That’s all we were, one of those two economic conditions. My schoolteachers educated me. And let me tell you the interesting thing about being segregated. The schoolteachers were segregated too. They could not leave and go anywhere else and so the best minds possible were forced by law to go nowhere else but to me. I had the advantage of being segregated, if you will, because these teachers owned me. They were my parents away from home and I was not disadvantaged when I was sent to school everyday.... There was no better school. The salaries were half the salary of white teachers by law. We were all segregated, black and poor and the textbooks were all hand-me-downs. I never had a new textbook. When they said write your name in the inside of the book there was no place to write your name.... How does one turn around a school and change an institution? You have to start with a philosophical base. First of all you must understand that good people participate in the educational process....Good people can (also) participate in the oppression of other people and not necessarily be malicious or mean-spirited. As an example, if you have the experiences as I did of riding the back of a bus, you learn something very interesting ...you get on in the front, that’s where the driver is. And you pass by some real good people in the front of that bus to get to the back. And when you get to the back you find some real nice people. The good people in the front and the good people in the back are very much the same. They believe in God. They go to church. They send their kids to school. They like a little hot sauce in their gumbo, like their music a little too loud, argue about baseball, cooking, have a good time, all going downtown. People in the back and people in the front exactly the same. Except the law says you cannot ride together and therefore we participated voluntarily in our mutual oppression. The people in the back going a step further fighting each other over good seats in the back of the bus until one day a lady said, “ My feet hurt, I’m tired. I shall do this no longer.” And the rest of us said what a wonderful idea. So before we leave here this evening, you will have to ask yourself, are you on the bus? Are you in the back? Are you in the front? Are you driving the bus? Do you even know that there is a bus? Or do you assume that where you are is where you are supposed to be and nobody can be a catalyst? You must be the catalyst who makes the social change, but you have to first understand that it is possible to change and necessary to change. Oppressed people often depend upon that oppression and defend it. You don’t believe that. There are still people in the Philippines wishing that Marcos would come back.... This is Black History Month. Black people have a history different in this country than anybody else (meaning no disrespect to all the other ethnic groups in this country). Nobody can equate themselves with black people and anybody who tries to do so is either malicious or misguided or misinformed. Let me tell you why. Black people have three distinct differences that make them different from all other groups. We came here involuntarily... direct from our families, our language, our history, our culture, our women. The men were taken first, used as absolute chattel, involuntarily. The typical scenario was that a black man walked out of his home to get a breath of fresh air in Africa and woke up 16 months later in chains in Georgia. That’s how we came. Number two. When we got there we were given no privileges at all. We were made property. Horses were worth more than we were. We were not allowed to marry or have families. We couldn’t even talk to each other If education is going to work at all, educators have to accept the responsibility and stop laying blame on victims who already are victimized by the system. because we had different dialects. It was illegal to educate us. We were absolute slaves. We were less than dirt in this country and that has not gone away. We have still been mistreated in this country in very tragic ways. The thirdjcondition that makes us different is that we came from Africa. Not from Canada, not from South America, not from Europe, Paris, not from Israel. We came from Africa.... Those three distinct differences make us unique in this culture....We were treated differently. We are still treated different today. Which made us stronger because we haven’t died. When you take a species and superimpose oppression upon it you either eliminate it or you strengthen it. Since we have not been eliminated you draw your own conclusions about the rest of it. But now that we are still hereand I now that we are trying to be educated and now that this society knows that slavery will no longer be tolerated, maybe not even in South Africa in a few years, there’s another way to enslave the people and keep us in place and make sure that we do windows and toilets that belong to other people. Mis-educate our youth. Now the public school system is a very interesting institution. It is in my opinion the most powerful institution on the face of this earth.... The public school system is the only institution in this society that says you break the law if you don’t give up your children to me. For 12 years you must - give up your children with no interference. And my primary purpose is to shape their minds and their values. Their futures are in my hands with no interference from you and if you don’t give them to me you are a lawbreaker. Do you know of any institution in the most despotic dictatorship in the history of this world that has taken the children for 12 years from the people and had control over their minds and values? And if the public school system is the most powerful institution in America and if America is arguably the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, then the public school system becomes the most powerful institution on the face of the earth. And if you and I are the people who run that system then we are the most powerful people on earth. If you don’t believe that then you have no business being in the profession. Power is what you take and assume.... Everybody with a teacher credential walking into a classroom has all the authority they need.... If a teacher ever says, “ I don’t have enough control, I