school enrollment in both math and reading. His confidence was at low ebb and his mood was frequently surly. But he came back around in good time and has been on an academic ascent ever since.
On this particular day, I guided Mateo and Maria through a mathematics homework assignment wherein they were asked to figure ratios from stated student population situations and from participant composition in various organizations. Both came in very confused but went out confident and smiling.
Marco had no homework and rose to every algebraic and geometric challenge I put before him. I also led him through a reading from a Barron’s ACT exam preparation manual, defining along the way words such as disposition, acquiescent, truculent, detachment (military unit), and raw-boned. Even enormously bright Hispanic and other immigrant kihuge English language vocabulary deficiencies that I have to be continually addressing through very aggressive acquisition efforts.
Marco, Mateo, and Maria were all smiles and frenetic action when I told the “church ghost--- Phil” to get off of Maria’s shoulders; The students beat me to the car by a full minute in their escape from the frightful spirit.
Part Six: 6:30 PM
About this time every Saturday I drive over to the apartment a block off Maryland Avenue, just east of I-35N in St. Paul., that houses two half-brothers, their mother (Evelyn), and her significant other (Marcel); the latter functions as a stepfather to the boys, Damon Peterson (Grade 6) and Terrill Baker (Grade K).
These are the only participants in my program who live in St. Paul. The students in the New Salem Educational Initiative live overwhelmingly in North Minneapolis, with a few Southsiders and a smattering of students who live in Northeast Minneapolis. How Damon and Terrill landed in St. Paul quite a story.
Terrill was just a babe in arms when Damon first entered my program at Grade 1. Evelyn and Marcel had just moved to Minneapolis from Southside Chicago, finding housing on Dupont Avenue, a block off Glenwood Avenue North in a venerable old section of the Northside that is long past its residential prime. Damon thrived in the program, overcoming a perceived speech impediment and numerous unfavorable teacher reports to gain solid academic footing by the end of his Grade 2 year. Evelyn was very attentive and enormously thankful for my help, always sharing information pertinent to grade reports and conferences at school.
But the apartment, shabby as it was, apparently became too expensive by the end of that academic year 2010-2011, and the family moved into a high-rise just off Olson Highway, not all that far on a trek northward from the Glenwood area residence.
There had always been a sort of reefer stench about Evelyn and Marcel’s apartment and personages. This condition seemed to intensify with the move to the high-rise. The apartment was soon cluttered with debris of various sorts. Evelyn and Marcel seemed less happy with each other. But Damon’s participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative continued almost every week, and he prospered as a Grade 3 student at Bryn Mawr K-5 next to Anwatin Middle School.
Then, as I returned from Dallas, Texas, in the late summer of 2012, following a visit with my then 90 year-old mother, the family had vamoosed from the high-rise. Evelyn’s cell phone number had changed, and Marcel’s seemed to be out of order due to unpaid bills. Four weeks went by as I sought leads to the family’s whereabouts. Then finally, as I was driving northward from Olson Highway close to Harvest Prep with Damon’s academic session mates one Saturday, Marcel came running up behind the car, waving his hands. He told me a story that included separation at the insistence of Evelyn, who had moved he knew not where.
Then, two Saturdays later, Evelyn called me on my cellphone from her own new phone. I got the address of her new apartment complex in far South Minneapolis, close to a Cub Foods just north of the Crosstown Highway. I connected with Damon, who had already fallen behind in school and was clearly suffering from the dislocations. He was acting out in school and not turning in assignments.
Then in the summer of 2013, Evelyn moved again. She was concerned that Damon might be separated from me again. I assured her that my relationships with students and families are forever. I began during the 2013-2014 academic year to drive over to St. Paul every Saturday evening about 6:30 or 7:00 PM. When I could, I took Damon over to New Salem to get him into a different physical environment and mental space. But my Saturdays eventually became so packed and the time so tight that we began conducting our academic sessions in the hallway outside the apartment. The apartment had too little furniture and was too messy and dimly lit.
Terrill clamored for entry and I allowed him to start formal academic sessions with me when he was a preschooler. He is now a Grade K student at Bruce Vento K-5 in St. Paul, thriving with the math and reading skills that would do an upper middle class student proud. Damon and I continue to work in that same hallway, sitting on the floor, back against the wall. He of the former speech impediment has mastered oratory full of eloquent Frederick Douglass flourishes. His most recent report card revealed all “A’s” but one. He bats not an eye at the challenges of algebraic equations that I place before him.
Prior to last June’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, I got a gloomy text message from Evelyn that confided that the family might not have bus fare to make it from St. Paul. I drove over to the apartment and slipped Marcel (the adult at home at the time) a twenty dollar bill before returning to the church and preparations for the banquet.
That night, Damon did his Frederick Douglass speech. Terrill showed the crowd that as a preschooler he could count backward from twenty. The boys beamed. Evelyn andTerrill fought back tears amid competition with broad smiles.
I wondered why I should be the one so blessed to spend my life this way.
Feb 5, 2015
On the Matter of the Search for a New Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent: Select Michael Goar, and Get on with What’s Important
Second Major Communication to MPS School Board
There are two important categories of consideration for the members of the Minneapolis Schools Board of Education to keep in mind as they articulate and implement a process for hiring a new superintendent: 1) the new superintendent should be absolutely committed to the three key programs of outgoing Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift; and 2) the school board should move as swiftly as possible to hire a superintendent dedicated to those programs, with the logical decision appearing to be that of hiring Michael Goar.
Hiring a New Superintendent Committed to Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift
Focused Instruction
Focused Instruction is the name given to the program articulated during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson under which the leadership of the district is striving to bring a higher quality and more cohesive curriculum to students throughout the public schools.
For many years, consistency of curriculum in the Minneapolis Public Schools was lacking, particularly at the K-5 level. Students in a Grade 3 class at Jenny Lind, for example, might be working on projects focused on the family and community, with students reflecting on and perhaps writing about how their own families affected and were affected by the communities in which they lived. Students in a Grade 3 class at Green Central, quite by contrast, might be sharing ideas and seeking information about warfare, perhaps writing up their personal reflections about war, citing any family members who had served in a military capacity in Vietnam, the first Persian Gulf War, or more recent engagements in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The problem with this approach to education is that it lacks consistency and rigor. The topics identified by the teacher (perhaps in consultation with students) resonates with the misguided “constructivist” education-speak of education professors, who have failed our students so miserably. This approach to education has little respect for knowledge as incrementally, logically imparted information from teacher to student. Students whiling away time in the classroom of a teacher under the sway of constructivism dive into projects without the proper background.
In the project cited above for Jenny Lind, the student is unlikely in the extreme to have much knowledge of the family as an anthropological form and the various ethnic contexts in which family life unfolds. Children from immigrant families may have little knowledge of how family life in their country of origin differs from situations into which they have been thrust in the United States; or how their particular community of immigrant families differs from other native and immigrant communities in the United States. Children of African American families may have little information on the impact of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, or the dislocations of the Northern Migration for families in the course of time and in the present.
In the project identified for Grade 3 Green Central students, students are unlikely in the extreme to have studied particular wars in any depth, to have any real sense of the causes of the Vietnam War or the first Persian Gulf conflict; they almost certainly could not convey any comprehension of British and Russian involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan or the internecine struggles that have made for turbulent history in those countries, those regions.
This failure to provide strong bases of information falls most heavily on children from economically challenged families, the formal education of which has typically not reached beyond high school and may not have included even high school graduation. Children from such families may still learn a great deal about life from hardworking and dedicated parents, who have had experiences from which middle class and upper middle class parents could learn. But in terms of academic matters, children of impoverished parents lacking formal education are not likely to get as much information and sophisticated vocabulary as a function of family conversation as do the offspring of more affluent, better educated parents.
Children of impoverished families also tend to follow their parents’ search for affordable Section 8 housing, often in a quest that may find them at three or four different residences in the space of a school year. This often involves transfers from one school to another, or among multiple schools within the academic year. When there is so much variance in what is taught from classroom to classroom, residentially mobile students are forever confused, ever in an educational netherworld, wandering from classroom to classroom like odd parts to decrepit machines, never able to fit and with tremendous deficits in knowledge and skill sets.
