INTERRACIAL VOICE

Essay

Another View:
What's Happening with the NAACP?
By Emory Curtis

I'm one of the old heads who came out of the South (Texas) in the late 40s and graduated from a Northern school (University of California (UC) in Berkeley) before the NAACP won the 1954 Supreme Court decision which not only integrated schools but it also was the death knell of de jure (legal) segregation of life in this country.

That landmark decision laid the foundation for the progress we made over the next twenty years in converting the Court's words on paper into facts of life on the ground. The court case itself was the culmination of almost twenty years of tactical step by step actions by the top legal brains that could be assembled to prepare the ground for a winning Supreme Court case.

That was a big gamble. A loss would have been a terrific setback for us and erasing it would have taken years. Unfortunately, strategic thinking and planning is sorely missing in the leadership of our top organizations.

That's evident now. Over the past thirty years or so, we have gone backwards, or, at best, stood still. The differences are more black women in better jobs in the private sector balanced(?) by the dearth of young black men in decent positions in private industry. Our girls do better than boys in school.

Even though there is no visible segregation now, there is segregation, in terms of the delivery of education to our youngsters. Schools that our youngsters attend are likely sub par in terms of physical plant, quality of teachers, availability of textbooks to take home, and almost any other quality used to measure the performance of schools.

The segregation that we need to fight now is segregation of young minds during their formative K-12 years.

On the one hand many of our youngsters trek through K-12 schools at the bottom of the heap with substandard facilities, lesser trained teachers, and few advanced placement courses. Their white middle class counterparts will make that school trek with better trained teachers, state-of-the-art facilities and more advanced placement courses.

Naturally, at the end of the process, the two sets of students are prepared for different roads to their future. Most of one set will be prepared to enter the upper tier colleges and the other set will enter the lower tier colleges or none.

That's the same results that I saw in my youth which led me to make the trek to the University of California rather than to Prairie View or Samuel Houston. In that day and time, that's the choice I had because of the color of my skin. In today's world, many black students are in that same fix because of the segregation of their minds in the K-12 system.

Frankly, from my observations, those conditions are much too commonplace in urban schools in this state and, according to a friend of mine, Jim Gordon who has worked with farm worker organizations in California for many years, those problems are doubled in spades when it comes to schools loaded with children from farm worker families.

He reported to me about a school teacher in a local (to him) elementary school refusing to let the children go to the restroom during the class period. Naturally, in that class, nature ignored the teacher's edict and some of the children whom nature called had to answer in class, in their seats, and in their clothes. Jim also said that an elementary school in his area didn't have one student performing at grade level.

At last legal action is being taken in California to get the state to equalize the public education delivery system across all race, creed, color and class lines. California is like many other states in that they violate their state Constitution by denying an equal education to those who have to attend schools with inadequate textbooks, the most untrained teachers, non-functional bathrooms and all kinds of other sub par conditions.

On the same day of the month that the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund won its historic 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown vs Board of Education, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), and some major national law firms and lawyers jointly filed the most comprehensive lawsuit concerning the bare minimums required for education that has ever been brought against the state of California.

According to the lawsuit, filed in the name of students from 18 schools throughout the state, the state has reneged on its constitutional requirement to provide at least the bare essentials necessary for students's education and it violates both the federal and state equal access to public education requirements. Their complaint was that the everyday educational experience of students in those schools was that they didn't have the materials and basic resources needed, received inadequate instruction, had massive overcrowding, and attended schools with degraded, unhealthful facilities and conditions.

It is obvious that our kids have much to gain with this suit winning. When I heard of the lawsuit, I assumed the NAACP was involved because it could mean so much for us.

There must be a story behind the fact that whites (ACLU and major law firms), Hispanics (MALDEF), and Asians (APALC) are all behind this legal battle against some obvious impediments that directly results in a deficient education for many of our youngsters, and the NAACP is not there. What gives? We need an answer from the NAACP leadership.

Let me hear from you: (916)961-1859 (V); (916)961-1596 (FAX); e-mail; eccurtis@hotmail.com. or 8931 Bluff Lane, Fair Oaks, CA 95628. To see back columns http://home.earthlink.net/~eccurtis