don’t have enough authority” —you already run a dictatorship. What do you want, the power of life and death? What more power do you need over your students? (You say) “ All of my students are crazy. They act the fool. They treat me with disrespect.” Let me tell you something. Kids know who to treat with disrespect. When you went to school you knew it too. There were some teachers we’d run out of the room in 10minutes. There were others if they just looked at us we knew our lives were in danger. You s t i l l remember them, don’t you? You know who they were. They knew who they were too. It had nothing to do with j their education. It had to do with the ! content of their character.... I am not saying to you that teach- I ersshould be abused by children. I am saying to you that for the most part teachers who are out of control have themselves to blame, not the children. Not the children to blame [ because the children are gonna be children. They have always been their way. You and I were the same way. I But let me go a bit further. The public schools in America have not ] ever been prepared to educate the i disenfranchised other than in those I public schools, in the segregated । south. Other than in the segregated I schools we don’t have any good examples system-wide of schools that have been effectively educating poor ( and disenfranchised children. But segregation allowed us to all be i locked in together. We had a common j dilemma and a common purpose, r Nowadays, as I indicated, public f school teachers don’t send their kids f to public schools. So who are they i teaching? Not their own children.... If we are going to effectively j educate young people we must dis- | continue the notion that the kids must come to us in a different condition before we can be effective. We can no more assume that young people in America be pre-educated by their parents as a condition of our being effective as schoolteachers than physicians in America can demand that all of their patients get well | before they come for medical treat- I ment. Of what use are you as a teacher if you can’t educate the uneducated? Stop demanding that the parent do something with the child. Why don’t we build in the vehicles that support the parent and give them some assistance in sending the child to us in a better condition? We do need support systems, we do need preferential treatment for the needy in I America. You call that affirmative action, special treatment. I just call it justice.... Until all of us are set free none of us can call this a just society. And you must understand this, I know a lot of people who sometimes get very intimidated by this kind of rhetoric.... I might ask you to stand up on your hind legs and look somebody in the eye and say, “ I will take this no longer.” And you say that’s not a very peaceful thing to do. “ I don’t want to cause waves. I am a very nice person and I don’t want to get in any trouble.” ... Non-violence is the only way that we are going to survive in th is society.... (But) what is non-violence? If you think non-violence means turning the other cheek and refusing to fight back you misunderstood it.... Non-violence is defined by Dr. King in a very simple way. He defines it by first giving you the definition of violence. Violence is anything that denies human integrity and leads to a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. I’ll repeat that. Anything, any act, any person, any place, any word, any deed, any thought, any legislation, any event, any time, anything that denies human integrity and leads to a sense of hopelessness and helplessness is called violence. And by that definition racism is violence. Poverty is v io lence . Hunger is violence. Homelessness is violence. Sexism is violence. And so is the miseducation of children.... Therefore those of us who believe in nonviolence must see these institutions in our midst as being absolutely violent and reach out as an army, soldiers of justice, and try to attack these ins titu tions by non-violent means and destroy these predators within our community that happen to be a part of us.... There is no “ they” out there who are responsible for this. We are re s p o n s ib le fo r mak ing th a t change.... And if you understand that, you understand that the power to make these changes lies in this room. So let’s talk about education as a vehicle for changing this society.... I am the principal of a high school in South Central Los Angeles. It has 2,850 students. It is 90 percent black and 10 percent Hispanic. When I took it over seven years ago it had 1,700 students and 1,300 per day were voluntarily leaving the school afraid to come to it. They were terrified. The school was run by the Crips gang. There was extortion every day. Kids fighting each other. Nobody going to class. Thirty-three percent absence rate. Less than 30 percent of the students even thinking about going to college. Unbelievable chaos. Graffiti everywhere. Students truant, hanging out. Narcotics being sold on a regular basis. Teachers being assaulted, real and imagined.... And coming onto that campus I knew something was wrong. Yet the people who worked there, the adults, told me, “ This is normal, this is the way black people are.” And their brothers walking around with their heads full of curlers and a shower cap, earrings down to here and 40 pounds of radio in the back and people telling me, that’s the way the brothers are. I have been black too long and I know they are lying to me. I know that that’s not genetic to black people. We were not born with curlers in our hair. Lord knows, I know, we need our curlers but we were not born with them. Ladies, if we were born with curlers in our hair, childbirth would be worse than it is now, wouldn’t it?... We have to begin to set some standards for the young people and the adults. Washington Prep began to talk about excellence. They established a contract for every student and parent. Homework is mandatory. Attendance is monitored daily. Conduct is non-violent. And dress has a code. Homework must be mandatory. Otherwise people won’t give i t . ... And attendance needs to be monitored on a regular basis. We cut absenteeism from 33 percent to less than 10 per8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988
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