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| What we learn about historical events should be based on past human experiences and be all inclusive, regardless of culture and politics. |
When two years old, I was enrolled in an HBCU nursery school program in Normal, Ala. where my mom was secretary to the college president and my dad was associate professor of Horticulture. My father, who also managed the campus orchard, garden, and greenhouses, was also on a team of scientists at Oak Ridge, Tenn. studying the effects of the atomic bomb on vegetation.
All the adults around me were professional educators and through osmosis, I learned that black people were upstanding citizens doing great things.
This idea was duplicated in my segregated kindergarten, in my all black church, and in the professional alliances my parents had in the community. By the time I was five years old, I could already sing the Lord's Prayer from memory and knew fractions, being taught by my teacher using her homemade apple pies. I was well prepared to learn that I and my people were important, smart, and studious. Some were alcoholics, though, probably related to the stress of being Negroes.
What I didn't realize was that my parents had to pay a poll tax to vote, that I couldn't use certain restrooms or eat in restaurants or attend integrated public schools because I was Black. And I remember feeling inferior when my new White friend couldn't come over to my house to play because I was different.When I was four, my mother and father started a florist and landscaping business. It was headquartered in a location which housed a black dentist, physician, tailor, and funeral home director.
When I entered a private Catholic elementary school, the only thing I learned about Black people was that the Indians skinned them to see what color they were underneath. In middle school, Black History was never discussed. My History teacher took me outside the classroom one day and told me that George Washington Carver was a credit to his race. This is something that the other students didn't hear.
In high school with the approval of my History teacher, my friends and I cut up pictures from Ebony and Jet magazines and arranged them on a Black History Bulletin board. One hour afterwards, it was torn down by students who didn't like the display.
Fast forward to my son's middle school experience in Georgia. While attending his school's open house, I was confronted with a flagpole sized Confederate flag on the History room wall which took my breath away. When I explained to the teacher that some students would have a negative reaction to seeing this, I was told that they were studying the Civil War. When I asked her and the principal to have it removed, they wouldn't until I notified them that only a small poster of the flag could be used as a teaching aid in the classroom.
Fast forward to now. Critical race theory is being shot down in several states because they don't want kids feeling bad about the past. They want their own sanitized history taught. So, lynching, race riots, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, murder of Emmit Till, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and others will not be discussed in History class?
Fast forward to now. When I explained to a young doctor how I didn't learn to swim because the black pool was in a sewage dump area and how I attended the first school to be desegregated in the State of Alabama, she smiled and said, "Thank goodness we don't have to go through that kind of mistreatment now," and I thought to myself does systemic racism still exist, and if it does, what are we going to do to defeat it?
Should it start in the classroom, the courtroom, in church, at the ballot box, in the bank, in the real estate office?I say yes! But first we must teach the teachers a new methodology of awareness which emphasizes the psychological importance of telling the truth despite what politicians say.
Now I understand why 16% of black parents are homeschooling their children. Let the whole truth be told. The students can handle it! We're not a RACE, but we're on track to becoming a new planet if we LEARN the right moves.
