of Ella” animates the discussion about treating persons as things, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man provides similar animation for considering how schools read young people too simplistically:
To Ellison, surviving as black people in America requires cleverness about how things are not what they seem, of how the contexts of language and history complicate any literal-minded interpretations of things, and make us vulnerable to real dangers if we ignore their complexities. (Introduction, p 33)
Ellison’s protagonist is chastened again and again as his people and the country try to teach him that no words or symbols correspond in any simple way to “reality.” (Introduction, p 35)
Charles Stuart was not mature enough as a human being to understand his Constitutional property, James Somerset, whose words and symbols for twenty years, evidently, could not be taken literally. Somerset spent his life telling white folk how to think about the things he knew about. He, seeking freedom, played the role Ralph Ellison gives to the college president, Dr. Bledsoe, who sought, on his own terms, a different concept of freedom: “‘I mean it son,’ he said. ‘I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had to wait and plan and lick around…Yes, I had to act the nigger!’ he said, adding another fiery, ‘Yes!’”
Ellison’s protagonist, a twentieth century James Somerset incarnation, is staggered by Bledsoe’s “disgusting sea of words”: “He was looking me in the eye now, his voice charged and sincere, as though uttering a confession, a fantastic revelation which I could neither believe nor deny. Cold drops of sweat moved at a glacier’s pace down my spine.”
Stuart, the slaveholder, like Ellison’s protagonist, could neither believe nor deny the “slave” Somerset’s apostasy.
It is an open question whether our country is mature enough to have an honest understanding about the past and present public school education of its youth. Getting down to and understanding the root cause of the education crisis will be no easier than understanding the root cause of “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” a task that has proved too much for the Obama Administration and for much if not most of the country. A nation that could neither believe nor deny Secretary of State Colin Powell’s fantastic revelation of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”—ignorant and dishonest about root causes—stunned itself into a war of massive “collateral damage.”
Who will have access to knowledge and how, is not a question to be settled once and for all, but the ground of a dramatic contest that we are already engaged in. The action we seek must take no delight in the slaughter or waste of anybody’s children, nor refuse consciousness of tragedy and history; rather we must allow ourselves to be affected by what young people in poverty desire and do, so that both we and they may act more gracefully, in more successful courtship. (Part IV, p 170)
Not anybody’s children, not even our own.
Preface
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
—Langston Hughes
The intended audience of this book are “practitioners in a system of education that does not yet exist,” as Dr. Vincent Harding called us. We are citizens in an America that is yet to become. We are trying to imagine and create a way to educate our children for democracy, but must do this in an America that does not yet know the practice of democracy.
The ideas presented here for creating this new system of education derive from the teaching of Robert Parris Moses, Mississippi field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s and founder of the Algebra Project. The work of the Algebra Project is to help young people “fashion an insurgency” in the country’s educational arrangements, one that will complement the insurgencies in public accommodations and voting rights of the Civil Rights Movement.
My first encounter with this body of work came during a two-week seminar in the summer of 1995 led by Maisha Moses, Bob Moses’s daughter, and by Lynn Godfrey, who more than a decade earlier had been Maisha’s math teacher in middle school. And their seminar—extending this genealogy—began with a study of Ella Baker, Bob Moses’s teacher, through the reading of an article called, “Organizing in the Spirit of Ella.”1
Central to Miss Baker’s spirit was her insistence that “radical” organizing must get down to the root causes of things. “We not only must remember where we have been,” she said, “but we must also understand where we have been.” For almost two decades I have wondered about the difference between “remembering” and “understanding” in Miss Baker’s terms.
One of the differences is that you can “remember” something that you have read in a book or that you have been told, but can only “understand” something that you have dwelt with: talked over, questioned, argued about, thought through, practiced, applied, worked out, acted out, done. The act of understanding, necessarily oral and physical to some extent, never ends. Deeper and deeper and deeper, the same knowledge or “information” burrows and tunnels and seeps into and saturates the soil of your being, till everything you “knew” looks different as you talk with people and do things with them, trying to understand.
In addition to following the thinking and practice of Bob Moses, I have tried to imitate the methods of the philosopher and critic Kenneth Burke. Burke’s crucial influence on Ralph Ellison has been a growing topic of scholarly investigation.2 But I first came in contact with Burke through his studies of rhetoric and poetry. He urges us to think about writing as “symbolic action,” that is, a poem or book does something that the writer needs done. Burke’s theory of dramatism interprets all human relations as dramatic in form, where we, the players, do things, and react to each other’s doing, and come to understand more and more about our roles as we work out our relations with other people and with the world. The parallels and similarities between Burke’s dramatism and Moses’s Algebra Project are striking and each throws light on the other.
Underlying my argument throughout is the idea that wherever we live or work may be thought of as a self-healing place. “Put down your bucket where you are,” Booker T. Washington explained in Up From Slavery. And as Dr. Harding taught, the entire history of humankind leads to right here and right now, wherever we find ourselves; and from here and now, constrained but not determined by the past, we are obligated to imagine and create a future that could restore the innocence of the first day.
Keeping the child’s innocence before the mind’s eye is useful in this regard. So, too, is a saying that Bob Moses quotes. He came upon it on the gravestone of Kingman Brewster, president of Yale University in the 1960s. Brewster’s epitaph reads: “The presumption of innocence is not only a legal concept; in common law and in common sense, it requires a generosity of spirit toward the stranger, the expectation of what is best, rather than what is worst, in the other.”
The creation of a system of education to foster a true democracy will be founded on this principle. Again and again in my daily work as a teacher in Baltimore, this question of the presumption of innocence is raised. It is raised by the young people; it is raised by their parents; it is raised by the police, the psychologists, the social workers; it is raised by students wondering if they are safe in the cafeteria, and by teachers wondering whether they will lose their jobs.
In our country, slaves were presumed guilty from the first day. Young people in poverty now are also presumed guilty in many contexts—treated with suspicion, aversion, alarm, and contempt. The question
