Page Updated Tuesday, July 26, 2005

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There is no issue more important than the teaching of our young. An ignorant child seldom evolves into an informed adult. Not only must our children be taught their history, but the history of others groups, nations, and accomplishments. If we truly want our young people to succeed we must present them with information on those who have succeeded before them, and not always under supportive conditions. Fight the racist with knowledge and you are guaranteed to win.

You must get involved with your local Parents Teacher Association (PTA). You must visit the schools, and examine the books used to teach your children. You must teach your children the TRUTH about themselves, and those that came before them. Ignorance may be blissful, but it is oh so dangerous.

CHAMPIONS OF EDUCATION

Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator, public speaker, and churchwoman, was an ardent follower of Booker T. Washington's philosophy. She worked tirelessly with the National Baptist Convention's Women's Auxiliary, first as recording secretary and then as president, for over fifty years. She established a school for girls in the District of Columbia in 1909 so as to provide them with vocational and missionary training. She stated that in addition to the three R's--reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, these young women needed the three B's--the Bible, the bath, and the broom. Burroughs often battled men within her denomination about the ownership and administration of her school.

While Burroughs represented working class women, Mary Church Terrell was a member of the African American elite. As a speaker, writer, and political activist, she dedicated the lion's share of her talent to the pursuit of full citizenship for both women and blacks. In 1898, Terrell, then president of the National Association of Colored Women, gave this address before the all-white National American Women's Suffrage Association. She pointed out that for black women, access to education and employment were as important as the vote. Terrell's autobiography was called A Colored Woman in a White World (1940); some of her papers, including the manuscript for her autobiography, as well as those of her husband, are in the Library's Manuscript Division.

Tuskegee Institute

where students were students and not colored.

"But I want to go to Michigan State," some young black student is saying. Well go on then. Education, from any institution of learning, teaches research, retention, and application. The quality of that education, however, is based along racial lines. Go to Michigan State and be a black student on campus, or go to a traditionally black college or university and be a student on campus. The choice is yours. 

Zora Neale Hurston, born in Eatonville, Florida, was a writer, anthropologist, and folklorist who received her training at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, Howard University in Washington, and Barnard College and Columbia University in New York. Included among Hurstons many writings are three novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Some of the materials Hurston collected as a folklorist are included in the Library's motion picture, photographic, manuscript, and sound recording archives.

Shown here are six of the "Little Rock Nine," the black students who desegregated Little Rock’s Central High School. President Dwight Eisenhower had to call out federal troops to enforce desegregation and to ensure the safety of these students. With them, in the center of the picture are Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Daisy Bates, president of the Little Rock NAACP.

In the "doll test," popularized by social psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, children were given a black doll and a white doll and asked which one they preferred. Most black children preferred the white doll, to which they also attributed the most positive characteristics. During court trials relating to segregated schools, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund enlisted Kenneth Clark's services as an expert witness on the detrimental effects of racial exclusion and discrimination. The Defense Fund lawyers also submitted a report that explained the test results to the Supreme Court as evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case. In a unanimous ruling in 1954, the court found that separate schools were inherently unequal and specifically cited the Clark report.

Would the same test, administered today, come up with the same results?

Education, at its core, is about knowledge. Facts. The truth. Yet, even now, citizens of the United States of America continue to deny the racism that they live each day of their lives. Whenever the subject surfaces the response is "don't drag up the past", but the "past" is now and in the future if black Americans continue to fail to take their own fate into their hands.

How many times has the "law of the land" deprived black Americans their birthrights? The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Dred Scott Decision, the "Jim Crow" laws of the south, the poll tax, and today we have the reversal of Affirmative Action that would open the doors of higher learning to a people still denied the most basic of education; the truth.

In 1960 four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro strolled into the F. W. Woolworth store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. They were not served, but they stayed until closing time. The next morning they came with twenty-five more students. Two weeks later similar demonstrations had spread to several cities, within a year peaceful demonstrations took place in over a hundred cities North and South. At Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the students formed their own organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick"). The students' bravery in the face of verbal and physical abuse led to integration in many stores even before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Little Rock Nine challenged the segregated education system on the high school level.

Their way was not an easy one. The Little Rock Nine faced racism face to face.

James Meredith challenged segregated education on the university level.

As the racist conservatives drive the stake through the heart of Affirmative Action maybe African-American parents, and students, will embrace the value of traditional black institutions of higher learning. All students deserve a learning environment free of racial prejudices, Slanted History, and second class treatment. To hell with Harvard ... go to Morehouse.

The racist would tie the minds of minorities into knots of ignorance, but the people UNITED will never be defeated.

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