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Volume 10 Issue 27…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…July 6, 2007
By John Burl Smith
The term irony indicates
incongruity between what might be expected and what actually exists or
contrasts between apparent and intended meaning or consequences. Truth and
reality, good intentions but bad results, even good results from bad intentions
are all instances of irony. Another example is the United States (US) is a
Christian nation, where people believe "all men are created equal,"
yet, it was founded on the institution of slavery. Thus, considering US slave
descendants and their present dilemma, irony describes their situation
perfectly.
Knowledge and the acquisition of
it have always been major forces behind slaves and their descendants' drive to
become a people. Since kidnaping free Africans and forcing them into bondage
approximately 400 years ago, keeping them ignorant has been a major goal of
whites in the US. Attainment of knowledge by slaves has been dictated by the
need to accomplish limited tasks through labor or scarcity in white manpower.
Any knowledge beyond that gained by slaves was their creation or manufacture.
Once out of forced bondage, slaves and their descendants faced knowledge,
socioeconomic and political gaps relative to whites.
Almost immediately following the
Civil War and the Reconstruction period, whites began using their knowledge,
socioeconomic and political advantages to force slave descendants into economic
slavery. Ironically, in less than twenty years after emancipation, federal,
state and local governments augmented by lynch law enforced by the Ku Klux Klan
and Jim Crow segregation had forced blacks into a situation worse than slavery,
because terror became the white man's instrument of control.
Terrorism suborned by government
created a hostile environment so lethal to slave descendants that lynching drew
crowds as large as a hundred thousand white men, woman and children to what
were called "picnics." This extra-legal system remained intact until
the late 1960s. Segregation and its hostile environment maintained the knowledge,
socioeconomic and political advantages whites had over slaves in 1865, and the
irony is that in 1965 conditions were relatively the same for their
descendants. There is no measure of conditions, legal statue or social practice
that was implemented by the US government to reverse this situation, let alone
make up for the 218 years of discrimination, disparate treatment, racism and
hostile environmental conditions slave descendants have endured.
Ironically, in their ability to
do for themselves, minus lynching, slave descendants fared better during
segregation than during the subsequent period of so-called integration. This
was not because of segregation but because of the indomitable will of slave
descendants not only to survive but improve as a people. Over the course of
that 218 years of terror and deprivation, blacks have beat the odds and
defeated efforts to deny them opportunities to demonstrate their phenomenal
abilities. Slave descendants were so successful, whites built the US economy on
their backs by plotting and taking over everything slavery's descendants built
or created.
Justin Smith Morrill
(1810-1898)
Born in Strafford, Vermont on
April 14, 1810, Justin Smith Morrill attended the common schools and Thetford
and Randolph Academies. According to his official biography, Morrill attended
Middlebury College, where he joined The Delta Upsilon Fraternity.
From 1825 to 1831, Morrill worked
as a merchant's clerk in Strafford and Portland, Maine. After working as a
merchant in Strafford from 1831 to 1848, Morrill engaged in agriculture and
horticulture from 1848 to 1855.
In 1852, Morrill was elected to
Congress as a member of the Whig Party. From March 4, 1855 to March 3, 1867,
Morrill represented Strafford in Congress as a Republican. In the thirty-ninth
Congress, Morrill served as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. He
authored the Tariff Act of 1861, but is most widely known for sponsoring the
Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College Act. Signed into law by
President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, it established federal funding for higher
education in every state of the country. The Land Grant College Act made
education available to more Americans, especially the working class. More than
150 state colleges were funded by the sale of public lands.
In 1866, Morrill was elected as a
Union Republican to the U.S. Senate. He was reelected as a Republican in 1872
and served from March 4, 1867 until his death. Chairman of the Committee on
Public Buildings and Grounds, he played a vital role in obtaining the current
Library of Congress main building. He served on the Committee on Finance, as
Smithsonian Institution regent (1883-1898) and University of Vermont trustee
(1865-1898).
Senator Morrill is also well known
for his authorship of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862. The legislation
targeted The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' practice of polygamy.
On January 6, 1879, in Reynolds v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the
Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which banned the practice of plural marriage.
Today, many agricultural colleges
have a 'Morrill Hall' named in his honor and for his contribution to education.
