Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation

Author: Rawn James

The Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered one of the milestones of the civil rights movement. James Rawn explores the two men,  Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, and the institutions they built- Howard University School of Law and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as the legal strategies they developed, to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This is a must and inspirational read. You will have a deeper appreciation for the dedication, commitment, and intellectual and legal brilliance of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.

Motown In Love: Lyrics From the Golden Era

Author: Herb Jordan

Detroit in the 1960s was an unlikely stage for a production that featured some of the most inspirational love songs ever written. It may seem equally unlikely, given today’s portrayal of black men that most of those songs were written by young black men. Default notions of romance are an awkward overlay to the reality of today’s popular music with its devaluation and degradation of women and love.

Herb Jordan catalogues the love songs of Motown which were the soundtrack of a generation and America’s Great Songbook. In this songbook, black men unashamedly declare their love for their women with a delicacy of surgeon.  Poet laureate, Smokey Robinson, wrote of love for a woman as “a rosebud blooming in the warmth of the summer sun.” Besides the delight of the Motown love lyrics, Jordan reminds of soft and sensitive side of black men who found meaning in love (not guns and gangs) and identity in their relationships with their women- their other half.

The Sea is Wide and My Boat is so Small: Charting the Course for the Next Generation

Author: Marian Wright Edelman

Written in the form of letters, Marian Wright Edelman reflects on the state of children in America and what must be done to provide a caring and nurturing context for their growth and well-being. This meditative manifesto is a discourse on building the “village” we often talk about in raising children. On a Prayer For Twenty-First-Century Children, Edelman juxtaposes what is required with what is desired and embraced: “God help us to raise a new generation of children/With highly developed computer skills but poorly developed consciences…With a gigantic commitment to the big “I” but little sense of responsibility to the bigger “we”. She leaves no stone unturned in the service of building a better and more caring society for children. This should be required reading for adults.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns is Wilkerson’s first book. (Its title is borrowed from the celebrated black writer Richard Wright, who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of those other suns.) Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is an epic narrative of one of the great migrations witnessed in America. The migration of black from the South to the North is often presented as a failed “social experiment.” These blacks are too frequently demeaned in literature as the wretched of the earth: thrown together in dead-end Northern slums, cast as poor illiterates who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.

Yet, Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns tells another story. Today, these black migrants are viewed as a modern version of the Europeans who flooded America’s shores in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What linked them together, Wilkerson writes, was their heroic determination to roll the dice for a better future. This is a delightful read and a departure from negative narrative of black life which is so often presented as the quintessential fact of black in America.

The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

Author: Ira Berlin

The Four Great Migrations frame the history of people of African descent in America, setting the paths by which Africans and then African Americans made and remade black and American life between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. These four massive upheavals form the foundation of Ira Berlin’s sweeping new interpretation of the African American experience.

This book is certainly a companion read to The Warmth of Other Suns, and one that will not disappoint. Tracing the transit from Africa to America, Virginia to Alabama, Biloxi to Chicago, and Lagos to the Bronx, Berlin challenges the traditional presentation of a linear, progressive development of black America. The Making of African America speaks of the old giving way to the new, innovation dancing with tradition, change challenging stasis- a two beat theme that has a profound effect on African American communities, families and individual lives, continually remaking all aspects of black culture from language to working patterns, from religion to art.

Marriage is the basis for stable and sustainable family life. Hence, the state of African Americans as a people is best measured by the state of the black family. The practice of Kwanzaa contributes both to strong marriages and stable families. Kwanzaa advances that the staring point and foundation for restoring healthy and lasting marriages among African Americans begins with its 7 Principles.

Principle One- Unity: the unity principle instructs that modes of communication and behavior among men and women in relationships or marriage should promote an atmosphere of harmony and togetherness. Joining two hearts as one requires self-conscience practice to build into the relationship perpetual sharing, empathy, dedication and commitment through daily practice. The 7 Principles advises that relationships or marriages fall apart day-by-day, not through one single argument or misguided act.

Principle Two- Self-determination: the self-determination principle assist couples in defining their relationship or marriage in terms that is in their own best interest, not that of others, practicing their own cultural value.  Too, this principle urges the setting of terms (e.g., no violence, no name calling, especially the “N” and “B” word, setting aside time each week for just the “two of us”), to avoiding misunderstanding and drift in the marriage.

