Word
Up!
When Is It Ever the Right
Place or Right Time?
By
Johnie H. Scott,
M.A., M.F.A.
(Reprinted from
The WAVE Newspapers, Wednesday, July 5, 2000)
Following the tragic circumstances surrounding the untimely murder of 20-year-old Lori Gonzalez, daughter of Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bernard Parks, along with the gruesome stabbing deaths of Al Patton and his wheelchair-bound wife Edna took me back in time to the year I was invited to lead a special program during the late 1990s at George Washington Preparatory High School in South Central Los Angeles.
Washington Prep is that same high school immortalized during the 1980s by the hard of African American educator George McKenna to lift not only the educational standards, but those stunted hopes and aspirations of the faculty, staff, students and families connected with that trouble-plagued inner city school. His efforts led to the making of that highly-praised television film The George McKenna Story. That movie, featuring Denzell Washington in the lead role, and the buzz it created propelled Dr. McKenna into the national limelight as one of a handful of educators dedicated to the proposition that Black and other poor, disadvantaged children need not come out of our schools labeled as “discouraged learners” – a practice that now is starting in their kindergarten years.
The 1980s and early 1990s saw McKenna, Jawanzaa Kunjufu and others bringing innovative, revolutionary pedagogical approaches into those classrooms and, in doing so, offering light for what otherwise were darkened minds and lives. Located as it is just down the street on 108th Street and Denker Avenue from Los Angeles Southwestern Community College, Washington High is only a few miles from Edwin Markham Junior High on 104th Street and Compton Avenue (i.e., this was before the term “Middle School” came to replace “Junior High”).
Washington isn’t that far removed, as well, from Manchester and Normandie Avenues – the infamous intersection where the 1992 Los Angeles Riots jumped off in the aftermath of the Simi Valley Jury’s acquittal of the four police officers in the beating-down of motorist Rodney King.
I attended Markham from 1959-1961 during that school’s first three years of existence. I finished Markham in 1962 as its student body president and part of a graduating class (i.e., “The Cavaliers”) that numbered 550 students. Less than a week later, 250 of us would enroll at Jordan High School which was less than ten blocks away. And three years later, 96 of us walked across the stage to complete the 12th grade and receive our high school diplomas at Jordan. That’s less than 20 percent or 1 out of every five of those who completed the ninth grade from Markham Junior High in the very heart of Watts, and not everyone transferred or went to other schools during those three years of senior high. Finishing high school in the 1960s was a real accomplishment even then if you were black and poor, but that’s another story, for another time.
The effort I was asked to implement – the 9-Step Life Management Program (LMP) – is a plan I developed during my first years of teaching from 1984-1988 in the Pan African Studies Department at CSUN. Loosely-based on the 12-Step Program made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous, I created the 9-Step LMP in attempting to help cut down on the numbers of African Americans and other minority students dropping out, being kicked out, or giving up on college during those crucial first and second years.
My invitation to introduce the 9-Step at Washington Prep came after I had begun to enjoy come real success at CSUN. The effort at Washington was underwritten by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and coordinated through the School of Education at CSU Los Angeles. Specifically, I found myself working with students in grades 9-11 at Washington over a four-week time span. Each morning found me driving out to Southcentral Los Angeles from my own home in the San Fernando Valley some 40 miles away. That commute from the Valley led me down the San Diego Freeway to the Hollywood Freeway. From there, I then traveled eastward to the Harbor Freeway and then headed south down to Imperial Highway.
Exiting on Imperial Highway, I then drove west to the high school. That drive into Southcentral served as a sobering reminder of how far I might have progressed from the Jordan Downs Housing Projects where I grew up as a child and young adult while attending Markham and Jordan. The drive into the inner city spelled out very clearly the growing distance right here between those who have and those who don’t have anything.
After showing identification to two burly security guards, I parked on Washington’s football field in a space set aside for faculty and visitors. I’ll never forget one particular morning when I arrived at Washington and went, as usual, to the Main Office. A small cubicle had been set aside for me – a desk actually, tucked away in a small room for office supplies – and it was there I did any final preparations for the day.
The voice of a male came over the school’s intercom with the day’s announcements. This morning, I heard a very different sort of “announcement”: a Washington Prep student had been murdered over the weekend, victim to the senseless street gang violence raging in the area. An appeal was being made by the slain youth’s family, through the school, to any “friends and classmates who might have known” the boy, to stop by the Main Office with whatever donations they might be able to make towards helping meet the burial costs. I asked one of the secretaries in the office about the announcement – the office was quite busy that morning, as it normally was – and told this was “nothing unusual.”
At the lunch break in the Teacher’s Cafeteria, I repeated that question to several of the faculty only to be told the same thing. In fact, I learned that any given found similar announcements being made a dozen or more times at Washington Prep alone. “That’s just the way it is around here!,” were the words of a middle-aged Black male instructor as he dug into his lunch. Those words from the morning reverberated in my mind: “Any of you who knew the deceased are asked to please stop by the Main Office and donate what you can to help with the funeral services.”