In 1999, the US Postal Service issued a 55 cent stamp of Morrill to honor his
role in establishing land grant colleges, forerunners of many state
universities. Morrill died in Washington, DC on December 28, 1898. (Sources: http://bioguide.congress.gov/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and www.vpt.org/)
Supremes Reverse
Brown
"The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial
equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the
plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality's
position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court
and the Nation will come to regret....It is not often in the law that so few
have so quickly changed so much." Associate Justice Stephen
Breyer
On June 28, 2007, the Supreme
Court handed down its decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools,
Petitioner v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. and Crystal D. Meredith,
Petitioner v. Jefferson County Board of Education et al.
At issue: "The school
districts in these cases voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely
upon race to determine which public schools certain children may attend. The
Seattle school district classifies children as white or nonwhite; the Jefferson
County school district as black or "other." In Seattle, this racial
classification is used to allocate slots in oversubscribed high schools. In
Jefferson County, it is used to make certain elementary school assignments and
to rule on transfer requests. In each case, the school district relies upon an
individual student's race in assigning that student to a particular school, so
that the racial balance at the school falls within a predetermined range based
on the racial composition of the school district as a whole. Parents of
students denied assignment to particular schools under these plans solely
because of their race brought suit, contending that allocating children to
different public schools on the basis of race violated the 14th Amendment
guarantee of equal protection. The Courts of Appeals below upheld the
plans."
When the Supreme Court granted
certiorari in these cases, civil rights advocates predicted the newly formed
conservative majority would reverse the lower court's decision, basically
nullifying Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Thus, the decision came as no
surprise. In the majority 5-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts was joined by
Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy in outlawing
the use of race in determining school assignments for K-12 students. This
decision is expected to affect public school districts across the country.
A Letter to America (For Rev. Jesse Jackson)
By Ronald G. Auguste
I read your shame in books, America.
I see your shame upon
my TV screen.
O America! You boast that you are
A land of freedom with wide open doors;
So what constitutional failures mar
Your grand design with these heart-breaking flaws
Which make you seek
all black men to demean?
Your paranoiac acts of brutal force
Have hurled their
whole destiny off its course.
O America! wherein lies the cause
Of your huge hatreds seeking to destroy
The black men, whose sweat and blood helped to grease
The wheels of your grand fortune and your fame?
Why! -- You have made these noble men a toy
For wild abuse and
blows without surcease!
You made them slaves. In clanking chains they came,
Uprooted from their soils without a name,
And bled to make you what you are today!
Yet cruelly you doom them to decay,
Too ignorant or blind to understand
The simple truth that
they are men like you.
America! the things you perpetrate,
Even a pride of
devils could not do!
Each day you grow more callous in your hate;
Barren of love; barren of moral kindness;
Lost in a sea of self soul-searing blindness!
While they stand out, shunned strangers at the gate,
Refused admittance to the Equal Rights Estate.
You tamed grim wildernesses.
You became the pride of nations -- The United States!
You can't be great till you have purged your shame,
And tamed the wilder
frontiers of your hates.
About
Me: Primarily written during the Civil Rights era, The Love They Do Not Use (Poems from
Un-Civil Times) is a collection of poems of by Ronald G. Auguste. You can read
his work online at http://members.aol.com/rgaapoet/index-2.htm.
Please forward comments to the poet at RGAaPoet@aol.com
Disgruntled says: Black
Americans thought they had won civil and equal rights with the Supreme Court's
landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down
Plessy v. Ferguson's (1896) separate but equal doctrine, and passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, efforts by white America to reverse Brown
have been relentless. Even elected officials promised, in signing the Southern
Manifesto (1956), to turn back the clock. While blacks think they have achieved
equality, the effort to maintain them in a second class status is alive and
well in George W. Bush's strict construction appointees to the nation's courts.
Disgruntled
wants to know: In a five minute video clip posted on YouTube on June 16
by the Programmers Guild, an advocacy group for US tech workers, Lawrence
Lebowitz, marketing director for the Pittsburgh law firm Cohen & Grigsby,
informs attendees at its annual Immigration Law Update Seminar in May:
"Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified US worker." Adding
insult to injury, there are illegal immigrants taking jobs by the millions,
off-shoring, out-sourcing and a Labor Secretary that only has bad things to say
about American workers. Faced with these challenges and more, especially for
black workers, where is the hope when the decked is so stacked against our
young people, even those that persevere and acquire a college education?