Principle Three- Collective Work & Responsibility: the collective work and responsibility principle is straightforward: each person in the relationship is responsible and accountable for its success or failure. The principle is clear that blaming and finger-pointing have no place in a relationship. It is always about “us” and “we” not ‘I” and “my.”

Principle Four- Shared Resources: the shared resources principle obligates those in long-term relationships to support and care for each other and to see their interest tied together. It also suggests that all finances and financial responsibility are shared among mates. No one person is the “bread winner” or has total say over management of family finances. Even when only one person is employed, the other person is entitled to should be fully involved in financial transactions.

Principle Five- Purpose: the purpose principle says to couples that one of their central goals in life is the building and developing or our relationships.  For it is through the building strong and lasting marriages that they contribute to stable families, the index of the strength and viability of a people. Further, the purpose principle instructs that mates find their social meaning and human identity in their union.

Principle Six- Creativity: the creativity principle renews the freshness, energy and excitement in relationships, especially marriages through the practice of continuous improvement. The principle says that couples should always seek to finds new and better ways of enjoying each other, and of recreating the magic which first attracted them to each other.

Principle Seven- Faith: the faith principle is what sustains couples through difficult times and crisis. Equally important, the principle keeps couples hopefully. Influential philosopher and theologian Howard Thurman asserts: “Faith is the substance and spirit which makes “tired hearts refreshed and dead hopes stir with the nearness of life; faith is the “promise of tomorrow at the close of everyday, the triumph of life in the defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than fate, right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”

Each month, couples should take inventory on what they have done to practice the seven principles above, celebrating their successes, and recommitting themselves to practice in greater measure those areas which need attention or improvement. At Kwanzaa time, December 26 through January 1, couple can assess how their relationship against the 7 Principles and celebrate their joy and happiness of their union.

Come home from the movies black girls and boys

the picture be over and the screen/ be cold as our neighborhood

come home from the show/ don’t be the show

come home from the movies/ black girls and boys

show our fathers how to walk like men/ they already know how do dance

-Lucille Clifton

Few would refute the dismal state of black male/female relationships. The soon to be release movie “For Colored Girls,” will further highlight the plight and problems of black women in society who are viewed as the antithesis of the standard of womanhood and beauty. Added to this is the estranged state of black men and women relationships. Sociologist Orland Patterson has been “listening to black men and women for nearly four decades. He has sifted through census data. And he’s closely followed the work of other researchers who study with new urgency what Patterson calls the current “crisis” in African American gender relations.”

Never, Patterson says, have the voices of black women and men been angrier or sadder. Never have many of the statistics been bleaker or more alarming. And never have these issues been more relevant to all Americans, Patterson and other researchers say. As marriage rates among blacks plummet, Patterson says he’s hearing increased numbers of educated, middle-class black women speak in tones of resignation or desperation about the scarcity of similarly accomplished black men.

As marriage rates among blacks plummet, Patterson says he’s hearing increased numbers of educated, middle-class black women speak in tones of resignation or desperation about the scarcity of similarly accomplished black men. As the black divorce rate has soared, he’s asked black husbands and wives to talk about their marriages – and has been increasingly dismayed by how many say they’re disappointed, dissatisfied or already straying.

Popular music, in particular rap songs have contributed to the estrangement of black male/female relationships, reducing them to recreational sex. . “Hateful,” Patterson described them, flatly rejecting the claim that these lyrics are harmless posturing. “How far can you go with those lyrics and claim what you’re hearing is not what you’re hearing?” he asked.

Speaking of the current state of black male/female relationships, M. Belinda Tucker, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science says, “It is a crisis,” Her book, “The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans,” highlighted the research of 22 leading psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and economists. “But it is a crisis; she goes on to say, set in the context of a larger crisis: the continuing vulnerability of the black male in this society.”

Nor are these problems unique to African American men and women. Tucker and Patterson say there’s evidence that suggests gender relations among white men and women may become increasingly strained for some of the same reasons.

“In many ways, what has happened to blacks is a precursor to what will happen to whites,” Patterson said. “Some of the trends are clearly in the same direction. Whether they have the same disastrous effects remains to be seen.”

Census figures document many of these trends. In 1910, the government reported that a majority of black women worked outside the home; white women passed that milestone only in the past 20 years, census statistics show. With work inevitably comes increased tensions at home as men and women – white and black – struggle to adjust to new roles and responsibilities, Tucker said.

