Martin Luther King Day

  

                                           

 

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a National Holiday. All government offices will be closed in honor of Dr. King and his pioneering role in the civil rights movement back in the 1960s. This is a unique holiday since he is the only man or woman to be honored with his own day anymore. Great Presidents like Washington and Lincoln have lost their individual holiday status and are now lumped together next month on President’s day. Poor Christopher Columbus has also slipped into virtual oblivion in deference to political correctness.

If Dr. King were alive today, I believe that he would be shocked to see how his famous dream has been turned into a nightmare. Statistics show that over 70% of black births now occur out of wedlock. This alarming figure has been rising every year since the time of Dr. King. The disintegration of the black family in America is perhaps the major reason for the fact that about 40% of the prison population today is black despite the fact that blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of that number the great majority would appear to be young black males. Most of these will have grown up without a father.

Critics can cry racism, but I believe that the failure of the dream lies elsewhere. The integration of America’s public schools was one of the key elements in the civil rights movement, but integration has turned out to be a disaster for most of the blacks in this country. Studies have shown, for example, that practically every attempt to integrate Connecticut’s schools has not only failed but has actually made things worse.

Magnet schools have only drawn the best students with the most involved parents away from the other schools. Attempts to bus inner-city students into nearby suburban schools have also failed to meet expectations. Even though they admit failure, politicians and commentators can only suggest more of the same. 

A favorite catch phrase of the civil rights movement was “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”  Today, it would appear that after years of failed experiments like the ones above, and the outlay of billions of dollars, that it would be better to say that the solution was the problem. Integration was the supposed solution offered by well-intentioned civil rights advocates, but it has actually turned out to be the problem. How did this happen?

I am old enough to have been educated before the civil rights movement and I will use the nearby city of Bridgeport, Connecticut as an example. Integration in Bridgeport abolished neighborhood schools, and as a result it destroyed existing neighborhoods and communities.  Integration accelerated the already begun exodus of the white middle classes from Bridgeport into the nearby suburbs. At the same time, these people did not leave their jobs. They moved outside the city but continued to hold their jobs as teachers, policemen, firemen, sanitation men, and other civil servants. Their unions even lobbied successfully to abolish laws that prohibited them from living outside the city.

As a result, the jobs that other groups had used to advance into the middle class were not available to blacks in Bridgeport. More than two generations would pass before they began to be teachers, policemen, fireman, and civil servants in any significant number. Even if a student managed to finish high school what could they do to earn a living? Many still turn to a life of crime, especially the drug trade. This is one of the factors in the high percentage of blacks in American prisons.

 Others try athletics but we know that despite heavy college recruitment, most will not graduate. Only a small minority manage to hit the pro jackpot. A few years ago, a friend sent me an article from USA Today about a scandal at the prestigious University of North Carolina. At UNC football players were able to take classes in the African American studies program that required no class attendance, only the submission of a paper at the end of class. These were pretty obviously phony courses created especially for black football players. Heads have rolled and the head of the program came under investigation. Other studies have shown that black athletes are reading at below eighth grade levels at many colleges across the country. 

So, it turns out that the integration of American schools did not usher in an educational utopia. After sixty years advocates admit that despite all their efforts and reforms, segregation has not been eliminated. Moreover, it is clear that integration has done little to improve education itself. In fact, it appears as if integration had more to do with social engineering than with education. Can it be that integration was the “problem” and not the “solution”?

The last sixty years have seen the disintegration of the black family; an incredibly high out of wedlock birth rate, jails filed with young black criminals, and an educational system whose reforms have gone sour despite good intentions. Martin Luther King could never have imagined that his dream would have turned out this way.*

*This post first appeared on The Weekly Bystander six years ago, Sadly, not much has changed.

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Quote of the Day. There is only one race, the Human race.

The Education of Hidden Figures

The film Hidden Figures was another Academy Award nominee that we had the pleasure of seeing on our recent trip to Alameda, California. Like Fences which I discussed last week, it concerns black life in America in the fifties and sixties. The film, based on a true story only recently recounted in a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, centered around three young black women who were involved in the US space program at its very beginning.

The key figure in the film was Katherine Johnson, a mathematician and physicist, played beautifully by Taraji P. Henson. Johnson specialized in celestial mechanics, and played a key role in the calculations necessary to bring an astronaut safely back to earth while re-entering earth’s atmosphere.

The other two women were Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monae, and Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer who was nominated for best supporting actress for her performance. Actually, Vaughan was not a mathematician but a “computer,” that is, one of a whole crew of intelligent, skilled young women who in the early days of the space program did the incredible number of calculations necessary at NASA at a time when the original IBM computers were just beginning to appear. They used only pencils and primitive calculators.

Most of these “computers” were young, intelligent, and skilled women both white and black. In the early days of NASA, which corresponded with the early days of the civil rights movement, these women were segregated even to the point of having to use separate bathrooms. Dorothy Vaughan fought to become supervisor of the all-black unit but at the same time she saw the handwriting on the wall and taught herself Fortran, the language used by the new IBM computers.