Focused Instruction addresses the unacceptable situation that has abided for decades in our K-12 schools, most notably during the crucial K-5 years. According to Focused instruction, students in one Grade 3 classroom studying meteorological change from season to season will be learning the same body of information as those in another classroom, at any school. A student in one Grade 4 classroom studying the conflict between the British government and the American colonists in the run-up to the American Revolution will find students in another classroom engaged in the same course of study at about the same time, should she or he have to switch schools. And a Grade 6 student who must move from one school to another will not have to wonder what students at another school will be studying, because she or he will know that (for example) proportions and ratios are the abiding topics at that time of year from school to school.
Initiating Focused Instruction was one of the major achievements of leaders in the Minneapolis Public Schools during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. Focused Instruction proceeds according to sound principles of educational excellence and equity. The next superintendent must embrace, implement, and continue to improve curriculum under the aegis of Focused Instruction.
High Priority Schools
For many decades, students from economically challenged families have been concentrated at certain schools. The academic skills of students at these schools have consistently languished below grade level. Currently the schools identified as High Priority Schools include Bethune, Jenny Lind, Sheridan, Green Central, Lucy Laney, Green Central, Hall International, Hmong International Academy, Broadway Arts and Technology, and North Senior High.
Administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools have endeavored to gain greater flexibility in the hiring and retention of excellent teachers to preside in the classrooms of students at High Priority Schools. Over time, the effort will be to staff every classroom in High Priority Schools with teachers of proven capability to move students with math and reading skill deficits toward grade level performance in those key skill areas. While recognizing that pedagogical skill matched with many years’ experience can produce a powerful teacher talent, and making an effort to attract and retain teachers both excellent and experienced, decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools will consider pedagogical skill paramount, and teacher quality will trump the sort of experience represented by tenure alone.
Efforts to address the skill deficits of students in High Priority Schools have resulted in more in-class and after school time focus on fundamental math and skill development. These efforts must be intensified in the days to come, sooner rather than later. Much more needs to be done to train tutors, some of them college students and qualified elder volunteers, some of them professional teachers and aides, to instruct students directly in those skills, particularly those in math and reading, languishing below grade level.
Only when a student has mastered mathematics at the prevailing grade level can she or he look toward high achievement in math, natural science, and technical subjects in the years to come. Only when a student is able to comprehend reading material pertinent to the key subject areas of language arts, history, economics, natural science, math, and the fine arts will she or he be capable of receiving an excellent liberal arts education from teachers who themselves will increasingly possess elevated levels of knowledge and skill. The next superintendent must fully embrace the designation of High Priority Schools and oversee efforts to bring every single student within the broad range of normal intelligence and above up to grade appropriate achievement in mathematics and reading.
The fundamental issue of equity is manifest in the concept of High Priority Schools, a program from the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson that must be continued.
Shift
Central school district bureaucracies are notoriously overstaffed. My own estimate is that central office staff could be reduced to 25% of current levels without any negative outcomes as to administrative functioning or student performance. Over time, the emphasis in resources expended on positions in the central office now at 1250 West Broadway should shift toward positions in school buildings, and particularly in the classrooms where students actually receive their education.
If key administrators in the central school district bureaucracy were to establish overall curriculum and policy to be implemented consistently across the school district, then place responsibility for implementation in the hands of those at the school building level, drastic reductions could be made in central office staff. Principals would be held responsible for teacher performance. Teachers would be held responsible for student performance. Family and community outreach workers would be responsible for establishing relationships with the families of students. Counselors and health workers would administer to student mental and physical health. Young people would be much better served by a school district designed to focus clearly and relentlessly on imparting a consistently excellent education, and therefore on attracting, retaining, and compensating excellent professionals who actually interact with students.
The idea of moving resources closer to the students themselves is inherent in the Shift program, also articulated during the tenure of Bernadeia Johnson. The evidence for implementation in this program is not strong, though. There has been some movement of resources from affluent schools of the southwestern neighborhoods of the Minneapolis Public Schools to schools populated by students from economically challenged families, and by implication from schools wherein student academic performance is high by the standards of the district to those schools where academic performance lags. But key additions have been made to central office staff during the Bernadeia Johnson tenure. Decision makers at the district created Michael Goar’s position of Chief Executive Officer. They increased the number of Associate Superintendents. The Office of Black Male Student Achievement was added, with the positions of Director Michael Walker and staff coming onto the payroll. And so it has gone.
So, very soon, as the Minneapolis Public Schools implements its plan to dramatically increase student achievement by the year 2020, much work needs need to be done to realize the promise of the Shift program. By moving resources to the school building level, holding professionals at that level responsible for raising student achievement, a greatly reduced central administrative contingent could increase compensation for those actually working directly with young people, including additional tutors for bringing academically faltering students up to grade level.
Carefully but Quickly Hiring a New Superintendent
My West Texas pappy was an ol’ farm boy who rose to a high-level of executive management for a previous incarnation of Southwestern Bell Telephone Company on the strength of his ability to make good decisions. He was fond of telling me, “A decision maker needs to gather all of the available information quickly and completely. Then that person needs to study that information with great care. And when that has been done, it’s time to make the decision, because you’re not likely to know any more later than you do at that point, and you can be just as right or wrong later as you can at an earlier stage--- so at a certain point it’s time to quit hemming and hawing and just take responsibility for the decision.”
This is what the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education now need to do: Make a decision on a new superintendent. Currently the board is considering a recommendation from the Human Resources Department to hire outside talent researchers and recruiters to conduct the superintendent search. There is another option to have the Human Resources Department itself do the job. And there is a third option, intermediate between the other two, that would involve hiring an outside firm to make more limited recommendations from a smaller pool of candidates, to the Human Resources Department and to the members of the Board of Education.
The tendency of the central school district to hire outside consultants grates on me. One would think that with a $720 million budget, a central office building staff of 651 people, and a department for every function of which the human brain is likely to conceive, there would be the wherewithal to make key decisions based on the research and decision-making prowess of the staff already being paid, many overly generously.
In this case, former CEO Michael Goar appears to have the inside track. In an interview with Star Tribune reporter Alejandra Matos, Goar expressed strong support for the kinds of initiatives necessary to fulfill the potential of High Priority Schools and Shift. He appears to be intent on pushing forward with the key programs of the Bernadeia Johnson administration of which he was a part. Goar is a person of sound administrative experience, having held two other posts in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as positions in Memphis and Boston. Complaints that he does not have classroom teaching experience are inconsequential. Administrators administrate and teachers teach. The main thing is that he knows that he must accelerate the initiatives begun under Bernadeia Johnson and that he has the spine to persevere in the likely event of opposition from those bent on the status quo.
Those being paid at the Human Resources Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools need to take responsibility for questioning Goar aggressively on his apparent enthusiasm for continuing the course for change that will be necessary to realize the goals of the 2020 plan. School board members need to do their own homework and consider the best evidence available to them. Then they should make a decision. They can consider other applicants as they wish and as legally obligatory. But Goar’s familiarity with the policies and inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools are legitimate considerations that will work to his advantage, given his viable administrative experience.
Goar is the likely candidate to emerge at the end of the process, whether hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on outside consultants or not. So why wait? The amount of talent available from the universe of administrators trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education is in any case not great. The notion that there is talent to match the territorial splendor of this vast nation is ill-considered. Central school district superintendents who get caught up in some sort of malfeasance, false claims, or political controversy are replete in the sordid history of the search for the position atop the institution charged with the responsibility of educating our precious children. The reality is that we should strive for someone who will first do no harm during the three to five years typical for the post.
So check him out. Consider all of the evidence in Goar’s case, and in the cases of other applicants as necessary. Then make the decision.
As my West Texas pappy would tell everyone concerned, the decision is not likely to be any better many months from now than it will be in the much nearer future.
There are two important categories of consideration for the members of the Minneapolis Schools Board of Education to keep in mind as they articulate and implement a process for hiring a new superintendent: 1) the new superintendent should be absolutely committed to the three key programs of outgoing Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift; and 2) the school board should move as swiftly as possible to hire a superintendent dedicated to those programs, with the logical decision appearing to be that of hiring Michael Goar.