Census figures also reveal that the number of unmarried black women who gave birth fell by 5 percent between 1990 and 1994, while the percentage of out-of-wedlock births to white women increased by 23 percent during the same period. And there are almost twice as many single white mothers as single black mothers, although the proportion of black families headed by women is much larger.

These statistics suggest that more children – white and black, poor and non-poor – must struggle to learn how to grow into men and women without a father in the home. Even as this problem continues to plague the black community disproportionately, economists have documented an expanding white “underclass” in which grinding poverty complicates the establishment of healthy gender relations, Patterson said.

In the past four decades, a social and economic revolution has transformed traditional patterns of marriage and family among both whites and blacks. Still, Tucker said, the changes are far more dramatic among African Americans, among whom the percentage of households headed by single women remains much higher than among whites. In 1950, 64 percent of black men age 14 or older were married, census data show. (The census selected 14 as an early but arbitrary benchmark.) But by 1995, that proportion had plummeted to 43 percent. (The percentage of currently married white males in the same age category also dropped, but not nearly as much, from 68 percent in 1950 to 61 percent in 1995.

Married black women are even rarer. Between 1950 and 1995, the percentage of black women 14 or older who were married fell from 62 percent to under 38 percent. Currently, 59 percent of all white women are married, down from 66 percent in 1950. Data collected by census researchers also suggest that fewer than 75 percent of black women can expect to marry sometime in their lives, compared with 90 percent of white women.

This crisis among black men and women portends a greater crisis which is devastating the black family. There, the urgency of this matter demands a total solution.

Answers in Kwanzaa: Black men and Women in Love and Togetherness Part II

Michelle and I send warm wishes to all those celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season. This is a joyous time of year when African Americans and all Americans come together to celebrate our blessings and the richness of our cultural traditions. This is also a time of reflection and renewal as we come to the end of one year and the beginning of another. The Kwanzaa message tells us that we should recall the lessons of the past even as we seize the promise of tomorrow.

-Statement on Kwanzaa by the President and First Lady

The Kwanzaa holiday was created in 1966 to introduce seven guiding principles which were seen as essential to improving the living conditions and life chances of African Americans. Unquestionably, since 1966, the lives of many professional and middle class African American have improved. In fact, some blacks rank among the highest paid professionals, and enjoy enormous social prestige. Yet, for the vast majority of African Americans, in particular those living in areas of concentrated poverty have witness their financial earning decline and their social conditions worsen.

Ironically, in the Age of Obama, the condition of African Americans has worsen: African Americans have experience a rise in poverty, continued high incarceration of young black men, many who are most likely victims of homicide; a decline in education performance, almost of African American students do not graduate; a steady increase of in HIV cases, in 2008 African Americans made up an estimated 50% of new diagnosed HIV cases, and they have experienced an unbelievable increase in children born out of wedlock-almost 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, and in 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, more than 70 percent of all Black families were headed by married couples; that number is now 48 percent. To be fair, it should be noted that the deteriorating of blacks dates back to the 1980s with the policies of Reagan.

Answers in Progress: Kwanzaa

The seven principles of Kwanzaa – Unity, Self Determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity, and Faith – express the values that have inspired us as individuals and families; communities and country. These same principles have sustained us as a nation during our darkest hours and provided hope for better days to come. Michelle and I know the challenges facing many African American families and families in all communities at this time, but we also know the spirit of perseverance and hope that is ever present in the community. It is in this spirit that our family extends our prayers and best wishes during this season and for the New Year to come.

-Statement on Kwanzaa by the President and First Lady

It has become abundantly clear that the conditions which necessitated the creation of Kwanzaa are still present today and demand our attention. The steady deterioration of the black family, self-destructive and irresponsible behavior of too many young and older black men, supported culture values and a culture orientation which discourages family stability, marriage, and academic achievement. Given these conditions, how can Kwanzaa reverse this trend?

Family-Centered Holiday

Kwanzaa is a family-centered holiday, stressing a mode of communication and behavior which serves to strengthening the ties that bind family members together, and reinforces their identity as family. Family is important and essential to child and adolescent socialization. The values and social orientation of dating, marriage, education, and morality, respect for human life, and community-building are introduced and taught in the family. Children and youth learn how to be mothers and fathers and providers and keepers of the culture in the family. To be sure, the family is smallest example of the community-its strength and illnesses, possibilities and vulnerabilities. The Kwanzaa principle Unity instructs parents to work in harmony with each other to create the conditions which nurture caring relationships and mutuality that define the essence of family. Put another way, Kwanzaa places a priority and premium on daily activities which reinforce the value of family togetherness.

