% Immigrant Blacks in US Colleges

sybbie719 · February 8, 2006, 2:20pm

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In Florida, in the 1940s, black parents successfully sued to get their kids' school year as lengthy as white kids' school years were. (Black kids were by law going to schools only 6 months a year in order to be available to plant and harvest crops.)

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Thanks for bringing this up NSM as this was exactly my parent's experience growing up in the south in the 1930s. If you were black and your parents had money you could go to school in town. Other wise you attended class in a one room class room with mixed grades and the girls in the class watched the younger kids in class. During the planting and harvest season, school was not in session as kids had to go work the Harvest.

The lesson that remains with me to this day is that my mother told me that the only thing that she ever asked her father for was to go to school in town. By this time, my grandfather had remarried (my mother was raised by her maternal grandmother as her mother died when she was 6 weeks old) and he told my mother that he could not afford to send her to school in town. when my parents left the south my mother always to ls us growing up that she would do any thing that needed to be done to ensure that we got and education. Anything we learned in school was a piece of cake compared to the stuff my mother taught us at home. My sisters and I still laugh about our world book dictionaries that had spelling and vocab. words from grade 1-12 and how my mother used to test us on them each week.

I remember in the 60's when my older brothers were bused to school in Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge brooklyn, and they had to run for the bus on the way home as they and their friends were chased by white kids on a daily basis. Every black and hispanic adult I know in Brooklyn who attended FDR, South Shore, Sheepshead bay, madision, Bay ridge, Lincoln, New Utrech in the late 60s and early 70s can tell a similar story.

By the time I attended High School, I went to Brooklyn Tech at the time when they first accepted girls. I remember that if you were in SP, they wanted you to take a test for one of the specialized high school. So all of the kids from 8 SP1 and 8 SP2 at our junior high school located in the heart of bedford stuyvesant (where we sang Lift Every Voice and Sing and Young Gifted and Black after the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner), went to take the test for either , tech, bx science or stuyvesant.

The bulk us us went to take the test at Brooklyn tech because our parents would not allow us to take the train into the City, so we took the Fulton St and the Halsey Street buses.

From my junior high school class 2 girls were admitted to Stuyvesant and 1 went to bronx science and about 15 girls to Tech. I don't think we got a lot of the acting white comments because some of the girls who got into Tech lived in the projects, and those of us who didn't just endured 4 years of being called braniacs.

The first graduating class of girls at Brooklyn Tech (as I was in the third class) had 2 girls- 1 asian and 1 african american.

I remember my own child going starting elementary school in the 80's in down town Tribeca, for quite a few years being the only black student in her grade in the class (the school had multi age groupings; k/1 2/3 4/5 so you kept the same teacher for 2 years). Her teacher was very suprised that she was reading at 3rd grade in kindergarten so she was assigned to reading to other kids in class. Just as soon as they asked for parent volunteers to come in during reading period, I rescheduled my lunch hours and became a reading volunteer in the class room.

when she graduated from 5th grade there may have been 20 african american students in the 5th grade.

I was a class parent, a Parent Rep, was an officer in the PTA, served as PTA Co-Chair donated tens of thousands of my employers dollar's to fund the 6 figure enrichment program and some parents (usually newer parents as I was good friends with many of the parents who were in the same grade as my D) would still ask me why did I bring my D all the way into the city for school. My response was that my taxes paid for this school also and I was just making sure that I got my money's worth.

My daughter caught a few "she talks like a little white girl" comments when we lived in Bed Stuy, but she also had enough cousins to help counter act some of them.

Poetsheart is right that we as a community of black people need a major paradigm shift as there are still too many young black kids who think that the only way they are ever going to get ahead is by waiting on their hoop dream or record deal.

It does sadden me when I think about those before us that died, went to jail and shed blood so that we could have equal access to the education that we were locked out of for so many years and our kids are not honoring it by doing their best work because this is our story.

All of my daughter's life I have told her those whom much has been given, much is required. She knows that it did indeed take a village to raise her. She also knows that she has been given a lot (not monetarily because I am still a poor black woman). The education that she has received is a gift and it is my hope that she remembers to help another young black kid along the way.

Drosselmeier · February 8, 2006, 2:48pm

Our culture is not pushing kids toward sports and music. Our Culture produced MLK, Malcolm X, Mae Jaimason, Senator Oboma, Sheila Washington (first AA to receive PHD in Physics), etc. . .the list goes on.

Of course sports and music were mere examples of the problem. There is a list of pursuits commonly associated with black culture, sports and certain kinds of music included in it, that when compared to other cultures is either too narrow, or whose fields are too small considering the size of the American black population. You mention several black leaders to support your point, but consider the distribution of these types of leaders throughout American black history. There are plenty MLKs, and Malcolms today, perhaps too many. People like Mae Jemison are virtually the exceptions proving the rule. We have no black Fields Medallists, and precious few black Nobel Prize winners. Those that exist are typically found in literature and even their literature, as fantastic as it is, is defined by the oppression that produced the likes of MLK and Malcolm. For a population that is so large, our scope of vision is too narrow. We are producing high profile leaders in a narrow list of fields, basically lessening the options for our children. I understand the historic pressures that made this so, but we must do something radical to help our kids break free of them.

I submit to you that when you took your kid out of the public schools and dedicated 25 hours of your time each week to making sure she was being well-educated, you were acting in a very radical way --and it worked. When I began schooling my kids at home, devoting far more of my life to educating them than is now typical, I acted radically. And it worked. We need to agree that we have a problem that can obviously be solved (you yourself have now proven this.). We need to agree that we blacks can solve the problem (you have proven this yourself). We need to agree that since we have a problem that we ourselves can solve, then for the sake of our kids we have the duty to solve it, regardless of whites, regardless of the past, regardless of anything else. Lastly, and this will be the rub, we need to fashion a variety of solutions, that contain the core philosophy that you and I have found to be effective. As far as I can see, we first need some serious overhauling of our culture before we will be successful.

