It seemed like a natural issue for us. Segregation wasn’t much of an issue anymore; whites had all but abandoned the
system. Neither was overcrowding, at least in black neighborhood high schools; only half the incoming students
bothered to stick around for graduation. Otherwise, Chicago’s schools remained in a state of perpetual crisis-annual
budget shortfalls in the hundreds of millions; shortages of textbooks and toilet paper; a teachers’ union that went out on
strike at least once every two years; a bloated bureaucracy and an indifferent state legislature. The more I learned about
the system, the more convinced I became that school reform was the only possible solution for the plight of the young
men I saw on the street; that without stable families, with no prospects for blue-collar work that could support a family
of their own, education was their last best hope. And so in April, in between working on other issues, I developed an
action plan for the organization and started peddling it to my leadership.
The response was underwhelming.
Some of it was a problem of self-interest, constituencies misaligned. Older church members told me they had already
raised their children; younger parents, like Angela and Mary, sent their children to Catholic schools. The biggest source
of resistance was rarely talked about, though-namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled
with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools;
they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white
counterparts of two decades before. There wasn’t enough money to do the job right, they told me (which was certainly
true). Efforts at reform-decentralization, say, or cutbacks in the bureaucracy-were part of a white effort to wrest back
control (not so true). As for the students, well, they were impossible. Lazy. Unruly. Slow. Not the children’s fault,
maybe, but certainly not the schools’. There may not be any bad kids, Barack, but there sure are a lot of bad parents.
In my mind, these conversations came to serve as a symbol of the unspoken settlement we had made since the 1960s,
a settlement that allowed half of our children to advance even as the other half fell further behind. More than that, the
conversations made me angry; and so despite lukewarm support from our board, Johnnie and I decided to go ahead and
visit some of the area schools, hoping to drum up a constituency beyond the young parents of Altgeld.
We started with Kyle’s high school, the one in the area with the best reputation. It was a single building, relatively
new but with a careless, impersonal feel: bare concrete pillars, long stark corridors, windows that couldn’t be opened
and had already clouded, like the windows in a greenhouse. The principal, an attentive, personable man named Dr.
Lonnie King, said he was eager to work with community groups like ours. Then he mentioned that one of his school
counselors, a Mr. Asante Moran, was trying to start a mentorship program for young men at the school and suggested
that we might want to meet him.
We followed Dr. King’s directions to a small office toward the rear of the building. It was decorated with African
themes: a map of the continent, posters of ancient Africa’s kings and queens, a collection of drums and gourds and a
kente-cloth wall hanging. Behind the desk sat a tall and imposing man with a handlebar mustache and a prominent jaw.
He was dressed in an African print, an elephant-hair bracelet around one thick wrist. He seemed a bit put off at first-he
had a stack of SAT practice exams on his desk, and I sensed that Dr. King’s call had been an unwelcome interruption.
Nevertheless, he offered us seats, told us to call him Asante, and as our interest became more apparent, began to
explain some of his ideas.
barré
(Barré)
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