Male/Female Relationships

It is now common place to hear men debase and degrade women, especially in popular music: Jay-Z, “If you’re havin’ girl problems I feel bad for you son/ I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.” VH1’s reality show, Flavor of Love, presents women, in particular black women, as sexual objects, waiting to be used. Little wonder then that only 48 percent of black families are headed by married couples, and 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Kwanzaa is the antidote to destructive narrative of male female relationships portrayed in popular lyrics and on reality TV shows. The principle unity instructs men and women to seek harmony and stability as expressed in poem, “Answer: This Magic Moment.”

Now that you have young love

Insist upon the dawn’

Its mornings bright with sun and rain

That summon up continuity

Now that your love is bounded and

Culturally confirmed, do not forget:

First meetings, great and early laughter

Preparation for first dates, delicate touches and

Kisses that quicken heartbeats, love notes and

Phone calls into the midnights’ dawns

Do not forget promises; there area always pure promises of, “forever yours”

-Haki Madhubuti

Kwanzaa thus serves to reinforce relationships between men and women, instructing them to be respectful of each other’s humanity, and to seek to develop each other in love and togetherness. Each Kwanzaa, those who are in relationships assess their relationships and their commitments to their partner, striving to build stronger bonds of love.

Black Men: In Love and In Trouble

In recent years, terms such as crisis, at-risk, marginal and endangered, are used with increasing regularity to describe the plight and condition of young Black males. The reason such stark and ominous terms are used with reference to Black males is quite clear: a broad array of social and economic indicators point with alarming consistency to the undeniable fact that large numbers of individuals who fall within these two social categories, Black and male, are in deep trouble. Whether the indicators relate to employment or education, health or crime, Black males are consistently clustered toward the end of the spectrum generally regarded as least desirable, and most vulnerable. For example:

• 29.4% of African American males born in 1991 (the year my son was born) will spend some time in their lifetime incarcerated (Department of Justice).
• The number one cause of death for 15-24 year old black males is homicide (2004 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• Black men in the United States have the shortest life expectancy (69.5 years) of all other racial and ethnic groups – averaging over six years less than white men who live 75.7 years (2005 National Center for Health Statistics)
• Unemployment among black males is higher than any other population at 14.1% (Bureau of Labor, January 2009).
• Over seventy percent of black children in America are raised by in parent households where no father is present (National Center for Health Statistics, 2007).

“More strikingly than patterns of military enlistment, marriage or college graduation, prison time differentiates the young adulthood of black men from the life course of white males. Imprisonment is now a common life event for an entire demographic group,” said Becky Pettit, one of the study’s authors and a University of Washington assistant professor of sociology.

Enough said. The situation with black males, in particular, young black men, is no longer a problem but self-perpetuating conditions that is heart of the disintegration of the black family. Kwanzaa offers a cultural framework for black male regeneration, beginning with the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: Unity- between black men and black women; Self-determination, redefining young black male identity from “gangstas,” “pimps and players,” to fathers and brothers; Collective Work & Responsibility, being “my brother’s and sister’s keeper,; Cooperative Economics, the practice  of African Americans working together to develop self-reliant, locally-based and community controlled economy and profiting from them together; Purpose,  building safe and thriving communities through service and sacrifice; Creativity, an ethic and practice of continuous improvement; and Faith, believing in capacity of black people to make progress (beginning with oneself).

Building Healthy and Thriving Communities

It is self-evident that children live in families and families live in neighborhoods. Today, many African American neighborhoods are not aligned with the aspirations of the families in those neighborhoods. Gangs, drug trafficking, gun violence, school dropout, and teenage prostitution have come to characterize too many neighborhoods of color. Black neighborhood youth find identity with street gangs, and meaning in gang violence. Even youth who are not members of gangs adopt the gang lifestyle- “keeping it gansta,” or referring to friends as “homies” or “homeboy.”

Kwanzaa seeks to align African American neighborhoods with shared values (7 guiding principles of Kwanzaa) of the families which inhabit those neighborhoods. The share values of Kwanzaa provide youth and adults with a shared identity, common purpose and collective destiny. Rather than the individualist orientation “looking out for number one” or in its worse state-“all against all,” Kwanzaa provides for culture framework which advocates that every member of the family and community is constituted by a web of interpersonal relationships which sees itself as collectively responsible for the success and failure of the neighborhood- its children and youth, the quality of education they receive, and the safety and well-being its neighbors.