Hiring a New Superintendent Committed to Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift
Focused Instruction
Focused Instruction is the name given to the program articulated during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson under which the leadership of the district is striving to bring a higher quality and more cohesive curriculum to students throughout the public schools.
For many years, consistency of curriculum in the Minneapolis Public Schools was lacking, particularly at the K-5 level. Students in a Grade 3 class at Jenny Lind, for example, might be working on projects focused on the family and community, with students reflecting on and perhaps writing about how their own families affected and were affected by the communities in which they lived. Students in a Grade 3 class at Green Central, quite by contrast, might be sharing ideas and seeking information about warfare, perhaps writing up their personal reflections about war, citing any family members who had served in a military capacity in Vietnam, the first Persian Gulf War, or more recent engagements in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The problem with this approach to education is that it lacks consistency and rigor. The topics identified by the teacher (perhaps in consultation with students) resonates with the misguided “constructivist” education-speak of education professors, who have failed our students so miserably. This approach to education has little respect for knowledge as incrementally, logically imparted information from teacher to student. Students whiling away time in the classroom of a teacher under the sway of constructivism dive into projects without the proper background.
In the project cited above for Jenny Lind, the student is unlikely in the extreme to have much knowledge of the family as an anthropological form and the various ethnic contexts in which family life unfolds. Children from immigrant families may have little knowledge of how family life in their country of origin differs from situations into which they have been thrust in the United States; or how their particular community of immigrant families differs from other native and immigrant communities in the United States. Children of African American families may have little information on the impact of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, or the dislocations of the Northern Migration for families in the course of time and in the present.
In the project identified for Grade 3 Green Central students, students are unlikely in the extreme to have studied particular wars in any depth, to have any real sense of the causes of the Vietnam War or the first Persian Gulf conflict; they almost certainly could not convey any comprehension of British and Russian involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan or the internecine struggles that have made for turbulent history in those countries, those regions.
This failure to provide strong bases of information falls most heavily on children from economically challenged families, the formal education of which has typically not reached beyond high school and may not have included even high school graduation. Children from such families may still learn a great deal about life from hardworking and dedicated parents, who have had experiences from which middle class and upper middle class parents could learn. But in terms of academic matters, children of impoverished parents lacking formal education are not likely to get as much information and sophisticated vocabulary as a function of family conversation as do the offspring of more affluent, better educated parents.
Children of impoverished families also tend to follow their parents’ search for affordable Section 8 housing, often in a quest that may find them at three or four different residences in the space of a school year. This often involves transfers from one school to another, or among multiple schools within the academic year. When there is so much variance in what is taught from classroom to classroom, residentially mobile students are forever confused, ever in an educational netherworld, wandering from classroom to classroom like odd parts to decrepit machines, never able to fit and with tremendous deficits in knowledge and skill sets.
Focused Instruction addresses the unacceptable situation that has abided for decades in our K-12 schools, most notably during the crucial K-5 years. According to Focused instruction, students in one Grade 3 classroom studying meteorological change from season to season will be learning the same body of information as those in another classroom, at any school. A student in one Grade 4 classroom studying the conflict between the British government and the American colonists in the run-up to the American Revolution will find students in another classroom engaged in the same course of study at about the same time, should she or he have to switch schools. And a Grade 6 student who must move from one school to another will not have to wonder what students at another school will be studying, because she or he will know that (for example) proportions and ratios are the abiding topics at that time of year from school to school.
Initiating Focused Instruction was one of the major achievements of leaders in the Minneapolis Public Schools during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. Focused Instruction proceeds according to sound principles of educational excellence and equity. The next superintendent must embrace, implement, and continue to improve curriculum under the aegis of Focused Instruction.
High Priority Schools
For many decades, students from economically challenged families have been concentrated at certain schools. The academic skills of students at these schools have consistently languished below grade level. Currently the schools identified as High Priority Schools include Bethune, Jenny Lind, Sheridan, Green Central, Lucy Laney, Green Central, Hall International, Hmong International Academy, Broadway Arts and Technology, and North Senior High.
Administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools have endeavored to gain greater flexibility in the hiring and retention of excellent teachers to preside in the classrooms of students at High Priority Schools. Over time, the effort will be to staff every classroom in High Priority Schools with teachers of proven capability to move students with math and reading skill deficits toward grade level performance in those key skill areas. While recognizing that pedagogical skill matched with many years’ experience can produce a powerful teacher talent, and making an effort to attract and retain teachers both excellent and experienced, decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools will consider pedagogical skill paramount, and teacher quality will trump the sort of experience represented by tenure alone.
Efforts to address the skill deficits of students in High Priority Schools have resulted in more in-class and after school time focus on fundamental math and skill development. These efforts must be intensified in the days to come, sooner rather than later. Much more needs to be done to train tutors, some of them college students and qualified elder volunteers, some of them professional teachers and aides, to instruct students directly in those skills, particularly those in math and reading, languishing below grade level.
Only when a student has mastered mathematics at the prevailing grade level can she or he look toward high achievement in math, natural science, and technical subjects in the years to come. Only when a student is able to comprehend reading material pertinent to the key subject areas of language arts, history, economics, natural science, math, and the fine arts will she or he be capable of receiving an excellent liberal arts education from teachers who themselves will increasingly possess elevated levels of knowledge and skill. The next superintendent must fully embrace the designation of High Priority Schools and oversee efforts to bring every single student within the broad range of normal intelligence and above up to grade appropriate achievement in mathematics and reading.
The fundamental issue of equity is manifest in the concept of High Priority Schools, a program from the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson that must be continued.
Shift
Central school district bureaucracies are notoriously overstaffed. My own estimate is that central office staff could be reduced to 25% of current levels without any negative outcomes as to administrative functioning or student performance. Over time, the emphasis in resources expended on positions in the central office now at 1250 West Broadway should shift toward positions in school buildings, and particularly in the classrooms where students actually receive their education.
If key administrators in the central school district bureaucracy were to establish overall curriculum and policy to be implemented consistently across the school district, then place responsibility for implementation in the hands of those at the school building level, drastic reductions could be made in central office staff. Principals would be held responsible for teacher performance. Teachers would be held responsible for student performance. Family and community outreach workers would be responsible for establishing relationships with the families of students. Counselors and health workers would administer to student mental and physical health. Young people would be much better served by a school district designed to focus clearly and relentlessly on imparting a consistently excellent education, and therefore on attracting, retaining, and compensating excellent professionals who actually interact with students.
The idea of moving resources closer to the students themselves is inherent in the Shift program, also articulated during the tenure of Bernadeia Johnson. The evidence for implementation in this program is not strong, though. There has been some movement of resources from affluent schools of the southwestern neighborhoods of the Minneapolis Public Schools to schools populated by students from economically challenged families, and by implication from schools wherein student academic performance is high by the standards of the district to those schools where academic performance lags. But key additions have been made to central office staff during the Bernadeia Johnson tenure. Decision makers at the district created Michael Goar’s position of Chief Executive Officer. They increased the number of Associate Superintendents. The Office of Black Male Student Achievement was added, with the positions of Director Michael Walker and staff coming onto the payroll. And so it has gone.
So, very soon, as the Minneapolis Public Schools implements its plan to dramatically increase student achievement by the year 2020, much work needs need to be done to realize the promise of the Shift program. By moving resources to the school building level, holding professionals at that level responsible for raising student achievement, a greatly reduced central administrative contingent could increase compensation for those actually working directly with young people, including additional tutors for bringing academically faltering students up to grade level.
Carefully but Quickly Hiring a New Superintendent
My West Texas pappy was an ol’ farm boy who rose to a high-level of executive management for a previous incarnation of Southwestern Bell Telephone Company on the strength of his ability to make good decisions. He was fond of telling me, “A decision maker needs to gather all of the available information quickly and completely. Then that person needs to study that information with great care. And when that has been done, it’s time to make the decision, because you’re not likely to know any more later than you do at that point, and you can be just as right or wrong later as you can at an earlier stage--- so at a certain point it’s time to quit hemming and hawing and just take responsibility for the decision.”
