TO BE YOUNG, EDUCATED AND BLACK IN AMERICA
by Cash Michaels
I will be 71 in January. But I still remember, as a little boy growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y. years ago, how and why my dear, departed mother, took hard-earned money she had been saving up to buy a house for us in the 1960’s, and instead sent me to a private parochial Episcopalian elementary school until it moved, then a Catholic parochial school in the heart of predominately Black Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, and finally a predominately white Catholic parochial high school from which I graduated and went on to Brooklyn College, the very first public school experience I ever had in my life.
Why did my mother put off buying a new home in a new neighborhood for so many years? Because she knew her only child would never survive in the New York City public school system in the Black community ("Had to fight your way in in the morning, and fight your way out in the afternoon" they used to say). Even then, back in the 1960’s and '70’s because of the high poverty community we lived in (better known as the "ghetto"), many of the public schools there were an absolute mess, and were neither good nor safe places for children to learn and grow.
My mother knew that, and was willing to move Heaven and Earth to make sure that her son was safe, and getting the best instruction she could afford, despite the availability of a free public education.
Yes, I can honestly, and gratefully say that my dear mother saved my life. She knew the emotional damage the NY City streets would do to me, as well as the NYC public schools, and she did her best to shield me from both. Though she’s been gone for many, many years, I will always thank GOD for her extraordinary love and singular devotion to my future success, for the rest of my life.
My primary and secondary school experience is why I took particular interest in a recent extraordinary personal essay by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and creator of The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones in last week’s New York Times Magazine titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html).
In a nutshell, Hannah-Jones wrote, “A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.”
A paragraph in, Hannah-Jones quoted her 16 year-old daughter, Najya, asking her, “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?”
Hannah-Jones, considered to be one of the top brilliant thinkers in our nation, if not the African-American community, explained herself this way - “I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.”
Hannah-Jones continued - I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.
In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.
Hannah-Jones and her husband, both admittedly successful products of integrated school experiences, decided that just as pioneers in the civil rights movement used their own children at times to challenge racism and segregation in the South, felt they were upholding a tradition by enrolling their child in high poverty segregated elementary and middle schools in an effort to challenge the systematic degradation of poor Black children in high poverty schools in high poverty NYC neighborhoods.
“That may appear paradoxical,” Hannah-Jones says, “but only if we forget that the battle for school integration wasn’t catalyzed by the desire to put Black students next to white students but by an effort to ensure that Black children received access to equal educational resources.”
So the cause was noble, but in the minds of many readers of Hannah-Jones’ piece, deeply flawed, and from my own experience, I can see why.
As a journalist, particularly a Black one, you see and get close to problems affecting your community all too often to ignore. And the irony is, they don’t go away. So you begin to think of ways those problems can be successfully addressed and remedied. One of the reasons why you begin to think this way is because these problems are happening in your community and to your community, to your people. So I understand exactly where Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband were coming from ten years ago.
But here’s where Hannah-Jones and I part company.
What was her plan? Was she hoping that other Black parents of means would join her by also sending their children to NYC high poverty schools, because if it was, that apparently didn’t happen. And what about poor Black parents, where the pressure really should have come from? Apparently those parents, many of whom were on public assistance or worked low paying jobs, were so mentally and emotionally challenged and beaten down by a steel-trap of a New York City oppressive bureaucracy, that they just threw their hands up and believed their children were being taught adequately, when they weren’t.
The kind of pressure needed to be brought to bear to change what was, and still is, a destructive, entrenched educational system in many parts of this country, simply didn’t happen in spite of the 1954 US Supreme Court decision against separate but unequal schools. For whatever reason, Hannah-Jones and her husband were all by themselves in this battle, and their child, who ironically had no say in the matter, apparently paid the price, which has to be very painful.
As a noted NY Times journalist, Hannah-Jones had the tools and avenues available to help bring awareness, and ultimately some change, but she didn’t use them effectively. If she wanted to send her young daughter to a predominately Black private school, there are plenty of parochial schools in New York City, or as my Mom and other Black parents did in the '60s and '70s, find accredited, multi-racial religiously-based schools that Black parents discovered they could enroll their children in.
In short, Hannah-Jones had options for her own child, while she fought for other people’s children. Remember, the goal was to have public schools in poor neighborhoods where the quality of educational instruction was the same as they would be in predominately White neighborhoods.
No matter what Hannah-Jones’ ambition was, that is a mighty tall order in this country, and the solution is pretty much out of the hands of a single mere mortal.
Our increasingly segregated housing patterns in this country are a primary reason for segregated schools, even to this day. I can remember back in the 1990s when big corporations moved to the Triangle bringing skilled labor with them from out-of-state, White families moved to North Raleigh and other prime parts of Wake County on the promise of sending their children to great neighborhood schools, only to be faced with the Wake County Public Schools reassignment plan that moved poor Black students to those neighborhood schools in an effort to stave off the problem of creating expensive high poverty schools.
I learned a lot from that entire sad experience.