Culture Orientation

Culture is a people’s brain or intelligence, dictating how they see themselves and the world and how they respond to their social condition. The popular culture of African Americans, in particular black youth is now informed by the worse of its “street” element. Historian and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson Popular culture has an intoxicating pull on youth people, especially those with weak family and culture ties. Orlando Patterson argues that sociologist need to pay more attention to what has been called the “cool pose” culture which for many young black men is “almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping, and dressing sharply, sexual conquest, party drugs, hip-hop, music and culture.”

Whatever the nomenclature, “cool pose” or “keeping it real” or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience Thomas Chatter, Washington Post editorial writers, argues – the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era- has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes. Contrary to the “cool pose” culture, Kwanzaa grounds young people in cultural values and historical models- Martin Luther King’s “service ethic”, Anna Julia Cooper male/female model of Complementarity, the youth example of struggle by SNCC, and Motown’s songbook. In brief, the key crisis in black life remains the culture crisis-the crisis in view and values.

Enhancing Education

More people of color are taking the SAT, but test scores for black students remain lowest among racial and ethnic groups, according to data released this week by the College Board. Black students scored at least 72 points behind the overall average in critical reading, mathematics and writing. A major contributing factor to the decline in academic excellence by young blacks is the “cool pose” cultural orientation, which equates learning and academic achievement with “acting white, negating black historical intellectual accomplishment-W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, George Washington Caver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Barack and Michelle Obama.

The African American holiday Kwanzaa with its emphasis on continuous learning (Creativity principle) and high achievement can be an effective intervention for families and schools. Kwanzaa provides incentives for children and youth to read and excel in school. Books are one of the seven Kwanzaa symbols, and are a mandatory part of Kwanzaa gift giving. No matter what is given during Kwanzaa, a book must be given. The book is to remind both parents and the child of the importance and priority of learning and education. In addition, the Kwanzaa symbols are instructive for reinforcing academic learning.  Take for example the symbol of the African American flag. The color black is symbolic of black people (black youth); the color red is symbolic of effort and work; and the color green is symbolic of the future and hope that comes from the effort and work. In the context of school, the lesson is that students who appreciate learning, respect each other and who, put forth an earnest effort at studying will excel academically and achieve in life.

Revisiting the Purpose of Kwanzaa

Given the scope of the crisis facing blacks in America, the spread and celebration of Kwanzaa, with emphasis on the practice of the seven guiding principles as a way of living for African Americans, is central and essential to eradicating the conditions which have given rise to the cultural malaise and social pathology which has arrested the development of African American. As is the practice of Kwanzaa, in 2010, families, neighborhoods and networks or black organizations must take assessment of what each has accomplished in relationship to the seven guiding principles of Kwanzaa. Beginning with the family and then expanding outward to the local and national African American community, the time has come for blacks to practice daily: Unity, Self Determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity, and Faith.

Ironically, since the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional, schools labeled as urban or inner-city (code for black) have failed to perform at the level of the so-called segregated schools of the South and North. For example, African American students ranked lasting the scoring on the national SAT and ACT.¹ An even more disturbing statistic is the high school dropout rate among black male student. The research from the Massachusetts-based Schott Foundation on Public Education shows that more than half- 53 percent- of black male students drops out of high school without a diploma, compared to 22 percent of white males. It’s a stunning statistic that foretells a permanent underclass, forever stuck outside the American mainstream.²

Dunbar High School offers an attractive model which goes beyond issuing slogans, threats, and blame. Between 1910 and 1930, for instance, the Dunbar students, who went “North” to school, entered Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Brown, Colby, Colgate, Dartmounth, Hamilton, Harvard, Michigan, Oberlin, Universities of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, and Syracuse to name just a few. Many received Phi Beta Kappa keys. Of the 156 Rosewald Fellowships awarded between 1937 and 1952, twenty-one or thirteen percent went to Dunbar graduates.³

Today, endeavors to create an environment which will produce black graduates able to meet and even determine the requirements of the larger society must look to Dunbar as a blueprint for success. The components of Dunbar’s success included the following:

• Teaching philosophy- At Dunbar, teachers provided quality education for their students because they and the students and the community believed it was possible to do so. They had not been told that it was not, nor were they then denied the possibility of reaching the best young black minds of the city. Dunbar was designed and saw as its mission to produce superior student capable of meeting any standards the American system wished to project.