This is what the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education now need to do: Make a decision on a new superintendent. Currently the board is considering a recommendation from the Human Resources Department to hire outside talent researchers and recruiters to conduct the superintendent search. There is another option to have the Human Resources Department itself do the job. And there is a third option, intermediate between the other two, that would involve hiring an outside firm to make more limited recommendations from a smaller pool of candidates, to the Human Resources Department and to the members of the Board of Education.
The tendency of the central school district to hire outside consultants grates on me. One would think that with a $720 million budget, a central office building staff of 651 people, and a department for every function of which the human brain is likely to conceive, there would be the wherewithal to make key decisions based on the research and decision-making prowess of the staff already being paid, many overly generously.
In this case, former CEO Michael Goar appears to have the inside track. In an interview with Star Tribune reporter Alejandra Matos, Goar expressed strong support for the kinds of initiatives necessary to fulfill the potential of High Priority Schools and Shift. He appears to be intent on pushing forward with the key programs of the Bernadeia Johnson administration of which he was a part. Goar is a person of sound administrative experience, having held two other posts in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as positions in Memphis and Boston. Complaints that he does not have classroom teaching experience are inconsequential. Administrators administrate and teachers teach. The main thing is that he knows that he must accelerate the initiatives begun under Bernadeia Johnson and that he has the spine to persevere in the likely event of opposition from those bent on the status quo.
Those being paid at the Human Resources Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools need to take responsibility for questioning Goar aggressively on his apparent enthusiasm for continuing the course for change that will be necessary to realize the goals of the 2020 plan. School board members need to do their own homework and consider the best evidence available to them. Then they should make a decision. They can consider other applicants as they wish and as legally obligatory. But Goar’s familiarity with the policies and inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools are legitimate considerations that will work to his advantage, given his viable administrative experience.
Goar is the likely candidate to emerge at the end of the process, whether hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on outside consultants or not. So why wait? The amount of talent available from the universe of administrators trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education is in any case not great. The notion that there is talent to match the territorial splendor of this vast nation is ill-considered. Central school district superintendents who get caught up in some sort of malfeasance, false claims, or political controversy are replete in the sordid history of the search for the position atop the institution charged with the responsibility of educating our precious children. The reality is that we should strive for someone who will first do no harm during the three to five years typical for the post.
So check him out. Consider all of the evidence in Goar’s case, and in the cases of other applicants as necessary. Then make the decision.
As my West Texas pappy would tell everyone concerned, the decision is not likely to be any better many months from now than it will be in the much nearer future.
Jan 30, 2015
Major Communication to Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education
Whenever I witness members of the education establishment (to which school board members by definition belong) discuss excellence in education, I am struck by the failure to understand what is meant by an excellent education and to grasp the essential purposes of K-12 education.
Understand, then, these fundamentals >>>>>
Definition of an Excellent K-12 Education
An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a content-rich liberal arts curriculum (focused especially on math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts) in grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors.
Definition of an Excellent K-12 Teacher
An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.
Purposes of K-12 Education
The purposes of excellent education are to provide students with knowledge and skill sets abetting a life of 1) cultural enrichment, 2) civic preparation, and 3) professional satisfaction.
I can typically set many a head to wagging affirmatively by enunciating these statements as to educational excellence and purposes. But, as a formal debater, I can do the same with the following pronouncements:
An excellent education is a matter of encouraging students to identify their own driving interests and to pursue those interests through engaging investigations and experiences that will develop critical thinking skills and preparation for lifelong learning.
An excellent teacher is a classroom facilitator skilled in helping students identify resources for investigating topics of driving interest, develop critical thinking skills, and prepare for lifelong learning.
The purposes of education are to develop student critical thinking skills and encourage lifelong learning.
By now, you will also likely be wagging your head affirmatively at these latter formulations. But if you are a clear thinker, you will at some point make a decision to embrace one set of definitions as primary.
Excellence of K-12 education follows the first set of definitions. Students should acquire a vast array of knowledge and skill sets as they go from grade to grade in the thirteen years of the K-12 experience: They should be given an aggressive mathematics sequence that prepares them to be able to succeed in Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus by the late high school years. Students should similarly gain logically sequenced, grade by grade training in the natural sciences throughout the K-12 experience that prepares them to take AP courses in biology, chemistry, and physics during high school.
Students should gain a thorough understanding in United States and world history, accumulated and discussed in such a way as to analyze current national and international issues from an informed understanding of past events and the political systems, cultural contexts, and religious faiths that have forged the world in which we live. Students should read a rich variety of literature from the Western world, including both American and English classics in translation; classics from the Greeks and Romans in translation; major works from the written and oral traditions of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America; and literary gems from major ethnicities of the United States, especially those of African American, Hispanic, and Native American authors. English composition and language arts skills should be acquired by engaging with and analyzing great national and international works of literature. Students properly trained in these fields will thrive in taking the relevant AP exams.
Students should also gain thorough grounding in the fine arts (musical and visual), so that their lives become enriched with a firm understanding of early music from across the world; classical, baroque, and romantic music from the Western tradition; ongoing developments in world music; and the forms most associated with the 19th century, 20th century, and 21st century American experience: work songs of the slaves, blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop.
If given a proper education at the K-5 level, of the sort found in the Core Knowledge sequence of E. D. Hirsch, our students would at that point possess more knowledge in the key subject areas than is the case with our current students when (if they graduate) they walk across the stage at graduation to receive a piece of paper that is a high school diploma in name only. Middle school students would progress to a level of very sophisticated mastery, and most students at the high school level would be very capable of mastering the rigorous material of AP courses, taking specialized courses in the liberal arts (e. g., African American History, Native American Literature, Jazz Interpretation and Composition), and learning the technical arts (e. g. plumbing, auto mechanics, computer graphics).
World language course options for high school students would be abundant. Curriculum would be rendered at a level of rigor and content anticipating, and at points intersecting, courses taught in community and technical college settings.
As we send our students forth into the world, we should want them to be prepared to evaluate whether military involvement in Afghanistan is worth sending sons of American mothers and daughters of American fathers into potentially fatal situations; whether the Affordable Health Care Act will be the fairest way to expand access to high-quality medical care--- or whether a single-payer or a traditional fee-for-service/ HMO approach should abide; whether Social Security and Medicare should claim such a high percentage of federal budget expenditures--- and whether these programs should be incorporated into a more comprehensive government welfare scheme, or eliminated altogether; whether August Wilson or Arthur Miller is the most adept at generating dramatic dialogue; whether Newtonian and Einstein’s physics have stood the test of time; whether the functioning of operant conditioning undermines the notion of free will; and whether the forms of jazz and hip-hop can be ranked with the best of classical and baroque forms.
Thus, we should want our students to be culturally enriched, so that they live their lives fully engaged with all the splendor of this earthly sojourn. We want them to be citizens capable of good judgment on issues of superlative importance. And we want them to go forth to post-secondary training with all of the knowledge and skill sets necessary to give them lives of professional satisfaction.
Were we to give our students of all demographic descriptors such an education, we would create a whole new world. People would live their lives on a high cultural plain, capable of artistic, musical, and gastronomic discernment. They would leave the abiding circumstance of episodic emotional responses to vital issues, too often leaving judgments to governmental office-holders who make bad decisions--- and rise instead to the level of informed citizenship. And they would be so well-educated as to gain welcome into numerous professional spheres, making major contributions and earning incomes capable of ending cycles of familial poverty that have existed for decades.
Such people are genuine critical thinkers and lifelong learners, because they have the knowledge base on which to exercise critical judgment and to live with joy in the world of mathematics, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts--- and in many areas of technical endeavor and manual skill.
Thus, members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education should decide that having a firm idea of the constituents of an excellent education--- and a keen grasp of the purposes for which we want to educate our young people--- is important. They should opt for the principles, purposes, and personnel integral to a broad and deep liberal arts education. And they should make all of their decisions while on the school board on the basis of that commitment to a knowledge-rich curriculum, imparted to all of the precious beings whose lives have been placed in their care.
Definition of an Excellent K-12 Education
An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a content-rich liberal arts curriculum (focused especially on math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts) in grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors.
