Page 12
June 5, 2019
O PINION
Every Child Deserves a Quality Education
Staying vigilant
on Brown
M arian W right
e delMan
As a teenager, many
of Barbara Johns’ wild-
est dreams were about
a surprising subject: A
new school. Then a day came when
the 16-year-old decided to put her
dreams into action.
“It was time that Negroes were
treated equally with whites, time that
they had a decent school, time for the
students themselves to do something
about it,” she recalled.
The year was 1951 and Barbara
was at segregated Robert R. Moton
High School in Prince Edward Coun-
ty, Va. As her sister Joan remembered,
“Most of the school supplies that we
got were torn and tattered, and we
didn’t have enough supplies to write
with. The school we went to was over-
crowded. Consequently, the county
decided to build three tar paper shacks
for us to hold classes in. A tar paper
by
shack looks like a dilapidated black
building, which is similar to a chicken
coop on a farm…It was a very
difficult setting for trying to
learn.”
Barbara organized and led
400 students in a strike to pro-
test the school’s terrible con-
ditions and demand facilities
more like the county’s white
high school.
NAACP attorneys Spottswood
Robinson and Oliver Hill became in-
volved after Barbara’s persistent calls
to their Richmond office, and after the
students agreed they were willing to
fight for a desegregated school rather
than just a better segregated one.
The legal case against the Prince
Edward County school board was
ultimately bundled with four similar
cases by NAACP attorneys in Brown
vs. Board of Education et al., leading
to the landmark Supreme Court deci-
sion outlawing segregation in public
schools 65 years ago.
But the triumph of Brown was sad-
ly not the end of the story for black
children in Prince Edward County. In-
stead of complying with the Supreme
Court decision, the commonwealth of
Virginia pursued a campaign of “mas-
sive resistance,” enacting a variety of
new laws and policies designed to pre-
vent public school desegregation.
While other districts eventual-
ly gave in, Prince Edward County’s
Board of Supervisors continued to
refuse to desegregate their schools
and instead voted in June 1959 to shut
down the county’s entire public school
system. It took five years and anoth-
er Supreme Court decision to finally
force the county to reopen its public
schools.
And the triumph of Brown is still
incomplete—and in renewed dan-
ger—for millions of students across
our nation right now. The struggle
for a quality education for every child
is still the unfinished business of the
Civil Rights Movement and the prom-
ise of ending “separate and unequal”
schools has not yet been realized.
Sixty-five years after Brown,
many of the 58 percent of black
students and 60 percent of Hispanic
students who still attend predomi-
nantly segregated schools—where
75 percent or more of their peers are
minorities—continue to endure inad-
equate schools, missing supplies, and
too many teachers with low expecta-
tions for them. Instead of moving to
address our nation’s ongoing need
to live up to Brown the current Ad-
ministration is choosing executive
and judicial nominees and pursuing
regulatory changes all moving in the
opposite direction.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and di-
rector-counsel of the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, writes
in a recent2 op-ed for the Washing-
ton Post: “Since April 2018, more
than two dozen executive and judicial
nominees have declined to endorse the
Supreme Court’s unanimous decision
in Brown v. Board of Education. This
week — one that marks the 65th an-
niversary of the landmark ruling that
struck down legal apartheid in this
country — the Senate is poised to con-
firm three of those judicial nominees
to lifetime seats on the federal bench.
That is simply unacceptable . . . The
ugly truth is that declining to offer ap-
proval of Brown signals a willingness
to question the project of democracy
that Brown created — one in which
African Americans and other margin-
alized groups compelled the federal
courts to honor the spirit of equal jus-
tice embodied in the words of the 14th
Amendment. And this isn’t just deeply
troubling; it’s also downright danger-
ous.”
Barbara Johns’ courageous de-
cision to do something about the
injustice she saw around her helped
change history just like the brave
actions of so many other children,
youths, and adults during the Civil
Rights Movement. But we will not
see continued progress unless we re-
main aware of all current threats and
ready to meet today’s insidious at-
tempts at “massive resistance” with a
mightier moral resistance of our own.
In this evil climate we must be more
vigilant than ever to make sure that
we keep moving forward, not back-
wards.
Marian Wright Edelman is found-
er and president emerita of the Chil-
dren’s Defense Fund.
No More Waiting on the Call for Reparations
A burden black
people can no
longer endure
t olson b anner
Have you ever
been caught in the
middle of “sumptin”
where it seemed as
if there was no way
out? Like table ten-
nis, you are “pinged
and ponged” between two opposing
forces: red and blue states. Incessantly,
you are slammed into the net because
neither side is willing to reconcile
the dichotomy of America’s ongoing
white tribal war: benign neglect by
Democrat liberals and recalcitrance by
Republican conservatives. Malcolm X
referred to this as the fox or the wolf
for black people. This is the nature of
reparations where white people are ei-
ther asking black people to be patient
like the Biblical Job or resign our-
selves to the waiting room, get in line,
take a ticket and listen out for their
number (untold millions of Africans
who died, as well as, those who were
enslaved during the Christian/Atlantic
enslavement trade) - which to this day
has never been called. No reconcilia-
tion; no atonement; and no ealing.
