Rang True For Me

I was raised in the segregated South, in rural China, Texas.

I entered first grade in 1962.  We didn't have kindergarten back then.  The school I attended housed first thru twelfth grades.  My oldest brother Willie was fourteen years older than me and already in the military by the time I was school age.  My second brother Forrest was a junior, and my third brother Terry was in second grade, and we were all in the same building.

Everyone in that school was black - the principal, the teachers, and the support staff.  The advantages of that world were that at an early age we mingled with professionals who looked like us.  People who had a vested interest in our learning and who understood the importance of teaching us so much more than just the three R's - reading writing and arithmetic.  They, along with our parents, taught us how to navigate our segregated world so that we'd live to tell about it.

That black oasis ended when I entered seventh grade and the school was integrated.  I went from having all black teachers for my first six years of schooling to having just one black teacher for the next six years.  All of the black staff from our school were fired, except for one.  The educational, social and economic impact of that decision was enormous.

In our push for integration, the assumption was if we were in the same class as white kids, we'd get the same education.  That was incredibly naive thinking.

The teachers' role in students' achievement was/is HUGE.  When teachers believe in their students, even when they don't believe in themselves, it makes a tremendous difference.  Does the teacher have to be black to teach black kids?  No, but it's a value-added endeavor when the teachers and students can relate to each other on a deeper level.

So, this author's comments and analysis in the article below rang true for me.

I understood them completely because I lived them.

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An excerpt from the New York Times -

Where Did All the Black Teachers Go?
By BRENT STAPLES

When black schools were shuttered or absorbed, celebrated black principals were demoted or fired. By some estimates, nearly a third of African-American teachers lost their jobs. Those who survived the purge were sometimes selected on the basis of a lighter skin color that made them more palatable to white communities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/opinion/where-did-all-the-black-teachers-go.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region