Definition of an Excellent K-12 Teacher
An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.
Purposes of K-12 Education
The purposes of excellent education are to provide students with knowledge and skill sets abetting a life of 1) cultural enrichment, 2) civic preparation, and 3) professional satisfaction.
I can typically set many a head to wagging affirmatively by enunciating these statements as to educational excellence and purposes. But, as a formal debater, I can do the same with the following pronouncements:
An excellent education is a matter of encouraging students to identify their own driving interests and to pursue those interests through engaging investigations and experiences that will develop critical thinking skills and preparation for lifelong learning.
An excellent teacher is a classroom facilitator skilled in helping students identify resources for investigating topics of driving interest, develop critical thinking skills, and prepare for lifelong learning.
The purposes of education are to develop student critical thinking skills and encourage lifelong learning.
By now, you will also likely be wagging your head affirmatively at these latter formulations. But if you are a clear thinker, you will at some point make a decision to embrace one set of definitions as primary.
Excellence of K-12 education follows the first set of definitions. Students should acquire a vast array of knowledge and skill sets as they go from grade to grade in the thirteen years of the K-12 experience: They should be given an aggressive mathematics sequence that prepares them to be able to succeed in Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus by the late high school years. Students should similarly gain logically sequenced, grade by grade training in the natural sciences throughout the K-12 experience that prepares them to take AP courses in biology, chemistry, and physics during high school.
Students should gain a thorough understanding in United States and world history, accumulated and discussed in such a way as to analyze current national and international issues from an informed understanding of past events and the political systems, cultural contexts, and religious faiths that have forged the world in which we live. Students should read a rich variety of literature from the Western world, including both American and English classics in translation; classics from the Greeks and Romans in translation; major works from the written and oral traditions of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America; and literary gems from major ethnicities of the United States, especially those of African American, Hispanic, and Native American authors. English composition and language arts skills should be acquired by engaging with and analyzing great national and international works of literature. Students properly trained in these fields will thrive in taking the relevant AP exams.
Students should also gain thorough grounding in the fine arts (musical and visual), so that their lives become enriched with a firm understanding of early music from across the world; classical, baroque, and romantic music from the Western tradition; ongoing developments in world music; and the forms most associated with the 19th century, 20th century, and 21st century American experience: work songs of the slaves, blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop.
If given a proper education at the K-5 level, of the sort found in the Core Knowledge sequence of E. D. Hirsch, our students would at that point possess more knowledge in the key subject areas than is the case with our current students when (if they graduate) they walk across the stage at graduation to receive a piece of paper that is a high school diploma in name only. Middle school students would progress to a level of very sophisticated mastery, and most students at the high school level would be very capable of mastering the rigorous material of AP courses, taking specialized courses in the liberal arts (e. g., African American History, Native American Literature, Jazz Interpretation and Composition), and learning the technical arts (e. g. plumbing, auto mechanics, computer graphics).
World language course options for high school students would be abundant. Curriculum would be rendered at a level of rigor and content anticipating, and at points intersecting, courses taught in community and technical college settings.
As we send our students forth into the world, we should want them to be prepared to evaluate whether military involvement in Afghanistan is worth sending sons of American mothers and daughters of American fathers into potentially fatal situations; whether the Affordable Health Care Act will be the fairest way to expand access to high-quality medical care--- or whether a single-payer or a traditional fee-for-service/ HMO approach should abide; whether Social Security and Medicare should claim such a high percentage of federal budget expenditures--- and whether these programs should be incorporated into a more comprehensive government welfare scheme, or eliminated altogether; whether August Wilson or Arthur Miller is the most adept at generating dramatic dialogue; whether Newtonian and Einstein’s physics have stood the test of time; whether the functioning of operant conditioning undermines the notion of free will; and whether the forms of jazz and hip-hop can be ranked with the best of classical and baroque forms.
Thus, we should want our students to be culturally enriched, so that they live their lives fully engaged with all the splendor of this earthly sojourn. We want them to be citizens capable of good judgment on issues of superlative importance. And we want them to go forth to post-secondary training with all of the knowledge and skill sets necessary to give them lives of professional satisfaction.
Were we to give our students of all demographic descriptors such an education, we would create a whole new world. People would live their lives on a high cultural plain, capable of artistic, musical, and gastronomic discernment. They would leave the abiding circumstance of episodic emotional responses to vital issues, too often leaving judgments to governmental office-holders who make bad decisions--- and rise instead to the level of informed citizenship. And they would be so well-educated as to gain welcome into numerous professional spheres, making major contributions and earning incomes capable of ending cycles of familial poverty that have existed for decades.
Such people are genuine critical thinkers and lifelong learners, because they have the knowledge base on which to exercise critical judgment and to live with joy in the world of mathematics, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts--- and in many areas of technical endeavor and manual skill.
Thus, members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education should decide that having a firm idea of the constituents of an excellent education--- and a keen grasp of the purposes for which we want to educate our young people--- is important. They should opt for the principles, purposes, and personnel integral to a broad and deep liberal arts education. And they should make all of their decisions while on the school board on the basis of that commitment to a knowledge-rich curriculum, imparted to all of the precious beings whose lives have been placed in their care.
Dec 12, 2014
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part I
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part I
A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education
I must in behalf of white America offer the apology to my African American friends that the nation as a whole seems reluctant to extend to you.
I have long felt that the nation owed this apology to you and now feel moved to offer these words of contrition, admiration, and appreciation.
I am sorry that 25,000,000 of your mostly youngest and strongest ancestral family members were ripped from the Bight of Benin, the realm of the Ashanti, the kingdom of Dahomey, many places along the Ivory Coast, and numerous other areas of the continent that gave birth to humanity. How ironic that the gift of humanity was returned with so many acts that we term, “inhumane.”
I am sorry that your ancestors were confined to cages until ships came to transport them across the Middle Passage through the Atlantic Ocean to toil on plantations variously producing sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton, and whatever else the owners and manufacturers could secure for profit--- with no regard at all for your needs. So many of those strong young people were confined to subterranean decks with little space to rest, chained together, lying for days in urine, feces, and other detritus until at last allowed to emerge on the upper deck to be doused with water, led around, and returned to nautical Hades.
How despicable that the wager was that enough people would survive under those conditions to be offered on the auction block to the highest bidders, all rejoicing that a sufficiency of inhumanely treated humanity had endured the sweat, stench, urine, blood, and chains to give their free labor to the agricultural South so as to feed the factories of the industrial North in these United States.
I am so very sorry.
I apologize that once on the plantations and farms of the American South, so many of your ancestors worked almost all of the time, that they were whipped for the smallest infractions or merely perceived slights to masters and overseers, and that via some combination of abuse and overwork they lived out their lives stooped, marred, scarred, limping, lame.
I am so very, very sorry that an overabundance of the women of your heritage were used as breeders and objects of pleasure, valued for the young slaves to which they could give birth and as the outlet for the urges of many a white master and male inhabitant of the plantation. I am appalled that so many women of African provenance were separated from their children, sold as mere units of production rather than treasured offspring, and that these young people grew up without knowing who their mothers and fathers were.
Please accept this apology.
I am sorry that an otherwise brilliant document, the Constitution of the United States of America, democratic in much of its spirit, mocked this spirit internally in failing to extend full rights of citizenship to women and implying that people in conditions of servitude should be considered just one-third of a human being for the purposes of population enumeration and ranking of states for representation in the United States House of Representatives.
I am sorry that the Dred Scott decision labeled enslaved humanity as transportable chattel and that Justice Roger Taney declared that Negroes had no rights that white America and authorized judiciaries had an obligation to respect.
How remarkable, though, that within a year of the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act, the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth stood before an assembly of assertive women and oppositional men, gathered in upstate New York to discuss women’s right to suffrage and full citizenship, and delivered one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of American oratory, as follows:
Sojourner Truth
Ain’t I a Woman?
Delivered at Women’s Convention in New York, 1851
Well, children, there is so much racket there must be something must be out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
Look at me! Look at these arms! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man--- when I could get it--- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in my head; what’s they call it? [“Intellect,” someone whispers.] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cup won’t holds but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to give me my half-measure, full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as a men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did you Christ come from? From God and woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner Truth ain’t got nothing more to say.