Asians, despite that they are smaller in number than we are, are almost now routinely producing their versions of Mae Jemison and Sheila Washington. They have Nobel Prize winners in all sorts of different fields. They have Fields Medalists, automakers, businesses in vast numbers of areas and fields. Their children dont really need Yao Ming or any other great athlete to aspire to greatness, though they have great athletes too. The kids merely need to look around and see their influence everywhere. Black kids tend to see black influence on a relatively very narrow list of fields. Our influence is powerful, to be sure, but I fear it is so narrow that black kids are unable to dream beyond it. What is worse, they routinely refuse to allow other black kids to dream beyond it. <a href="http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html</a>

I taught young children, tutor them now, and all want to be lawyers, doctors, president and around middle school reality sets in. They see the "glass ceiling"

Why didnt reality set into your daughter? For some odd reason, she was able to maintain her dreams, and those dreams paid off. Now, she is convinced of her own potency. I suspect if someone were to tell her she is dumb because she is black, she simply would shrug and continue on her way to greatness. If you can do this for your kid, then perhaps you might show me how I can do it for mine. And if I can do it, then maybe I might show my neighbor. A few generations of this, and no one will know who Sheila Washington is and for the right reason.

There will never be more than 1 AA Supreme Court Justice. There will never be more than 2,3 Cabinet Member AA. There will never be more than one or two, 3 tops US Senators

I dont think this is true. Teach the kids to dream, and as they reach many of their dreams, others will follow them or perish.

, there will never be more than 3,4 AA Astronauts headed for space. . .

I think we need to think more powerfully here. There was a competition called the X Prize that, until fairly recently offered a $10million prize for sending a ship in space (read about it here <a href="http://www.xprizefoundation.com/index.asp)%5B/url%5D">http://www.xprizefoundation.com/index.asp)</a>. One of my kids came across it and for about a year worked to see if he could figure a way to win. Did I personally think he could do it? Irrelevant. I didnt know whether he could or couldnt and I personally didnt care. I know he learned an amazing amount, both in science and about himself. Had he succeeded, maybe he would have been another AA headed for space at some point in his life. Had we millions of kids dreaming like him, maybe one of them would have succeeded. Perhaps of the millions of losing black dreamers, some would have learned so much they would eventually start aerospace companies destined to send astronauts for private space exploration. Perhaps many others of these millions of black dreamers would have become the astronauts that the black aerospace pioneers would send into private space exploration. And in this way you might have a lot more than 3 or 4 blacks headed for space.

But man! Compared with Asians and whites, we have no more than a handful of blacks even dreaming of entering space. Most of our kids are dreaming of being rap artists, basketball players and comics. And of those that do dream otherwise, they see a depressing reality around middle school, as you say. It is just a near total defect of culture.

NSM has posted above of why this exists, and I think she is really onto something. Prior to our successes in civil rights, we had quite an intense love of education, so intense that we would do almost anything to get it. Racism has distorted and all but destroyed the dreams that have traditionally been very important to us. I am not interested in blaming blacks or even in blaming whites for this, because it just accomplishes very little. I want this thing fixed and I think we can fix it.

These kids are smarter than you give them credit. They are astute and keen about the reality that is this country.

They need to become astute and keen about the reality that is themselves. You have already proven that this is possible. Now we need to find ways to take what you have done and help everyone see how they too can do it.

The talented tenth of us. . .that is all that will ever be allowed to prosper.
Not 11%, not 12%. . .

I think this notion of a talented tenth is just a figment of the general black imagination. It is yet another of myriad limitations that we blacks have willingly placed upon ourselves, and we have done this for no good reason. Where did Dubois even get this number? It was made out of whole cloth, and we need to just discard it. Your daughter, for all her obvious brilliance, is really no better than vast numbers of black kids who, instead of being funneled into math and the sciences where they naturally belong, are being pushed by flawed culture toward gangs, sports, drugs, premarital sex and despair.

She is considered an honorary caucasion by caucasions. It is easier to deal with her that way. . .for them. Understand the quandry people face when they meet someone who goes totally against their idea of what that person should be.

Sure. I caught this. But just think of what it says. It says that your daughters friends understand that if you are black you should be a failure, and since you are obviously not a failure, you are an honorary one of usa white person, successful and good. That is just awful, and tons of black kids are feeling the weight of it. I mean, they are born with friends who think they are rubbish until they prove otherwise.

Instead of questioning their own preconcieved beliefs, critically thinking about how the beliefs came to be, and throwing out those beliefs it is easier to pretend she is one of them, than to think that we are intelligent, secure and conscious.

I understand, but I do not think she is being honored, however it may appear. One of my sons white friends once said you are the whitest black guy I know! apparently thinking my son would take it as a complement. My son responded, No. I am the blackest black guy you know. We need to redefine what it means to be black. We need to do this for ourselves, so that our children will be free to be whatever they wish.

Hey, I just want to say that I very much admire you, not because of your daughters success, but just because you are radical. I have a very warm feeling about our conversation here, despite that we disagree on many things. The fact is, I think our disagreements are minor. But having you hanging tough wherever it is you live, and thinking about these things as intensely as you obviously are thinking of them, gives me hope that one day, we are all gonna just knock the block clean off this thing.

Drosselmeier · February 8, 2006, 2:49pm