Maybe the most disappointing aspect of our struggle today is that there is a generation of young African Americans who no longer see getting an education as defiance, as rebellion—who no longer understand that the right to learn is a revolutionary act. To learn is an act of defiance, because there is so much strength in education. To the extent that we accept mediocrity and do less than our best academically, while exceeding the norm in athletics, we are accepting an equation we cannot settle for if we are to catch up to other Americans.
If you compare Neuqua Valley High School in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, to a high school on the South Side of Chicago, for example, you view the imbalance in the American public school system. Neuqua Valley High is forty-five minutes outside Chicago, in a suburb called Naperville. It has a 14:1 student–teacher/staff ratio. It has a Library Media Center with more than twelve thousand books. The library has thirty-six networked computers. The school has cushioned carpets. It has a pool and several gyms. Some of the veteran teachers earn $72,000. Real estate brokers refer to the school in newspaper ads. On Sundays, local churches rent space in the school and the community sponsors programs using the gymnasia and one of two Olympic-sized pools. In other words, what you have is a school industrial complex, as opposed to a jail industrial complex. In that environment, students tend to rise to expectations.
People with education take the roof off of their dreams. They say, “Why can’t I be president of Harvard? If Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter can be president of the United States, why can’t I be? Why can’t I be a U.S. senator?” The people who are the most educated are the most likely to raise those questions. Not always, but most often. Giving up on education is a mind-flipping process. That is why I try to lay out the movements of the
Freedom Symphony
and their impact on the oppressed and the oppressor. If one stage is to end slavery, that is the movement as the oppressed defined it. That was not “the thing” for the slave masters; that was the thing for the oppressed. If the movement was to end legal segregation, that was not the movement for the segregator; that was our movement. If the thing was to get the right to vote, oppressors were not in agreement. Today there must be a movement for access to capital, industry, technology, and economic recovery. If that becomes the thing to do, then we begin to raise economic questions having to do with historical continuity. The militant thing to do today is to find out how much pension monies there are in each state, and whether common people may share in those monies. The militant thing to do today is to find out which insurance companies had race-based premiums and how much do they make and in what do they invest. The militant thing to do today is to fight for our share of education, because education is one of our strongest weapons. Let us not forget that if we are going to even the playing field, those most likely to even that field are those who have the equipment to do so.
People who are living with low roofs on their dreams develop lifestyles to match. We hear about how many black women get pregnant and get abortions. We do not hear as much discussion about how many white women get pregnant and get abortions. This type of focus always assumes that something is wrong with the behavior of black people. Many poor people smoke cigarettes. Most poor people have poor dietary habits. Most poor folk do not take regular exercise. The things that middle-class people do, most poor people, who are black, do not do. There is a culture of poverty. The more that people are educationally and financially liberated, the more their behavior changes. That is why the movement of getting access to capital, industry, technology, and economic recovery has become the big challenge.
I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, living in legal segregation, but I did have an infrastructure of support. I had parents and teachers with high expectations, because in segregation there was the sense that we had to prove we could win against those odds. My family moved “up to the projects,” and we bought a car at the same time—private transportation. My father purchased a 1948 Hudson in 1957. But it was
our
car. The point of it was, we moved to the “other side” of town.
I remember Mrs. Sara Valena Shelton, one of my favorite teachers. I shall never forget her. When we moved, we came to her class, the middle class. Children do not quite know what teachers to avoid once their family lives on the new side of town. There were two sixth-grade classes, and one was very overcrowded, with maybe seventy students. One had maybe five students, maybe six. So this was logical to me: I should sit where there are a lot of seats. I did not know why those who had been there the year before had gone to another class. I did not know there was a class where the teacher was less likely to challenge them. Other students avoided Mrs. Shelton’s class. So Mrs. White, who was our principal, came and evened the classes out.
One day Mrs. Shelton walked in with a certain military rigidity and she said, “Good morning.” And we said, “Good morning, Mrs. Shelton.” And we sat upright. She started writing long words on the board, and we thought she thought it was the eighth grade, because they were big words to the class. Suddenly she turned and said, “I know this is the sixth grade, not the eighth, and these are no longer big words; these are polysyllabic terms. Over there is a dictionary and there is something called
Roget’s Thesaurus,
and beyond that toilet there is something called the Dewey decimal classification system in the library. And furthermore, I will not teach down to you. One of you little brats might run for president or governor one day, and I do not want to be made ashamed, so listen to me intently.”
When I ran for the presidential nomination in 1984, Mrs. Shelton had retired from teaching. In 1985, running on the Democratic ticket, she became one of a very few African-American members of the House of Representatives in South Carolina in the last century. The teacher who said she would not “teach down” to us was on the same party ticket as one of her former students. There was that sense of the quality of the teacher. These same teachers, I might add, who taught us on Monday through Friday also shopped at the same grocery store with our parents. They went to the same church. Even if your parents missed a PTA meeting, Mrs. Shelton would see your mother at church, and your mother would know if you were acting up at school.
Individuals dream past their reality to survive. They can stand up and say, “I am somebody!” If you have self-affirmation, you keep fighting back. If you have self-affirmation, then you define yourself as “free,” much like the enslaved Dred Scott did in 1857. If you have self-esteem, you can be a Rosa Parks, you can be a Martin King. Keep pushing forward. If you stop asserting yourself, then you will not change the structure of the laws under which you live, and that is the tension between individual will and the structural crisis. If the structure is bad, you do not change it by surrendering. You change it by acts of defiance and acts of assertion. And people who are the most likely to do that are the ones whose ambition has been cultivated by education.
