By Colbert I. King
Saturday, April 5, 2008
April 4, 1968, was a day when black people didn't feel much like singing "God Bless America." It was an ugly time made worse by a sense of despair too deep for words. Somebody had killed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"A riot is at bottom," King said, "the language of the unheard."
Within hours of the crushing news, anger replaced hopelessness, and with anger came looting, a paroxysm of self-destructiveness and inner cities going up in smoke.
In Memphis, the night before his assassination, King told a rally at Mason Temple that God had allowed him to go up to the mountain.
"And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
Forty years later, we're not there yet.
To be sure, the day is gone, as King preached in Memphis, when black people would go around "scratching where they didn't itch and laughing when they were not tickled."
Our backs are straighter now. A lot of us mean business.
But "we, as a people" are not in the same space.
This week my wife, Gwen, and I attended a luncheon at Howard University that was held in a health sciences library named after retired African American representative Louis Stokes (D-Ohio). The dining area was filled with more than 70 men and women at the top of their professions: lawyers, doctors, theologians, educators, former military officers, a former mayor, a university president and the chairman of the board of one of the world's largest media companies.
A large number of PhDs -- a testament to academic achievement -- were there. With one or two exceptions, all present were African American.
King would have been pleased.
The next day I was in the District's Tenleytown neighborhood in the vicinity of Wilson Senior High School. King would find the academic trajectory of black and white students distressing.
In the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System used in 2006-07 to test Wilson students in reading, 94 percent of white students scored at or above "proficient," compared with only 49 percent of black students.
In math, 94 percent of white students scored at or above proficient; only 35 percent of black students reached that level.
Those dismal results are replicated throughout the D.C. school system and in urban schools across the country.
Test scores are only part of the problem.
"Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education," King said.
Some today also fail the character test.
Wilson is not a "battleground" as it was depicted in the headline of last week's column. But neither is it the "Riverdale High" found in Archie Andrews comics.
From September through February, Wilson recorded six assaults, eight fights, four robberies, 10 weapons violations, two abuse cases and one drug case, according to a report provided by D.C. public school administration this week. In March, there were 13 arrests in one week alone.
At one level, the turmoil stems from school system assignment policies that sent a large influx of new students to Wilson, several of whom were far behind academically and were socially unprepared to function in a setting without structure and support.
Their ranks contained the hall-walkers, the disrespectful and insecure kids, full of resentment, spoiling for a fight.
It's not just at Wilson.
Wrote one successful charter school operator this week: "These kids today are the children of parents whom we failed. This is the group of students that [D.C. public schools] turned out last year on social promotion because they changed their structure to eliminate junior high schools. We had 40 kids who registered in our school who had straight Fs."
Policy changes in the works by school officials and Wilson's school restructuring team may bring conditions back to normal. But they won't eliminate problems rooted in conditions beyond the walls of Wilson and other D.C. public schools.
King, reading the works of Harvard historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, would be saddened by the extent of instability in black families and by the self-destructiveness of young black men four decades after his death.
He would be stunned that school dropout rates are so high; that jobless young black men are becoming fathers without the means to support their children; that 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers; that young black men are murdering each other at nine times the rate at which white youths kill each other; and that one-third of African American men in their 30s have prison records.
He might look at a black presidential candidate, two black governors, black legislators galore, black corporate executives and a growing African American middle class, and then look at the chasm separating them from poor blacks left behind and ask what happened to his call for unity.
"Be concerned about your brother," King told the Memphis rally. "Either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."
Forty years later, we're not there, either.
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