...................................................................................................................................................................
I am sorry that Sojourner Truth’s appeal for women’s suffrage was not honored until 1920; and that her entreaty for the abolition of slavery was so imperfectly realized even after the passage of a constitutional amendment (13th) to that effect. But I thank my African American brothers and sisters for the gift of this great seeker of justice under the law, for her energy, her optimism, and her relentless courage.
But I apologize that the ideals of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution were subverted under the doctrines of interposition and nullification in the former slave states, that Reconstruction came to an ignominious conclusion in the Compromise of 1877, that unequal equality was deemed sufficient in Plessy V. Ferguson (1896) by the very Supreme Court Justices who were sworn to uphold statutory and constitutional law, that sharecropping incorporated many of the features of slavery in a wickedly innovative agrarian system, and that Jim Crow and the Black Codes were allowed to trump the Law of the Land.
I am so very sorry.
I apologize profusely for this abnegation of citizenship in a polity that projects itself as a paragon of democracy.
I am so sorry that the party of Lincoln reinvented itself as the champion of corporate interests.
But I thank you for this eloquent reply from Frederick Douglass to an assemblage of African American leaders in 1883:
Frederick Douglass
Who Would Be Free, Themselves Must Strike the Blow
Delivered at Convention of African American Leaders in 1883.
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for and fought for. The man outraged is the man to make the outcry. Depend upon it, men will not care much for a people who do not care for themselves.
Our meeting here was opposed by some of our members, because it would disturb the peace of the Republican Party. The suggestion came from coward lips and misapprehended the character of that party. If the Republican Party cannot stand a demand for justice and fair play, it ought to go down. We were men before that party was born, and our manhood is more sacred than any party can be. Parties were made for men, not men for the parties.
If the six millions of colored people of this country, armed with the Constitution of the United States, with a million votes of their own to depend upon, and millions of white men at their back, whose hearts are responsive to the claims of humanity, have not sufficient spirit and wisdom to organize and combine to defend themselves against outrage, discrimination, and oppression, it will be idle for them to think that the Republican Party or any other political party will organize and combine for them or care what becomes of them. Men may combine to prevent cruelty to animals, for they are dumb and cannot speak for themselves; but we are men and must speak for ourselves, or we shall not be spoken for at all.
We have conventions in America for Ireland, but there should be none if Ireland did not speak for herself. It is because she makes a noise and keeps her cause before the people that other people go to her help. It was the sword of Washington that gave Independence the sword of Lafayette.
In conclusion, we have to say that we meet here in broad daylight. There is was nothing sinister about us. The eyes of the nation are upon us. Ten thousand newspapers may tell if they choose of whatever is said and done here. They may commend our wisdom or condemn our folly, precisely as we shall be wise or foolish. We put ourselves before them as honest men and ask their judgment upon our work.
.....................................................................................................................................................................
Thank you for the great gift of Frederick Douglass, who believed so fervently in the very Constitution that was soon given such scurrilous short shrift by those Justices sworn to uphold it.
Thank you for the relentless pursuit of justice under the law, by which courageous African American patriots held the mirror of the nation’s own legal institutions up to the American populace, extolling a beautiful vision of justice amidst horrendous brutality.
How terrible it was for your ancestors, my African American brothers and sisters, to walk amongst their kinfolk hanging from trees, burned at the stake, tarred and feathered, maimed for life for faults as slim as spitting on the lawn of a white person or failing to step aside for one of lighter skin hue to pass.
A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education
I must in behalf of white America offer the apology to my African American friends that the nation as a whole seems reluctant to extend to you.
I have long felt that the nation owed this apology to you and now feel moved to offer these words of contrition, admiration, and appreciation.
I am sorry that 25,000,000 of your mostly youngest and strongest ancestral family members were ripped from the Bight of Benin, the realm of the Ashanti, the kingdom of Dahomey, many places along the Ivory Coast, and numerous other areas of the continent that gave birth to humanity. How ironic that the gift of humanity was returned with so many acts that we term, “inhumane.”
I am sorry that your ancestors were confined to cages until ships came to transport them across the Middle Passage through the Atlantic Ocean to toil on plantations variously producing sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton, and whatever else the owners and manufacturers could secure for profit--- with no regard at all for your needs. So many of those strong young people were confined to subterranean decks with little space to rest, chained together, lying for days in urine, feces, and other detritus until at last allowed to emerge on the upper deck to be doused with water, led around, and returned to nautical Hades.
How despicable that the wager was that enough people would survive under those conditions to be offered on the auction block to the highest bidders, all rejoicing that a sufficiency of inhumanely treated humanity had endured the sweat, stench, urine, blood, and chains to give their free labor to the agricultural South so as to feed the factories of the industrial North in these United States.
I am so very sorry.
I apologize that once on the plantations and farms of the American South, so many of your ancestors worked almost all of the time, that they were whipped for the smallest infractions or merely perceived slights to masters and overseers, and that via some combination of abuse and overwork they lived out their lives stooped, marred, scarred, limping, lame.
I am so very, very sorry that an overabundance of the women of your heritage were used as breeders and objects of pleasure, valued for the young slaves to which they could give birth and as the outlet for the urges of many a white master and male inhabitant of the plantation. I am appalled that so many women of African provenance were separated from their children, sold as mere units of production rather than treasured offspring, and that these young people grew up without knowing who their mothers and fathers were.
Please accept this apology.
I am sorry that an otherwise brilliant document, the Constitution of the United States of America, democratic in much of its spirit, mocked this spirit internally in failing to extend full rights of citizenship to women and implying that people in conditions of servitude should be considered just one-third of a human being for the purposes of population enumeration and ranking of states for representation in the United States House of Representatives.
I am sorry that the Dred Scott decision labeled enslaved humanity as transportable chattel and that Justice Roger Taney declared that Negroes had no rights that white America and authorized judiciaries had an obligation to respect.
How remarkable, though, that within a year of the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act, the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth stood before an assembly of assertive women and oppositional men, gathered in upstate New York to discuss women’s right to suffrage and full citizenship, and delivered one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of American oratory, as follows:
Sojourner Truth
Ain’t I a Woman?
Delivered at Women’s Convention in New York, 1851
Well, children, there is so much racket there must be something must be out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
Look at me! Look at these arms! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man--- when I could get it--- and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in my head; what’s they call it? [“Intellect,” someone whispers.] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or Negro’s rights? If my cup won’t holds but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to give me my half-measure, full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as a men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did you Christ come from? From God and woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner Truth ain’t got nothing more to say.
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I am sorry that Sojourner Truth’s appeal for women’s suffrage was not honored until 1920; and that her entreaty for the abolition of slavery was so imperfectly realized even after the passage of a constitutional amendment (13th) to that effect. But I thank my African American brothers and sisters for the gift of this great seeker of justice under the law, for her energy, her optimism, and her relentless courage.
But I apologize that the ideals of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution were subverted under the doctrines of interposition and nullification in the former slave states, that Reconstruction came to an ignominious conclusion in the Compromise of 1877, that unequal equality was deemed sufficient in Plessy V. Ferguson (1896) by the very Supreme Court Justices who were sworn to uphold statutory and constitutional law, that sharecropping incorporated many of the features of slavery in a wickedly innovative agrarian system, and that Jim Crow and the Black Codes were allowed to trump the Law of the Land.
I am so very sorry.
I apologize profusely for this abnegation of citizenship in a polity that projects itself as a paragon of democracy.
I am so sorry that the party of Lincoln reinvented itself as the champion of corporate interests.
But I thank you for this eloquent reply from Frederick Douglass to an assemblage of African American leaders in 1883:
Frederick Douglass
Who Would Be Free, Themselves Must Strike the Blow
Delivered at Convention of African American Leaders in 1883.
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for and fought for. The man outraged is the man to make the outcry. Depend upon it, men will not care much for a people who do not care for themselves.
Our meeting here was opposed by some of our members, because it would disturb the peace of the Republican Party. The suggestion came from coward lips and misapprehended the character of that party. If the Republican Party cannot stand a demand for justice and fair play, it ought to go down. We were men before that party was born, and our manhood is more sacred than any party can be. Parties were made for men, not men for the parties.