Hidden Figures is an excellent, uplifting film with a truly exciting ending as all, black and white, sweat out the problems of John Glenn’s epic first mission with its dangerous fiery return from orbit. However, a couple of thoughts occurred to me as I thought about the film afterwards.

I couldn’t help but be impressed by the black women in the cast, not just the three leading ladies but by the whole group of “computers.” Where did all these young women come from? Where did they develop their skills? Most of them seemed to be just out of high school. Moreover, since most of them were from the South, all of them must have come from segregated, all-black schools. In actual fact, Dorothy Vaughan became a supervisor in 1949 before the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision decided that separate but equal schools in the South were not equal.

Could it be that these segregated schools were not as unequal as the Supreme Court judges thought? A recent letter in the Wall St. Journal from a resident of Louisville, Kentucky bemoaned the fate of his city’s public school system since the forced integration of its schools. He claimed that a flourishing school system back then is now a disaster, especially for blacks. Just today an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal by a black columnist bemoaned the chaos in the New York City public school system.

During my career as a financial advisor, one of my clients was a black man who was a guidance counsellor in a nearby urban school system. He also held a PhD and was on the Board of Governors of the University of Connecticut. He liked to brag about his all-black school in Oklahoma where his small graduating class eventually produced three PhDs.

I could also mention Zora Neale Hurston, a black writer from the South who at the time was very critical of the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. She did not believe that black schools were inherently unequal and argued that the idea that blacks needed to be educated with whites would not result in better education. It would also be a death blow to the progress that black schools and teachers were already making. She wrote,

If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.

 I suspect that Hurston and most of the black women depicted in Hidden Figures were proud of the education they received in their segregated schools. I suspect that they even loved these schools. They had black administrators and teachers who spoke their language, knew their culture, and acted as powerful role models. They could excel in all areas of education not just in sports. They could write and edit the school newspaper and yearbook. They could participate in student government and be elected class President on their own merits and not because of tokenism.

I can imagine what they might have thought when far away judges told them that their schools were unequal, and that they, even the smallest, would have to be bused to schools far away from their neighborhoods. I don’t think they all chose to be part of a great social experiment but then, as now, they had no choice.

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School Dis-integration

                                     

The Connecticut Post likes to feature statistical studies on its Sunday front page. This past week it ran a lengthy article complete with appropriate bar chart that indicated that schools in Fairfield County were still largely segregated.

Thus, sixty years after the famous Brown vs. Board of Education decision that outlawed so-called separate but equal segregated schools in the South, the population of the Bridgeport Connecticut public schools is largely Black and Hispanic. At the same time the smaller communities surrounding Bridgeport have a school population made up largely of White students.

In typical fashion the CT Post followed up this shocking revelation with an editorial a couple of days later that bemoaned the situation and called for remedial action. Interestingly, the Post article included interviews with two older black men who both had attended segregated schools in the South as children. Both men praised the education they had received, and believed that it was superior to what students were getting in Bridgeport today. One even claimed that his all black school was superior to the white one in his South Carolina hometown,

Neither in the article nor in the subsequent editorial did the Post comment on or even realize the implications of the evidence provided by these two men. Is it possible that the whole school integration movement has been the problem and not the solution? Despite all sorts of social engineering involving vast expenditures of time and money, is it possible that school integration has been a disaster for three generations of black children?

Today more than 70% of black children are born out of wedlock to single mothers many of whom are little more than children themselves. Some are grandmothers before the age of forty. Today more than 70% of the inmates in American prisons are black men. Today on the streets of cities like Chicago, young black men are killing each other at alarming rates.

I was still in college when the implications of Brown vs. Board of Education began to be felt in northern cities. In these cities there were no laws requiring segregated schools, but there was what was called “de-facto” segregation. In the North children went to their neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods reflected the racial and ethnic make up of those cities.

Although there was often racial imbalance in the neighborhood elementary schools, by the time students went to high school, they would usually all attend the same high school. My wife grew up in the city of White Plains in nearby Westchester county. Pictures from her high school yearbook show a school much more integrated than most urban schools today. The school’s excellent football team reflected the racial balance in the city where about 10% of the population was black. The class President was an outstanding black student. He and other former black students attended her fiftieth reunion a few years ago, and most of them seemed to have been successful at making it in American society.

Nevertheless, in the sixties it was decreed that to achieve true integration children had to be bused out of their neighborhood communities into schools in other neighborhoods in order to achieve true racial equality and so-called “upward mobility.” This policy inevitably led to the white flight from the cities that is a matter of historical record.

You can call the Whites “rascists” but whether they were or not begs the question. Political scientists and sociologists like the ones interviewed in the CT Post article should have, with all their learning and studies, been able to predict the White flight and its consequences. I don’t think any proponent of integrated schools at the time imagined the terrible consequences that ensued.

Integration destroyed community. It destroyed both white and black communities in the cities. It can be argued that without community and the consensus it brings, it will be almost impossible to educate young children. Nowadays, everyone talks about and praises the value of “diversity.” It has become a sacred cow that must be accepted on faith. Yet, the testimony of the two men cited but ignored in the CT Post article is not irrelevant. A community is essential to education but it cannot be created by judicial order.