This told me in no uncertain terms that here was a territory, a human geography, distinctly different from the landscape I had become accustomed to in the San Fernando Valley.
When I begin the 9-Step Program, I normally ask those participating to complete a short background form. They provide their name, age, address and year in school, major (if they have one), that sort of thing. Given Washington Prep was my first experience with participants who this young, I added a space for these kids to list their “major concerns about school.” This was deliberately done in order to get a feel for the audience and gauge what would be a fitting approach. I administered the background questionnaire to some 150 students total in five classes.
That evening, I sat down at home to read through the responses. After finishing some 30-40 of these, I called out to my wife and asked if she would take a look at what the kids filled in as their “major concern about school.” They didn’t list boring teachers, dull or uninteresting classes, out-dated or insufficient textbook, or a lack of equipment: what one might expect simply from listening to the litany of complaints so frequently echoed in the newspapers. Rather, this is what my wife and I read, repeated so many times until it became as numbing as it was disturbing.
Waking up in the morning.
Waking up in the morning.
Waking up in the morning.
That phrase, those five words, repeated itself through easily a third of the responses I gathered from the students that afternoon. Not wanting any misunderstanding, on my next visit out to Washington Prep I asked the young people what it was they meant. With surprising honesty and candor, they told me in crowded classroom after crowded classroom exactly what that phrase meant.
It was not that they did not want to wake up and go to school, choosing to ditch instead as one might first think. Neither was “Waking up in the morning” a sign of laziness. No. What these young people said was something far deeper, much more profound: a giving-up on life, an acceptance of the lack of options and alternatives in the ‘hood, their community, their ghetto-cages. Not wanting to wake up in the morning was, plain and simple, a death wish.
That young man whose family appealed for help in the burial expenses, where the size of the donation did not matter, was a fate they had come to embrace as the norm. I was shaken. Never had I seen evidenced so clearly the warning uttered by James Baldwin in his seminal work The Fire Next Time where he writes the essay titled “On the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and says: “This country set you down in a world in which you were not expected to aspire to excellence. Instead, you were to make peace with mediocrity.”
In its May 10th, 2000 edition, the WAVE Newspapers carried a news story reporting on Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines. The LAUSD’s head honcho was quoted saying, “Unless they can dramatically improve their performance during summer classes, 9,700 second-graders and 3,800 eighth-graders will be held back and placed in special remedial programs to boost their basic skills.” That article went on and made note that the students facing retention were first identified by their teachers last year (i.e., 1999-2000), and many already had taken classes to bring their grades up.
Cortines concluded those remarks with “I’m disappointed in the lack of response we’ve had from many parents. And it wasn’t one effort to contact these parents. It was many, many attempts.”
Right now, Los Angeles is mourning the death of Lori Gonzales. And well it should! We also mourn the loss of Al and Edna Patton. I think in particular of Al Patton’s efforts with the 100 Black Men of Los Angeles where he set up scholarships for African American youngsters. It is only right to grieve their unnatural deaths, just as there is some small consolation that the perpetrators of those heinous acts (in both instances, African Americans) have now been arrested. But with this particular Word Up!, I have to ask a question.
Who is mourning for those 9,700 seven-year-olds who have just “flunked” the second-grade? Who is angry, or upset, not that twenty, thirty, forty or even seventy, but instead 9,700 kids could not pass second-grade? Or that the majority of these kids now being placed in “special remedial programs” – and no, this is not playing “the Race Card” – just happen to be predominantly Black and Brown? The same facts hold true for those 3,800 eighth-graders who have been told they must repeat the eighth grade, that is, if they choose to come back to school in the fall.
A bittersweet irony exists when listening to talk of how Lori Gonzalez was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A sadness fills the air in hearing the same sentiment expressed for 90-year-old Al Patton and his wife of 63 years, Edna – the wife stabbed to death in her wheelchair in the bedroom of that couple’s La Brea Avenue home. The violence continues, the mourning escalates as we are asked to be satisfied with a cliche that means absolutely nothing -- The wrong place at the wrong time!
Well, now let’s add to those three deaths another 10,000 – these being the seven-year-old boys and girls who, somehow, can’t get past the second grade whose parents “aren’t responding” to the attempts being made by the teachers to reach them. And let’s add, on top of that, a city still coming to grips, or trying to, with the stench of corruption within its law enforcement ranks that is costing the city tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits and settlements that could have been better spent on teachers, textbooks, upgraded teaching materials and classrooms to cut down on the overcrowding.
And we still say, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Who, I ask, is kidding who?
(The above has been edited from its original format when published in the WAVE. The links have since been added by the author – JS)