If the six millions of colored people of this country, armed with the Constitution of the United States, with a million votes of their own to depend upon, and millions of white men at their back, whose hearts are responsive to the claims of humanity, have not sufficient spirit and wisdom to organize and combine to defend themselves against outrage, discrimination, and oppression, it will be idle for them to think that the Republican Party or any other political party will organize and combine for them or care what becomes of them. Men may combine to prevent cruelty to animals, for they are dumb and cannot speak for themselves; but we are men and must speak for ourselves, or we shall not be spoken for at all.
We have conventions in America for Ireland, but there should be none if Ireland did not speak for herself. It is because she makes a noise and keeps her cause before the people that other people go to her help. It was the sword of Washington that gave Independence the sword of Lafayette.
In conclusion, we have to say that we meet here in broad daylight. There is was nothing sinister about us. The eyes of the nation are upon us. Ten thousand newspapers may tell if they choose of whatever is said and done here. They may commend our wisdom or condemn our folly, precisely as we shall be wise or foolish. We put ourselves before them as honest men and ask their judgment upon our work.
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Thank you for the great gift of Frederick Douglass, who believed so fervently in the very Constitution that was soon given such scurrilous short shrift by those Justices sworn to uphold it.
Thank you for the relentless pursuit of justice under the law, by which courageous African American patriots held the mirror of the nation’s own legal institutions up to the American populace, extolling a beautiful vision of justice amidst horrendous brutality.
How terrible it was for your ancestors, my African American brothers and sisters, to walk amongst their kinfolk hanging from trees, burned at the stake, tarred and feathered, maimed for life for faults as slim as spitting on the lawn of a white person or failing to step aside for one of lighter skin hue to pass.
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part II
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part II
A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education
I am sorry.
Please accept my apology.
And I know that your acceptance of this apology will take much in the way of a forgiving spirit when you stare straight at the terrible legacy of terrorism that saw 4,500 children, women, and men lynched between the years 1882 and 1965.
But amidst this very horror, thank you again for the eloquent appeal to law, reason, ethics, and spirituality that came pouring from the richly endowed voice of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, when she spoke to the matter of “this awful slaughter” at the first official meeting of the NAACP in 1909:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
What Is the Cause of This Awful Slaughter?
Delivered at NAACP Convention, 9 May 1909
The lynching record for a quarter of a century merits the thoughtful study of the American people. It present three salient facts:
First, lynching is color-line murder. Second, crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third, it is a national crime and requires a national remedy.
Proof that lynching follow the color line is to be found in the statistics that have been kept for the past twenty-five years. During the few years preceding this period, while frontier lynch law existed, the executions showed a majority of white victims. Later, however, as law courts and authorized judiciary extended into the far West, lynch law rapidly abated, and its white victims became few and far between.
Just as the lynch-law regime came to a close in the West, a new mob movement started in the South. This was wholly political, its purpose being to suppress the colored vote by intimidation and murder. Thousands of assassins banded together as the Ku Klux Klan, “Midnight Raiders,” “Knights of the Golden Circle,” et cetera, et cetera, spread a reign of terror by beating, shooting, and killing colored people by the thousands. In a few years, the purpose was accomplished, and the black vote was suppressed. But mob murder continued.
From 1882 to the present, lynching has been along the color line. Statistics show that 3,284 men, women, and children have been put to death in this quarter of a century. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization--- the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.
Why is mob murder permitted in a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily--- always the same shameful falsehood that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, at once a champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said: “The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate annihilation of the Negro race. This is the never-varying answer of lynchers and their apologists. All now that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels in murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But the truth is mighty, and the lynching record discloses the hypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime.
The only certain remedy is an appeal to law. Lawbreakers must be made to know that human life is sacred and that every citizen of this country is first a citizen of the United States and secondly a citizen of the state in which he belongs. The strong arm of the government must reach across state lines whenever unbridled lawlessness defies state laws.
Federal protection of American citizenship is the only remedy for lynching. Foreigners are rarely lynched in America. If by some terrible mistake a foreigner is lynched, the national government quickly pays the damages. Thousands of American citizens have been put to death, and yet no President has yet raised his hand in effective protest. If the government has the power to protect a foreigner even from insult, certainly it has power to save a citizen’s life.
In a multitude of counsel there is wisdom. Upon the grave question presented by the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children there should be an honest, courageous conference of patriotic, law-abiding citizens anxious to punish crime promptly, impartially, and by due process of law, and to make life, liberty, and property secure against mob rule.
Time was when lynching appeared to be sectional, but now it is national--- a blight upon our nation, mocking our laws and disgracing our Christianity. “With malice toward none but with charity for all” let us undertake the work of making the “law of the land” effective and supreme upon every foot of American soil--- a shield to the innocent; to the guilty, punishment swift and sure.
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What an erudite woman, eloquent speaker, stalwart citizen. How remarkable that time after time the very people who year after year were denied their full rights of citizenship reminded us with such clarity what good citizenship means. How ironic that the very people who were denied their rights, so clearly stated in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and elsewhere in the Constitution, understood better than anyone what an astounding quest for the ideal of democracy can be found in that great document.
How lucky for the people of the United States that African America relentlessly pursued the democratic ideal and brought us closer, if still imperfectly, to that exalted political condition.
But I am sorry that the process was so arduous and that the Constitution as amended in the 1870s was so callously disregarded for at least a century.
I am so sorry.
I apologize.
I am sorry that the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was necessary, and from 1909 until 1954 so much effort had to be expended by Thurgood Marshall and other first-rate attorneys in calling upon the nation’s citizens to observe their own expressed ideals.
I am sorry that millions of African Americans gave their energies to fighting World War I to “make the nation safe for democracy” but frequently felt neither safe nor democratically honored for their service or for their citizenship.
I am sorry for the thousands who continued to be tortured, lynched, emotionally abused in the persistent pursuit of citizenship.
I am sorry.
I apologize.
But I thank the African American people for giving us Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes as literary masters of the Harlem Renaissance, that remarkable cultural flowering that sprouted literary blossoms from humanity on a very thorny national field of inhumanity.
I thank and appreciate Langston Hughes for writing, in “I, Too, Sing America”:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed---
I, too, am America.
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Thank you so much, African America, for giving us Langston Hughes.
You are indeed beautiful. And I am so very ashamed of this nation for the abuse that it has heaped on you.
You, too, most certainly are America.
More than that, you are America at its best--- in its art, literature, music, citizenship, patriotic spirit.
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part III
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part III
A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education
I am sorry for all that you have had to endure.
But I thank you for oratorical eloquence, democratic spirit, and artistic genius. I thank you for the foresight and courage of A. Philip Randolph in leading the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and planning a March on Washington that in the 1940s forced the hands of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, impelling those presidents to bring greater fairness to federal hiring practices and service in the military.
And, oh my goodness, thank you so very much for the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall in arguing the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas case; the courage of Rosa Parks in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott; for the tenacity of the Little Rock Nine; and for the ascendance of that preeminent leader and nonpareil orator, Dr. Martin Luther King.
Thank you specifically for his classic call for brotherhood, sisterhood, love, and justice--- once again based on that claim to the Constitution that he staked, as had Douglass, Barnett, Randolph, Marshall, Parks, and the persistent African American people as a whole--- when he joined others in fulfillment of the March on Washington envisioned by Randolph:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I Have a Dream
Delivered at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963
I say to you today, my friends, that even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, the hills and mountains shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the Glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we can hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
And this will be the day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring”---
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped mountains of Colorado. Let freedom ring form the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that.
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will speed that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last."
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But I am sorry.
I am so, so sorry for the injustice heaped upon Emmett Till; James Meredith; and Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair--- four precious little girls whose lives disappeared in flames of hatred at 16th Street Baptist Church (Birmingham, Alabama) in 1963.
As tenaciously as you had been holding the Constitution high for all to see, how catastrophic were these acts of terror and intimidation. You deserved accolades, African America. But you received hateful threats for seeking education, and you died when American-grown terrorists perpetrated ghoulish disembodiment and murderous arson.