Disgruntled
feels: Uneducated! In the state of Georgia, USA, especially in the
predominantly black DeKalb County Public School System, teachers spent the bulk
of the academic year teaching students the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test
(CRCT). Based on preliminary results, students in schools where a rigorous curriculum
was taught performed best on the test in every subject, including science and
math. Clearly, our children are not being educated with those mimeographed
practice tests on which some schools invest so much time, rather than teaching
our children critical thinking skills. Even if they score high on the CRCT, our
children are still unprepared and uneducated for the many challenges they face
merely to survive in the USA.
A Present Day Irony
By John Burl Smith
The Morrill Land-Grant Act of
1862 gave federal lands to states to create colleges and universities to
educate farm and working class children. Few were open to blacks, particularly
in the South. Only Alcorn State University in Mississippi was created
explicitly as a black land-grant college. The second Morrill Land-Grant Act of
1890 specified that states using federal land-grant funds must either open
their schools to both blacks and whites or allocate money for segregated black
colleges (separate but equal). Federal laws and polices augmented segregation
by facilitating separate but "unequal" education; this is the basis
of blacks' claim for reparation because the US government suborned
discrimination, disparate treatment and helped maintain a hostile environment.
Land-grant funds established sixteen exclusively black institutions in 1890.
Prior to 1890, blacks, along with the American Missionary Association (AMA) and the Freedmen's Bureau, set up private colleges and universities to educate ex-slaves and their descendants. Black churches established and ran their own elementary and secondary schools in the South, preparing black children for vocations or advanced studies. St. Katherine Drexel founded a Catholic congregation, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and built hundreds of schools and churches across the South and Midwest to educate ex-slaves, their descendants and Native Americans; the most famous of which are St. Francis de Sales, St Emma's Military Academy and Dillard University.
The need for education created a
demand for higher education, particularly institutes to train teachers for
black schools. Between 1861 and 1870, the AMA founded seven black colleges and
13 normal (teaching) schools. Many of these institutions--along with the
private historical black colleges and universities (HBCUs) founded later by the
AMA, the Freedmen's Bureau, and black churches--became the backbone of a black
higher educational system that produced black American leaders that sustained
slave descendants until today.
Ironically, that tradition is
currently under siege and is being uprooted by administrators and Boards of
Directors at HBCUs. Reports abound from schools, such as Fayetteville (NC)
State University, Morehouse, Benedict College, Cheyney University, South
Carolina State University, Miles College, Howard University and Bowie State
University to name a few, regarding how HBCUs are changing their priority of
educating black children to going out of their way to recruit whites, Hispanics
and non-black students. They boast of creating special scholarships programs
and lower tuition to facilitate whites and others' attendance at HBCUs.
This farce would be laughable
were it not so tragic. Creating minority affairs offices for whites, manned by
whites and Latinos, these schools are sending people around the world to
recruit whites, Hispanics and non-black students. Morehouse has a 21-year-old
Brazilian immigrant from Silver Springs, Maryland on a special scholarship.
State land-grant schools claim to be under pressure from the federal government
because of United States v. Fordice. There the United States Supreme Court
required Mississippi in 1992 to end its dual, segregated educational system,
but did not recognize the special status of HBCUs. The problem is, HBCUs were
never segregated; whites chose not to attend them, unlike white schools which
states legally barred black attendance. Lumping the two groups together is like
comparing apples and oranges.
Under no federal pressure,
private HBCUs asininely assert that recruiting whites is about their bottom
line and being competitive with white universities. First, HBCUs were
established to serve the needs of black students who are victims of the
residual impact of slavery and direct affects of segregation. HBCUs giving
whites and Latinos special scholarships means blacks are paying them to attend
school free. How does "free" help their bottom line? Regarding
competition, these aren't the best and brightest white students attending
schools like Morehouse on scholarship. Anywhere else these students would have
to compete for scholarships based on their grades and other criteria, rather
than being given special scholarships based solely on skin color. Lastly, if a
white school created a special scholarship to recruit blacks, the courts would
call that "reverse discrimination." Besides, why aren't white schools
under the same pressure to admit black students? White schools are reducing
efforts to recruit blacks in favor of Latinos.
Another asset created by slave descendants is being taken away like Beale Street in Memphis, where blacks created the "blues." Black churches raise money to support HBCUs to educate black children, not whites and Latinos. A present day irony, certainly not what was expected or intended, what is the United Negro College Fund's (UNCF) justification for raising money from blacks for blacks but giving white students scholarships?
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