This constant request from white
people (some blacks as well) to be pa-
tient and wait are the critical reasons
why Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the
book Why We Can’t Wait. King laid
out several reasons to make his case
during the tumultuous 60’s. Those
same reasons are applicable today for
black people: disillusionment with the
by
way justice is served up for black peo-
ple; lack of confidence in politicians
and the government; decolonization of
Africa (today neo-colonialism); living
out the true meaning of the Emanci-
pation Proclamation; and economic
inequality.
Even before the news pundits
pontificate and before election
gurus peer into their crystal balls,
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders
with his echo chamber renowned
scholar, Cornel West have already
told black people to forget about
having reparations as part of Sanders’
platform or the Democratic platform
for that matter (although we are be-
ginning to hear a faint chorus in favor
of reparations from some Democratic
hopefuls).
Need I remind my Democratic
socialist and Christian revolutionary
brothers thatanytime is the right time,
as Spike Lee reminded us, to “Do the
Right Thing!
The pain and suffering experienced
by the Jewish people during the ho-
locaust engendered “esprit de corps”
with African-Americans from the
Atlantic enslavement holocaust. But
that is where the similarities end. The
Reparations Agreement between Is-
rael and the Federal Republic of Ger-
many was signed in 1952. In short,
Germany was to pay Israel for the
costs of “resettling so great a number
of uprooted and destitute Jewish refu-
gees after the war and to compensate
individual Jews.” Three quarters of a
century after the holocaust ended, for-
mer U.S. Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat
negotiated settlements for victims
who were not covered under previous
agreements.
In contrast, when the Civil War
ended in 1865, ideas on how to
make the enslaved African-American
“whole” were bandied about but never
took hold. With the U.S. Presidential
election between Hayes and Tilden
hanging in the balance, the North con-
ceded to the demands of the South by
removing all Federal troops: unleash-
ing another reign of white domestic
terror known as Jim Crow. No recon-
ciliation here Bernie... Cornel.
President Ronald Reagan signed
the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to com-
pensate over 100,000 people of Japa-
nese descent who were incarcerated in
internment camps during WWII. The
federal government legislation ex-
tended a formal apology from the U.S.
government and paid out $20,000 in
compensation to each surviving vic-
tim.
For black people incarceration
and their continued enslavement
were surreptitiously upheld by the
13th Amendment which was ratified
in 1865. Michele Alexander, author
of “The New Jim Crow” documents
this loophole in the 13th amendment
which states: “Neither slavery nor in-
voluntary servitude, except as a pun-
ishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall
exist within the United States, or any-
place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The railroading of black people by
this nation’s legal system for crimes
they did not commit are well docu-
mented. Add “Three Strikes Legis-
lation” - courtesy of the Democratic
Party and signed into law by “Slick
Willie” aka former President Bill Clin-
ton - and you’ll witness the makings
of raw material for the prison/enslave-
ment/industrial complex. No atone-
ment here Bernie... Cornel.
After 12 years of research, Dr. De-
Gruy developed her theory of Post
Traumatic Slave Syndrome. DeGruy
went on to publish her book of the same
name which outlines and addresses
the residual impacts of generations of
slavery, explain the causes of many of
the adaptive survival behaviors in Afri-
can-American communities.
These maladies show up as lack of
self-esteem; feelings of hopelessness/
depression; and a general self-destruc-
tive outlook. Anytime America has
experienced major catastrophes, as in
school shootings, grief counselors are
rushed to the scene to begin the heal-
ing process which hopefully would
allow people to handle the trauma. For
almost five centuries, no grief coun-
selors were dispatched to help African
Americans deal with the trauma and
horror of their brutal enslavement.
To all the other naysayers who
reject the idea of “work-done pay-
ments” for black people on the basis
of not quite understanding how dis-
bursements would be handled, allow
me to remind them there are various
models and formulas already in ex-
istence for computing and calculat-
ing reparations. For example, black
people could be exempt from paying
federal taxes and allowed to attend
universities who benefitted from our
enslavement tuition free. Georgetown
University recently passed a student
referendum to increase the school’s
tuition by $27.20 to compensate the
descendants of 272 enslaved Africans
who were sold to save Georgetown
and the Catholic Church. This bears
scrutiny - not waiting!
Even former President Barrack
Obama maintained black people were
too far removed from our enslavement
to seek compensation - Bernie echo
those sentiments. The recent findings
from the Freedmen’s Bureau Project
have identified a listing of enslaved
Africans and their “property value”
thus illuminating a direct line to their
descendants.
I ask, are we too far removed to
see and witness the toils of our labor?
No we are not! Most notably, our en-
slaved labor was used in the construc-
tion of the U.S. Capitol and the White
House: two shining beacons of light
promulgating democracy, while at the
same time highlighting the hypocrisy.
Above and beyond these examples,
our “free” enslaved labor made Amer-
ica the richest nation in the world - but
we are too far removed for compen-
sation?
The weight of waiting is a burden
black people can no longer endure.
David Brooks, a white moderate
conservative seems to agree. Brooks
writing an op-ed piece for the New
York Times titled “The Case for Rep-
arations” opined, “Slavery and the
continuing pattern of discrimination
aren’t only an attempt to steal labor;
they are an attempt to cover over a
person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.”
Gifted artist, musician and ances-
tor, Gil-Scott Heron captured this soul
wrenching pain and suffering of black
people in his song, “Who’ll Pay Repa-
rations On My Soul?” Bernie... Cornel
I think this question is for the two of
you. Barack feel free to chime in.
Tolson Banner is a writer and col-
umnist, Vincent Jones also contributed
to this article.