TO BE BLACK AND EDUCATED 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., how and why my dear, departed mother, took hard-earned money she had been saving to buy a house for us in the 60’s, and send me to a private parochial elementary school, in my case an Episcopalian elementary school, 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 first public school experience I ever had in my life.
Why? Why did my mother put off buying a home 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. Even then, back in the 1960’s and 70’s because of the high poverty community we lived in, the public schools were an absolute mess, and not 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 only child 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 what 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 experience is why I took particular interest in a recent personal essay by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in last week’s New York Times Magazine titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
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 quotes 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 brilliant thinkers in the nation, if not the African-American community, explains 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, admittedly both 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 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 in 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 their plan? Were they hoping that other Black parents of means would join them 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 they were so mentally and emotionally beaten down by a steel-trap of a New York bureaucracy that they believed their children were being taught something 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, 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 is painful.
As a noted NY Times journalist, Hannah-Jones had the tools and avenue 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, or as my Mom and other Black parents did in the 60s and 70s, find religiously-based accredited schools that Black parents have 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 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 mere mortals.
Our increasingly segregated housing patterns in this country are a primary reason for segregated schools even today. I can remember back in the 1990s, white families moving to North Raleigh from elsewhere in the country on the promise of sending their children to neighborhood schools, only to be faced with the Wake County Public Schools reassignment plan that moved Black students to those neighborhood schools in an effort to stave off the problem of creating more expensive high poverty schools.
I did a Youtube video 15 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdETw4PJMiM) for the Great Schools in Wake Coalition exploring why high poverty schools had a greater drain on resources per pupil, they were prohibitive, even theough then conservative Wake County School Board voted to adopt a neighborhood schools policy which created more high poverty schools. In the video, titled “Cost-Consequences,” I even traveled to Charlotte, which had already created a neighborhood schools policy which caused big problems in its real estate market and overall economy.
I remember, through my reporting in Raleigh’s Black newspaper, The Carolinian, I fought alongside others in the Southeast Raleigh’s Black community and general community to oppose the bunch of right-wingers for what they were trying to do to our children, and my youngest child hadn’t even been born yet. It wasn’t easy, but eventually we got those people the hell off our school board.
The creation of the magnet school program was also another way to prevent tearing down old schools in the inner city, by implementing special educational programs that would attract white students students there, 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 predominately White schools out of their neighborhoods, 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 was there when the predominately-Black Raleigh public school system and the predominately-white Wake County public school system merged back in the mid-1970s. Malone was one of many courageous public officials back then who stressed that our school system 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, but an economic one, and 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 (part one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRNBXmcRuKc; part two - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Ie6l7V2gw&t=265s).
Black and White students should be in the same classroom getting the same quality instruction, so that everyone benefits, and learn to live together, was the mantra.
Yes, against the backdrop of an angry suburban white community in North Raleigh that felt 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 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. Very hard.
So 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 child attended good integrated public schools, had good educational experiences with her, watched her graduate during the pandemic and go on to university of her choice where she matriculated and today is gainfully employed …by that university.
We were blessed with those opportunities because of where we lived, and I don’t apologize for it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u2hI3ozgUU). But a lot of Black parents are trapped where they live, and do whatever they can to have their children properly educated. Even with that, my wife and I still 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 1990’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 finds the same solace one day.
Hey, don’t forget, I don’t care what the news reporting about the polls say, make sure YOU vote . We need a landslide to make sure that any tricks Trump has planned don’t get very far!
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