• A rigorous and challenging curriculum- As early as 1899, Dunbar’s curriculum was based on courses in English, Latin, French, Spanish, German, history, mathematics, science, art and music. The prepared African American students to attend the highest academic colleges in the United States. It is interesting to note that Dunbar did not, as a rule, try to prepare black athletes to seek coveted athletic scholarships.

• Conscious, committed, and capable teachers and administrators- From get-go, Dunbar teachers and administrators were mission-focused and mission-driven. Teachers, the grandson of Frederick Douglass, the Father of Black History Month, Cater G. Woodson, were among the list of teachers who represent W.E.B Dubois’s Talented Tenth. The teachers who were black and could thereby provide a basis of identity did derive their intellectual, if not their emotional strengths from having themselves achieved in the larger society. Dunbar during its florescence capitalized and built upon the strengths of blacks who brought knowledge and security to an educational to an educational task because they themselves had met the standards of the larger society.

• Engaged and motivated students- At Dunbar students exhibited a respect for learning. Neither the student nor the teachers were handicapped by strong feelings of bitterness, hostility, or inferiority. The energies of the students were not wasted on hating each other; all were directed toward developing a superior academic orientation and outcome. All students knew and sang with regularity and more feeling than the manner in which they saluted the American flag “The Black National Anthem,” with the words penned by poet James Weldon Johnson and which began “Lift every voice and sing…” There were no high school sororities or fraternities. Extra-curricular activities were based on interest, not social status: a stamp club, a Black History club, or, in competition, the National Honor Society.

Therefore, if Dunbar can be informative and instructive, it would seem that creating high performing schools first a function of context. Once within the walls of Dunbar, all students were exposed to a special academic environment. This meant for many students the essential and first step on the ladder of equality with any student of similar endowment of any race. Second, parents and the community were an integral part of the education process, reinforcing the value of learning, and the value of the school as a learning institution. Put another way, parents and the community embraced Dunbar and Dunbar embraced them.  Third, teachers had high expectations of their students and believed in their academic potential and possibilities. Terms like “ghetto” school, “culturally deprived youth,” “combat pay,” were not part of their vocabulary or thinking. Teachers, as a rule, expected to produce college graduates, and were not hesitant to provide the most challenging and rigorous academic subjects, confident that their students could master these subjects.

As parents, citizens, taxpayers, and policy makers, we need to revisit the Dunbar High School legacy and experience. It should be required reading for school officials and teachers, students, and parents. Initiatives and policies which attempt to improve school performance for poorly performing schools, should use it as a starting point and reference for educational excellence.

Reference

1. Schott Foundation for Public Education: The 2010 Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education
2. Cynthia Tucker, The Atlanta Journal, September 18, 2010
3. Adelaide Cromwell Hill: The Black Seventies Black Education in the Seventies: A Lesson from the Past
4. Mary Gibson Hundley, The Dunbar Story (1870-1955)
5. Mary Church Terrell History of the High School for Negroes in Washington, Journal of the Negro History, Vol. II, 1917

You are my pride and joy
And I just love you, little darlin’
Like a baby boy loves his toy
You’ve got kisses sweeter than honey
And I work seven days a week to give you all my money
And that’s why you are my pride and joy
And I’m tellin’ the world
-Marvin Gaye

During the 1960s, it common place to hear black men say and sing to black women, “How sweet it is to be loved by you” or “You are my everything”. These statements echoed the emotional sentiments of the Motown song writers: Smokey Robinson, Marvin Tarplin, William Stevens, Brain, Edward Holland, Lamont Dozier, Bobby Rogers, Marvin Gaye, Norman Whitfield, Clarence Paul, Barrett Strong, Stevie Wonder, and Henry Cosby. All of these men and others contributed to the Great American Songbook known as the Motown Sound and Songbook. The Beatles and James Taylor, masters of songwriting themselves, recorded Motown songs. Bob Dylan spoke of Smokey Robinson as ‘the greatest living American poet.”

This songbook was much more than a collection of songs. It (songbook) speaks volumes about softer side of black men as well as their humanity. For these writers were not exceptions, but reflective of black men, in particular young black men, who lived in low-income neighborhoods. They refused to let the circumstances around them, public or low-income housing and other factors associated with low-income status, mute their imagination or lower their moral expectations, especially as it related to male/female relationships. Instead, they gave black men and women a new vocabulary which to speak to each other-“You’re A Wonderful One”, new concepts of love-“Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” and “Distant Lover” and “Your Precious Love”, and a deeper understanding of the complexity of relationships- “All Is Fair In Love” and “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game”.

