I finished the first 40 pages of this book yesterday in preparation for finishing my next week’s Reader column. I read the book almost fifty years ago and have kept its paperback version ever since. I will try to finish it today but a few thoughts about it first that probably won’t make it into my column.
I suspect my Dad recommended the book to me. I remember and read a number of his book recommendations including A Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks and Nat Turner Diaries by William Styron.
Just writing this is forcing me to reevaluate my Father. He moved to a house where he knew I would be attending a school about to be integrated in the wake of Brown v. Education. When asked if our family would accept a student of any race in 1967 for our family to host as our foreign exchange student he led us all in agreeing to do so and in fact our family ended up hosting a student from Ethiopia.
Like any kid I spent time searching his armor for cracks. I asked him when I was in college what he would think if I married a black woman he told me he wouldn’t want me to. I asked him why and he told me he wouldn’t want his grandchildren to be mistreated by society. I thought that was, what we called a “Copp out” in those days. A way of suggesting that while he wasn’t prejudiced he knew biracial grandchildren would have been treated badly and he couldn’t bear that thought. Of course he was right. By then Barack Obama was ten years old and his white Kansas Mother kept him out of the continental 48 states and had him raised in Hawaii by his grandparents. And years later as our first black President his blackness caused the Republican Party to begin its expulsion of anything that liked Lincolnesque liberality toward black America. Dad wasn’t wrong in his evaluation of the pitfalls of being black.
But in looking back on a very common 1960’s treatment of inner city schools, (Up the Down Staircase, To Sir with Love, Blackboard Jungle) I was struck yesterday by the dates. I read the book in the early 70’s but it was published in 1967 a year in advance of Martin Luther Kings assassination. But when I got to a passage in the book about author Kohl’s black Sixth graders interest in the coming Sonny Liston vs. Floyd Patterson heavyweight boxing championship fight that set me on my heals. I was in sixth grade during that fight. Only I was a minority white kid in a recently integrated Topeka grade school.
I was, am, the same age as Mr. Kohl’s damaged and neglected kids in neighborhoods where junkies died on the streets and where dealers shot each other over control of the drug trade only to hide whenever testosterone-charged white cops drove by to drive them into hiding or to give them a good hiding.
Inside me is a long simmering rage over the abandonment of Abe Lincoln by the seedy, greedy, anti-American, self-righteous and unthinking opportunists of today. While they pick fights over the boogers they pluck from their brains news stories pile up largely ignored like those from today you can find links to in the previous post. The Earth as God or Darwin handed it to us is being changed. Hell even a first class world plague is being thrown around like a hot potato when our collective knowledge has given us the ability to nip it in the bud……but the Republicans assholery takes precedence as they do their damndest to convince their shrinking credulous minority that they are still in charge of the majority and that Dim Wit Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of America’s votes in 2020.
I’m busy writing a weekly series of Reader columns about Education but there is a lot more on my mind – Our education system, and intellectual honesty, is being undermined by a Falwell, Koch Brothers, Bircher, Segregationist, Roid-rage Christianity stew which has made the Republican party the porta potty of the Free World. Good old Tucker Carlson is there in Hungary now licking Viktor Orban’s boots as he flushes the nation’s new found democracy down the drain. And hasbeen New Gingrich who once hailed the fall of the Berlin Wall and flooded Russia with the Federalist papers and De Tocqueville to teach them about American democracy turns his back on his empty words of the past.
Pete Stauber are you in this stew?