I am so very sorry.
I am sorry every day that my feet hit the ground.
I am sorry to my very soul.
You deserved none of this.
And at the midpoint of the 1960s, in the aftermath of such horrific acts inflicted upon the young and promising, you sent forth another spokesperson, who proclaimed loudly and eloquently that enough was enough:
Malcolm X
Address to Mississippi Youth
Gathering Sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
31 December 1964.
One of the most important things I think young people, especially today, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you’re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you’re going west. The most important thing we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.
It’s good to keep ears wide-open and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make decisions, you have to weigh all of what you’ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you’ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies. This is one of the things that our people are beginning to learn today--- that it is very important to think a situation out for yourself. If you don’t do it, you’ll always be maneuvered into a situation where you are never fighting your actual enemies, where you find yourself fighting your own self.
I think our people are the best examples of that. Many of us want to be nonviolent and we talk very loudly, you know, about being nonviolent. Here in Harlem, where there are probably more black people concentrated than any place in the world, some talk that nonviolent talk too. But we find that they are not nonviolent with each other. You can go out to Harlem Hospital where there are more black patients than any hospital in the world, and see them going in there all cut up and shot up and busted up where we find they got violent with each other.
My experience has been that in many instances where you find Negroes talking about nonviolence, they are not nonviolent with each other, and they are not loving to each other, or forgiving with each other. Usually when they say they’re nonviolent, they mean they’re nonviolent with somebody else. I think you understand what I mean. They are nonviolent with the enemy. A person can come to your home, and if he’s white and wants to heap some kind of brutality on you, you’re nonviolent; or he even take your father and put a rope around his neck and you’re nonviolent. But if another Negro just stomps his foot, you’ll rumble with him in a minute. Which shows you there’s an inconsistency there.
So we here in the Organization for Afro-American Unity are with the struggle in Mississippi one thousand percent. We’re with the efforts to register our people to vote one thousand percent. But what we do not go along with is anybody telling us to help nonviolently. We think that if the government says that Negroes have the right to vote, and then some Negroes come out to vote, and some kind of Ku Klux Klan is going to put them in the river, and the government doesn’t do anything about it, it’s time for us to organize and band together and equip ourselves and qualify ourselves to protect ourselves. And once you can protect yourself, you don’t have to worry about being hurt.
That doesn’t mean we’re against white people, but we sure are against the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils; and anything else that looks like it’s against us, we’re against it. Excuse me for raising my voice, but his thing, you know, gets me upset. Imagine that--- a country that’s supposed to be a democracy, supposed to stand for freedom and all of that kind of stuff--- when they draft you and put you in the Army and send you to Saigon to fight for them--- and then you’ve got to turn around and all night long discuss how you’re going to just get the right to register and vote without being murdered.
You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a “crazy Negro,” or they’ll call you a “crazy nigger”--- and they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom.
So don’t go around here trying to make friends with your enemies. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom: and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And we’ll respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let someone who hates me tell me to love him. I’m not that way out. And you, young as you are, and because you start thinking, you’re not going to do it either. The only time you’re going to get in that bag is if somebody puts you there. Somebody else, who doesn’t have your welfare at heart.
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So on you went.
Some of you seized the American Dream that became more attainable with the passage of civil rights, voting rights, fair employment, and fair housing legislation. But others of you were left behind, as Dr. King knew in organizing the Poor People’s March at the moment that more homegrown terrorism blew him away in 1968.
I am sorry for the loss of Malcom X and Martin Luther King to assassination.
I am sorry that so many of you languish still at the urban core, and as a teacher I apologize profusely for our wretched public schools from which if you graduate at all, you graduate with nothing resembling the education that a high school diploma should signify.
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part IV
An Apology to the African American People in Behalf of White America: Part IV
A Promise of Rectification Through Transformation of K-12 Education
I am sorry for the loss of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to assassination.
I am sorry that so many of you languish still at the urban core, and as a teacher I apologize profusely for our wretched public schools from which if you graduate at all, you graduate with nothing resembling the education that a high school diploma should signify.
I am sorry.
I apologize and hope that you can forgive this poverty, this loss, these murders on top of so many murders.
But thank you for the gift of Maya Angelou, who in January 1993 urged as at the first presidential inaugural of Bill Clinton to reexamine ourselves for what we can be, having learned that what we have been and what we are falls far short of our potential and those transcendent values to which we should aspire:
Maya Angelou
On the Pulse of Morning
Delivered at the Inaugural of William Jefferson Clinton as President of the United States January 20, 1993
A Rock. A River. A Tree.
Hosts to species since departed.
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On the planet floor.
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But, today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly,
f orcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today,
You may stand upon me;
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song.
It says, Come, rest here by my side.
Each of you, a bordered country.
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace,
And I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me
when I and the
Tree and the Rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbit, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today.
Come to me,
Here beside the river,
Plant yourself beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed-
On traveler, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers--- desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede.
The German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
The Italian, the Hungarian, the Pole,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stole, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I, the River, I, the Tree
I am yours--- your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of you hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need.
Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space
To place new steps of change
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me,
The Rock, the River, the Tree, you country,
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eye
And into your brother’s face,
Your country,
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.
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I thank you for the great gift of Maya Angelou.
But I remain sorry.
And I apologize.
I am sorry and aghast that so very recently 16 year-old Trayvon Martin, 19 year-old Michael Brown, 12 year-old Tamir Rice, and 28 year-old Akai Gurley were shot and killed by police--- sworn officers of the law who acted without subtlety, without adept professional judgment, upon an abiding fear of young black men everywhere, whom white America refuses even now to understand as young people born to conditions of raging terrorism, stark fear, broken families, lousy schools, all flowing from a brutish history,
Perhaps, now that the national economy is according to many indicators back on track--- understanding that abiding features of familial cyclical poverty, crime-ridden communities, and inadequate public education have produced an underclass for whom the economy is never good--- we can shift our attention to the perennial inequities from the daunting economic challenges that Barack Obama urged people to meet head-on in his both stirring and reality-grounded first inaugural speech:
Barack Obama
First Inaugural Address
Delivered in January 2009
My fellow citizens, I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you’ve bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.
I thank President Bush for his service to the nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout the transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our celebrated documents.
So it has been, so it must be with this generation of Americans.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things--- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor--- who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops, and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg , Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might have a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. Starting today we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
We have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united. We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds will some day pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself, and that American must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
In this winter of our hardship, let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter, and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.
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I am sorry that the economic conditions that served as a backdrop to President Obama’s first inaugural speech fell so heavily on many of you.
I am sorry that the condition of cyclical poverty in which so many urban African American families have been stuck has never been understood as a product of historical circumstances, the remedy for which must be a viable K-12 system that can start each child out with an equal chance to have a culturally enriched, civically prepared, professionally satisfying life.
But I thank you for the great gift of this president, who has moved us closer to universal health care, superintended policies allowing us to emerge from that dark economic time that described the start to his presidency, and with grace and style has advanced our national discussion on a wide variety of social issues.
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I am sorry.
I apologize.
I am sorry and I apologize in behalf of white America, which has never reckoned with the terrorism witnessed at each phase of United States history, and which has never offered this sort of apology to you.
I am sorry for the treatment that you as African Americans have received in the course of four centuries on the American continents. I am sorry for the conditions on the slave ships, the humiliation of the auction blocks, the brutality of forced labor on farms and plantations in the American South. I am sorry that amendments 14 and 15 went for a century before any protracted and dedicated enforcement ensued.
I am sorry that the effect of the 13th amendment was vitiated by the conditions of sharecropping. I am sorry that the Republican Party sold you out in the Compromise of 1877, that the Democratic Party was suffused with such a mean spirit for so long, that Supreme Court Justices rendered such an unjust decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, that so many of your ancestors died hanging from a tree or were charred on the stake.
I am sorry that because of all of this so many of you felt the need to leave the home and the family and the region of your nativity in an attempt to find a better life at the end of a Northern Migration. But how wrenchingly awful were the restricted housing covenants, job discrimination, and racist white attitudes that dashed so many hopes and dreams that you had carried to New York City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, and eventually on to St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis/ St. Paul.
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