I did a Youtube video 15 years ago titled “Cost and Consequences,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdETw4PJMiM) for the Great Schools in Wake Coalition, exploring why high poverty schools had a greater drain on local resources per pupil, and why they were fiscally prohibitive, even though the then conservative Wake County School Board actually voted to adopt a neighborhood schools policy which created more high poverty schools (I have that extraordinary scene in the video). I even traveled to Charlotte, and showed how that school district had already established a neighborhood schools policy that caused big problems in its real estate market and overall economy.
Remember, in North Carolina, state and local resources go into building and maintaining schools in all 115 school districts. For construction, a combination of state grants, state lottery money, and county general obligation bonds help break ground. Once built and operating, local property tax revenue per school district, along with county sales taxes and income taxes, go towards maintaining schools.
School districts poor neighborhoods produce less local tax revenue, a clear formula for high poverty schools. School districts with strong property values create healthy tax revenues and neighborhoods, resulting in healthy schools.
Through my reporting in Raleigh’s Black newspaper, The Carolinian, I fought hard alongside others in Southeast Raleigh’s Black and general community, to oppose the right-wingers who took over our Wake School Board in 2010, and started moving bussed Black children out of predominately White neighborhood schools, and into high poverty schools. It wasn’t easy, but eventually we got those crazy people the hell off our school board.
The creation of the magnet school program featuring STEM, the arts and international studies as well as core curriculum courses, was also another way to prevent tearing down old schools in the inner city, by implementing unique educational studies there that would attract White students, thus creating a two-way busing situation.
There was profound anger on both sides. Black parents didn’t like getting up very early in the morning to send their children to predominately White schools out of in the suburbs, and White parents were angry that Black children from the ‘hood were being bussed in to sit next to their children in what they considered to be their neighborhood schools.
And then there were pioneers like the late State Sen. Vernon Malone, who helped oversee the controversial merger of the predominately-Black Raleigh public school system and the predominately-White Wake County public school system back in the mid-1970s. Malone was one of many courageous public officials back then who stressed that our school systems and our classrooms should look like our shopping malls - free and open to the public of all colors.
It wasn’t just a moral issue. Sen. Malone made clear that companies seeking to setup shop in North Carolina in the 1970s and 80s were resolute that segregation was bad for business, and they wanted no part of it (see him talk about it in part one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRNBXmcRuKc; and part two - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Ie6l7V2gw&t=265s).
Black and White public school students should be in the same classroom, funded by our tax dollars, getting the same quality instruction, so that everyone benefits, and learn to live together, and from each other, was the mantra.
Yes, against the backdrop of angry suburban White communities in North Raleigh, and also Southwest Wake County, (where White parents actually wanted to succeed from Wake, and create their own school system) where the feeling was the neighborhood schools in their communities actually belonged exclusively to them and not all taxpayers in Wake County, there were visionary leaders like Wake Supt. Bill McNeal who tried valiantly to fight against the creation of more predominately Black high poverty schools so that what is happening in New York City would not become common place here.
Hard to do when you allow poverty to become prevalent in Black, and now Latino communities in the first place. Very hard.
Let me be clear, I am in no way saying that any of my coverage of the Wake County Public School System controversies involving race and student reassignments in and of itself brought about the needed change, though I’m sure it played a role. Indeed, thanks to courageous people like then-Rev. William Barber, who led others from the NC NAACP in protesting at Wake School Board meetings to the point of being placed in handcuffs and hauled off to jail; White liberal school board members who never gave up and though outnumbered by conservatives, still voted time after time against creating more high poverty schools: Black Wake School Board member Keith Sutton who stood strong and tall for poor Black children who otherwise had no voice on the school board; and other caring advocates who knew that Wake County was a special place for all children to learn and grow together.
So, based on my experiences as a Black NYC student, North Carolina reporter like her (she once worked in Durham) and parent, I deeply feel for Nikole Hannah-Jones and her family. At the same time, I feel relieved that my wife and I did all we could to ensure that our young female child attended good integrated public schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u2hI3ozgUU), had good educational experiences with her, watched her graduate high school during the pandemic and go on to the university of her choice where she matriculated, and today is gainfully employed... at that university.
We were blessed with those opportunities because of where we lived, and I don’t apologize for it. ALL children deserve safe, decent places and neighborhoods to live in if that can be made possible, and you work hard for it. Indeed, though we did not live in one, today there are plenty of Black middle class neighborhoods in Wake County. It's what my mother wanted for me, but made the difficult decision to provide me with a solid education first so that I would be properly prepared to fend for myself and my family in the future, which is exactly what I have done. But a lot of Black and Latino parents are trapped in the high poverty neighborhoods where they live, and do whatever they can to have their children properly educated. My wife and I showed up for our daughter when she was younger, and let her teachers know that we were hands-on parents who loved their child, and expected great things from her, so handle with care.
I have fought, and will continue to fight for educational equity for ALL children. Much has to change to bring that about, however. But I’d like to think that some of the stories and videos I wrote and produced back in the early 2000's helped to get us where we are in Wake County today - a stable public school system that still has some problems, but no longer grades itself by race.
I pray that my colleague, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who my youngest daughter actually met during her speaking engagement at the UNC School of Journalism in 2019, finds the same solace one day.
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