Moreover, as the population of American cities like Bridgeport became largely made up of former minorities, the white politicians, policemen, firemen, civil servants, and teachers kept their union jobs in the cities. These upwardly mobile positions would be largely closed to Blacks and Hispanics graduating from the city schools. What could they do to make a living after graduation? A handful might succeed in athletics but many more had no alternative but the drug trade. For young black women the choices were even fewer.

Actually, the proponents of school integration were guilty of a kind of racism of their own. Without saying it, they assumed that Blacks like the men quoted in the article would not be able to rise out of poverty unless they were provided with the example of White students. Weren’t they saying that Blacks were really inferior to Whites? Or was it that “diversity” became a goal in itself, more important than a good education?

If a White Supremacist had planned an attack on the Black community in America sixty years ago, he could hardly have wrecked more havoc than White Liberals and Black activists did in their pursuit of integrated schools and diversity. Yet, the local Professors cited in the CT Post article could only call for more of the same. Instead of local involvement and control of public schools, they want larger mega school districts where children will be bused even further away from their local communities.

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Martin Luther King's Dream

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a National Holiday. All government offices will be closed today in honor of Dr. King and his pioneering role in the civil rights movement back in the 1960s. This is a unique holiday since he is the only man or woman to be honored with his own day anymore. Great Presidents like Washington and Lincoln have lost their individual holiday status and are now lumped together next month on President’s day. Poor Christopher Columbus has also slipped into virtual oblivion in deference to political correctness.

If Dr. King were alive today, I believe that he would be shocked to see how his famous dream has been turned into a nightmare. Recent statistics show that over 70% of black births now occur out of wedlock. This alarming figure has been rising every year since the time of Dr. King. The disintegration of the black family in America is perhaps the major reason for the fact that over 70% of the prison population today is black. Of that number the great majority would appear to be young black males. Most of these will have grown up without a father.

Critics can cry racism but I believe that the failure of the dream lies elsewhere. The integration of America’s public schools was one of the key elements in the civil rights movement but integration had turned out to be a disaster for most of the blacks in this country. Recently, a columnist in the Connecticut Mirror, an online newspaper, cited studies that showed that practically every attempt to integrate Connecticut’s schools has not only failed but has actually made things worse.

Magnet schools have only drawn the best students with the most involved parents away from the other schools. Attempts to bus inner-city students into nearby suburban schools have also failed to meet expectations. Even though they admit failure, politicians and commentators can only suggest more of the same.

A favorite catch phrase of the civil rights movement was “ If your not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”  Today, it would appear that after years of failed experiments like the ones above, and the outlay of billions of dollars, that it would be better to say that the solution was the problem. Integration was the supposed solution offered by well-intentioned civil rights advocates, but it has actually turned out to be the problem. How did this happen?

I am old enough to have witnessed the civil rights movement and I will use the nearby city of Bridgeport, Connecticut as an example. Integrated in Bridgeport abolished neighborhood schools, and as a result it destroyed existing neighborhoods and communities.  Integration accelerated the already begun exodus of the white middle classes from Bridgeport into the nearby suburbs. At the same time, these people did not leave their jobs. They now lived outside the city but continued to hold their jobs as teachers, policemen, firemen, sanitation men, and other civil servants. Their unions even lobbied successfully to abolish laws that prohibited them from living outside the city.

As a result the jobs that other groups had used to advance into the middle class were not available to blacks in Bridgeport. More than two generations would pass before they began to be teachers, policemen, fireman, and civil servants in any significant number. Even if a student managed to finish high school what could they do to earn a living? Many turned to a life of crime, especially the drug trade. This is one of the factors behind the high percentage of blacks in American prisons.

 Others try athletics but we know that only a small minority get recruited by colleges, and that only a handful hit the pro jackpot. The other day a friend sent me an article from USA Today about a scandal at the prestigious University of North Carolina. At UNC football players were able to take classes in the African American studies program that required no class attendance, only the submission of a paper at the end of class. These were pretty obviously phony courses created especially for black football players. Heads have rolled and Julius Nyang’oro, the head of the program, is under investigation. Other studies have shown that black athletes are reading at below eighth grade levels at many colleges across the country.***

So, it turns out that the integration of American schools did not usher in an educational utopia. After fifty years advocates admit that despite all their efforts and reforms, segregation has not been eliminated. Moreover, it is clear that integration has done little to improve education itself. In fact, it appears as if integration had more to do with social engineering than with education. Can it be that integration was the “problem” and not the “solution”?

The last fifty years have seen the disintegration of the black family; an incredibly high out of wedlock birth rate, jails filed with young black criminals, and an educational system whose reforms have gone sour despite good intentions. Martin Luther King could never have imagined that his dream would have turned out this way.

***Here is a quote from the USA Today article.

"More than 50 classes offered by the African Studies department, and very popular with athletes, appear not to have actually existed. Some of these courses listed instructors who had not 'supervised the course and graded the work.' and others 'were taught irregularly'...UNC's chancellor and football coach lost their jobs. the African studies department chair...is under indictment."

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