By
Johnie H. Scott
(WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, April 19, 2000)
On Friday, March 25th of this year, U.S. Presidential hopeful George W. Bush paid a visit to historic Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was there to push his education program while taking a shot at Vice President Al Gore. It’s no secret that if the Republicans are to have any hope whatsoever this coming fall in the race for the Presidency, they must address the problems laying siege to urban schools – especially those with student bodies that are predominantly African American.
As reported by T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times, “Bush chose the high school, site of one of the nation’s most infamous integration battles, to talk about the need to improve educational opportunities for minorities as well as to highlight his own plans for a targeted voucher program, greater accountability and a reduced federal bureaucracy.”
This LA Times staff writer reported Republican spokeswoman Karen Hughes stating that “Bush’s visit to Central High was not a typical Republican action, saying it was the first time in memory that a Republican nominee had visited the school.” Miller then added, “But Bush’s message didn’t find much resonance with the public educators in Little Rock.”
I ask you to recall Word Up! From Week 6 titled “Reflections on Bulworth, Presidential Politics 2000.” I wrote then that Bush’s “purpose was to sell his educational program; not to the administration, faculty, staff and student body of Central High but, instead, to the nation. His campaign staffers,” I noted, “certainly picked a location loaded with symbolic value, especially where education is concerned. What they failed to take into account was the seriousness of the issues affecting Central High and, by extension, all of Black America.”
I was raised believing, if nothing else, that the most important action any African American can take is getting an education. My parents instilled that in all of their children, just as their own parents preached that same gospel of education – the very same gospel African Americans have honored and striven for since first being brought to American shores in bondage.
Mamma and Daddy are both gone from this world. My parents were ordinary folk, as Black people go. They were born and raised in the Old South, in the northeastern section of Louisiana near Shreveport before they moved out West to Los Angeles. Daddy was a semi-skilled laborer for most of his life. His final years found my father – a man who only went as far as the sixth grade -- working as a night watchman.
Mamma finished high school in Watts, going to Jordan High’s Evening Adult School during the late 1950s. I will never forget the importance she attached to her kids “going farther and doing better in life.” Nor will I ever forget Mamma’s belief -- a belief shared by every single Black parent I have ever known or met -- that the “best and safest way for a colored person to get ahead in this world is by getting some education and a degree.”
Let the truth be told: America was a very different country during the 1950s and early 1960s. Black South Los Angeles was still very close to its Southern roots, extremely segregated from the remainder of the city, and you saw that Southern mentality reflected in the way that families, entire neighborhoods, bonded together. There was considerable truth and reality in an African proverb that was lived out every single day for all of us: “It takes an entire village to raise a child.”
It was hard during those years. Still, there was a belief in the air that times were going to get better which was fueled by a president named John Kennedy who very presence in the White House promised a new turn of events for African Americans. For our little neighborhood in the projects of Watts, for the entire community, we truly believed that the mind was a terrible thing to waste. Our elders were determined not to lose a single black child to poverty, not one boy or girl, not if they could help it. Our elders were people who came from a segregated South years before Rosa Parks decided one day that she was not going to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
The schools in Watts were, arguably, not that much better than those in the South that led so many Black Southerners to push so hard for integration, knowing as they did that the white schools were built to be superior to those black kids attended. But that knowledge didn’t matter. For our parents, the world black people had to make it in, that their children and grandchildren had to deal with, still revolved around the gospel of education: that gospel (which has always meant “good news”) being a generation of young, educated black minds filled with the potential and self-confidence to bring about a change in their lives and circumstance.
Hard to believe it is nearly a half century later; just as it is still difficult to accept that I won’t be hearing Mamma’s voice, not in this world, asking me, “What did they teach you in school today?” And wanting me to slow down from whatever it was I might be doing to say just what, in fact, did happen in class that particular day. Mamma’s eyes might mist over as the years passed by, as the Civil Rights Movement came into full bloom, as her seven children along with millions of other African Americans watched the Little Rock Nine accompanied by federal troops march bravely to class at Central High.
I remember those words like a clap of thunder in the storm, their meaning sending chills down my body as I think of the clichés George W. Bush tried pushing off on the people, my people, during his visit to Little Rock. I still don’t believe he understands just how serious the issues are.
White America has to sooner or later understand that Black people aren’t interested in vouchers; that we are getting just plain ol’ tired of our children getting up early in the morning before the crack of dawn, leaving the neighborhood for the other side of the city every single day, our kids riding on those buses for five and six hours Monday through Friday with their efforts a statement in itself that the schools in Black communities are not going to improve, that no more effort is going to be placed into making them better, and that if a Black kid wants an education of any substance then they’re just going to have to keep on riding that bus until times get better.
Maybe that’s why Fannie Lou Hamer’s words carry even more meaning to the parents of Black children, to people like myself who live in the North and West, in those communities James Baldwin described as “the cities of destruction” when that Southern freedom fighter said: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”
(This
article has been revised and edited from the original as it appeared in the
WAVE newspapers and has been provided with special links as well for students
and readers – JS)