Where today’s songwriters and producers see artists from inner-city projects as perfect instruments for rap street stories and gritty hip-hop soul, the men at Motown dreamed higher, imagining, for example, the Brewster Housing’s own Diana Ross as just the vehicle for a classic ballad. In the midst of a low-income neighborhood, they heard a symphony. At Motown, “95 percent of the songs were written by young, black men,” Jordan says. “They wrote for the male and female artists, and brought to it a sense of vulnerability any English professor would be proud of. Coming out of Detroit, one of harshest environments you could imagine, they elected to write love songs.”

The Motown writers drew their inspiration and song materials from ordinary life in the “neighborhood,” giving beauty and narrative to everyday life of black people. They weighed-in on the enduring power of love, “What Love Has Joined Together”, writing poetically. “It would be easier to take the cold from snow or the heat from fire
than for anyone to take my love from you ’cause you’re my heart’s desire, I really love you. What love has joined together can’t nobody take it apart”. To be sure they advised that love transcended space and time and that when men and women are joined together in their hearts, nothing is impossible: “Even if they separate us,” the songwriter says “a thousand miles apart, we will still be together in each other’s heart. It would be easier to change all the seasons…baby, of the year than for anyone to change the way I feel about you; I love you dear”.

Moreover, Motown writers knew that the bonds of love kept men and women tied together no matter the circumstance: From “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”:

Listen, baby/ Ain’t no mountain high/ Ain’t no valley low/ Ain’t no river wide enough, baby/ If you need me, call me/ No matter where you are/ No matter how far/ Just call my name/ I’ll be there in a hurry/ You don’t have to worryRemember the day/ I set you free/ I told you/ You could always count on me/ From that day on I made a vow/ I’ll be there when you want me/ Some way, some howMy love is alive/ Way down in my heart/ Although we are miles apart/ If you ever need a helping hand/ I’ll be there on the double/ As fast as I can

The Motown male songwriters captured the female perspective instructing men and women: “You Can’t Hurry Love”.They revered women, writing about ordinary black women as Goddesses and magicians, cherishing them, seeing them as central and essential to life. From “My Girl”:

I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.  When it’s cold outside I’ve got the month of May. I guess you’d say what can make me feel this way? My girl/ I’ve got so much honey the bees envy me. I’ve got a sweeter song than the birds in the trees. I guess you’d say what can make me feel this way? My girl/ I don’t need no money, fortune, or fame. I’ve got all the riches baby one man can claim. I guess you’d say what can make me feel this way? My girl.

The Motown writers were unafraid to tell about the vulnerability of men, writing Please Return Your Love to Me: “I cry myself to sleep at night/For fear of another holding you tight for and baby I miss you with each passing day/Every night on my knees I pray.” And black men rush to apologize, even crying to display their remorse and hurt, if they were caught doing wrong: From “The Track of My Tears”:

People say I’m the life of the party/ Because I tell a joke or two
Although I might be laughing loud and hearty/ Deep inside I’m blue
So take a good look at my face/ You’ll see my smile looks out of place If you look closer, it’s easy to trace/ The tracks of my tears

Again, in contrast to the popular male image of today, black men were unafraid to show their emotions and share their pain. Sometime the hurt from the lost of a woman was so great the man was immobilized and wish for rain. From “I Wish It Would Rain”:

Sunshine, blue skies, please go away/ My girl has found another and gone away/ With her went my future, my life is filled with gloom/ So day after day, I stay locked up in my room I know to you it might sound strange/ But I wish it would rain
Cause so badly I wanna go outside. (Such a lovely day)/ But everyone knows that a man ain’t supposed to cry, listen
I gotta cry ‘cause cryin’ eases the pain, oh yeah/ People this hurt I feel inside, words could never explain/ I just wish it would rain

The Motown Songbook, which surely is America’s Great Songbook, is a narrative of black men in love. The lessons of love which they the men at Motown wrote about helped to inform and shape black male/female relationship. Equally important, their songs gave spiritual and moral guidance to black men, instructing them in the ways love, forever reminding them of divinity of black women because: “Heaven must have sent you {black men} from above.”