We do ourselves a disservice when we underestimate lack of access to equal education, lack of access to equal insurance, lack of access to equal employment, lack of access to capital, lack of access to universities. So let’s not underestimate those things. On the other hand, I say that we all have the burden of doing our best against the odds. That is why coaches are so successful, because they cut it real hard in terms of what you must do to win. Recently, I was speaking at a school in Newark with about two thousand kids. I said to a basketball player standing near the equipment shed, can anybody dunk? Oh, we can dunk. So I said, how many hours do you practice a day? They said, about three and a half. I said, what time? Six to nine-thirty. That’s homework time; they had some superintendents sitting there. Six to nine-thirty. How many days a week? Six. I said, well, do you ever have any radios in practice? Oh no. A TV in practice? No. I said, well, suppose you were running and you get real tired, can you sit down? No. What do you do? You have to suck it up. I said, wait a minute, six days a week, four hours a day, no radio, no TV, no telephone. You’re good. You’re good at what you work at. That’s why we excel in football, basketball, baseball, and track, because we work at it.
Given how the culture is, if one says to a white suburban coach, this year you must coach at a predominantly black inner-city school, he doesn’t like that; he considers that to be punishment. It is the same thing if I want the physics and math teachers to go to that school. They say no, or, I am going down there but I am not sure they can learn; I am not sure their parents will help. I am not sure they have enough equipment. I am not sure I can park my car. Their cultural bias kicks in. But I submit to you that in poor and under-served neighborhoods, the same place where the athletes come from and musicians come from, scientists come from the same area, and scholars come from that same area, but the athletic entertainment dimensions are more exploitable; they are the more commercial “cotton pickers.” Therefore, there are more ways out as athlete and as singer than as scholar. There are more young black men getting scholarships who play basketball or football than there are young black men getting scholarships in medicine.
The result of what I would call the system in crisis is that there are now nearly 1 million African-American men in jail and more than 2 million black men in the criminal justice system, including those on probation and parole. There are only 625,000 African-American men in college. More young black men in jail than college. In 2002, there was a daily average of 11,200 inmates compared to about 10,000 beds in the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Most of the young black inmates there are high school dropouts. Forty percent of these young men are in jail on nonviolent drug charges. If those who are at Cook County Jail and other jails on a nonviolent drug charge were let out with an ankle or wrist bracelet and monitored, conditional upon their mastering some trade or getting a GED, America would then have more young black men in college than in jail.
All the data show that most drug users and pushers are white. In 2001, 86 percent of all the rural arrests were white; 71 percent of all urban arrests were white. Yet about 54 percent of American men in jail in 2002 were black and about 19 percent were Hispanic. The majority of those in jail now are black and brown, and poor, without adequate legal representation. Once you are caught in that system, it tends to recycle itself, because that system is the epicenter of HIV/AIDS, and it is the epicenter of drugs. You leave there slicker, because you learn the science of the system. You leave there slicker and sicker. You get more drugs in than out, so you leave there slicker and sicker and you return quicker. If we broke up recidivism alone in jails, you’d have to close down half of that industry today.
It would mean losing a lot of jobs. We would have to turn that institution into a library. The Cook County Jail budget today is bigger than any Historically Black College or University in America, including Howard, Morehouse, or Florida A&M. None of those schools have a budget as big as the Cook County Jail budget. It is ridiculous, but it is real. In the last ten years, half of all public housing built has been jails, mainly for black men committing nonviolent drug-related crimes.
That is why I am saying that it is simplest to study harder while young. We have also got to study harder on the structural forces that are undercutting spiritual opportunity. When the right wing could not reverse the Supreme Court decisions on education, they started planning to undercut the educational system. When I was growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, you had your black high school, Sterling High, and you had your two high schools for whites, Parker and Greenville. The right wing could not stop the
Brown
v
. Board of Education
decision, but they started taking big churches and turning them into white, private Christian day academies. That became a way to keep black and white education separated. Then they went from there to various formulas and charter schools, and as they began to take teachers away and students away, they reached a stage where they want to take funding away through vouchers. Those who opposed desegregation contend that race is not currently a factor in segregated schools, rather property real estate tax formulas. Either way, the result is the same: a tale of two schools.
You have a terrible imbalance based upon the real estate tax base, and it ends up being separation by mostly race and class. The gap between the all-black high schools of the 1950s and the all-white high schools of that period was not as great as the gap between today’s high schools in poor neighborhoods and those in more affluent neighborhoods. Then, the all-black school received books three years after the all-white school did, but basically the same books. There was a kind of parallel. But the new vertical class-race gap based upon real estate funding is wider than the old horizontal race gap was a little more than fifty years ago. Now it has the indignity of not only race exploitation but class exploitation, and rural white youth as well as black inner-city youth suffer from lack of an equal funding formula. The children of Appalachia are suffering from lack of an equal funding formula, but it does not make it any less unfair that in addition to blacks, and in addition to Hispanics, rural whites and Appalachian whites are not getting a fair deal. It just means that they, too, are getting less than the promise of the American dream.
Life is some combination of nature and environment. There is nothing wrong with our nature, but there is something wrong with our environment, and we tend to underestimate environmental opportunity. The fact is that in America the black and brown youth have less access to equal education today, less access to health insurance today, less access to a job today, less access to promotions today, less access to mortgage lending at a fair price today, and less access to risk capital to go into business today. We must not underestimate the structural forces that impinge upon our nature and upon the way we behave.