Black Issues Forum #1420

Martin:
Dr. Donald Martin, Superintendent of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Collins: Nancy Collins, co-director of Many Voices, One Community Eversley: Reverend Carlton Eversley, Chairman of the NAACP Education Committee

Holloway:
Education, youth, and race relations. We'll talk about that tonight on Black Issues Forum. Stay tuned next. [MUSIC]

Holloway:
Good evening and welcome to Black Issues Forum. I'm Jay Holloway, your host. We're in Winston-Salem, North Carolina tonight on the campus of Winston Salem State. We're talking about educating youth about race relations. Another town hall meeting. And thank you for joining us. We have a full studio audience here in Winston-Salem on the campus, and a distinguished panel. Let me introduce first, staring with Dr. Donald Martin. Dr. Martin is the Superintendent here in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. Dr. Martin, thank you for being with us. Nancy Collins is co-director of Many Voices, One Community. Thank you, Nancy, for being with us. Last but not least is Reverend Carlton Eversley. He's chairman of the NAACP Education Committee. Thank you for being with us, Dr. Eversley. We're talking about youth in race relations, and we have a number of youth here in our audience. We have a good representation of organizations that are concerned about that, and hopefully our youth in the audience will participate tonight in our discussion. But I think a forum like this is a good opportunity to talk about some real issues and for youth to learn that racial problems are evident, they will face them, and maybe they can learn from us and they can also share something for us to learn from them about how to deal with these issues. Nancy Collins, let me start with you. Your organization is Many Voice, One Community. And does it do what the name says? What are you doing to bring people together around these issues?

Collins:
We are trying to ensure that the vast group of voices in this community are all heard, which is one of the things we want is to hear the voices of youth heard. So it's strange hearing this from a 56-year old woman, but we're really interested in getting those voices out and having dialogue and bringing together the vast number of organizations in this city who work on race relations issues together. And most of all to get people involved in talking about race relations who have never thought that it was an issue for them, that it was an issue in which they should be involved.

Holloway:
Reverend Eversley, this community in Winston-Salem was the first community in our state to introduce an Afrocentric curriculum in a school, and I understand you were a part of that curriculum development. Tell our audience about that, and why do you think it started here in Winston-Salem?

Eversley:
Well I did write that proposal in 1994, and it related directly to the election of school board in 1994. We had high hopes that we might have elected a progressive Board of Education, and as you recall, there was a great Republican landslide that year across the country. It swept this county as well; our Board is now 7 to 2, white to black, 7 to 2, Republican to Democratic. And to make a long story short, we felt, in the NAACP and several other major organizations--the Urban League, the Ministers' Conference, Citizens United for Justice--that the people who got elected were most interested not so much in education but it was in withdrawing white children from the inner city into middle school. And so the Afrocentric proposal is essentially a fall-back proposal to say, now that we know we're going to have some all-black schools, what would be the nature and character of them? And that's when we designed the Afrocentric proposal.

Holloway:
When you think about this curriculum and also Afrocentric and black schools, the issue of neighborhood schools comes up. What about this school districting in Winston-Salem and Forsyth, how did you all welcome something like this and how do you deal with the whole issue of this type of controversy, if it is.

Martin:
Well certainly many communities I think in North Carolina are facing reassignment of pupils, overcrowding, building buildings. And this community had been cross-district busing to achieve racial balance, really since 1983. And the new school board that Dr. Eversley mentioned actually ran on a platform of how can we return schools to more neighborhood school format. What we spent about six months developing was a redistricting plan that actually is based on choice, and it's a pattern called "controlled choice" where there's a certain number of rules, a student can choose one of 4 or 5 elementary schools. We provide transportation to that school and you get your first choice if it's in the area that is kind of your resident area. We don't use "neighborhood" simply because schools are not exactly where people live now, and it's the closest school, really. And so we call it a resident area, you get a preference to go there. Although we do have several racially-identified black schools in the inner city, any student who wants to choose a school outside of that area in their zone, we provide transportation and guarantee them a seat at that school. And I'll just give you one brief example. We have a school that's not too awful far from here, that's in fact very close, Jefferson D. Diggs Elementary School is in the middle of a housing community. It is a basically 100% African-American area.

Holloway:
That's why this curriculum.

Martin:
Exactly. And that's the place that the Afrocentric curriculum began. We have a school a good piece from here towards the Guilford County line that's in an area that's 90%. That school is 30% African-American, predominantly because we have students from this area who have chosen to go to that school and we transport them. And we actually have unlimited choice until the school reaches to within 10% of our minority ratio, which is 44%. So up until 34%, the school could be 34% and we would guarantee seats. So we haven't created just all African-American schools, we've actually, you have a choice and the people who are at Jefferson D. Diggs have chosen to be there.

Holloway:
How do you, if the Diggs elementary school is close to this institution, in the black neighborhood, but is predominantly black, so we're talking about race relations here but do the majority students get an opportunity to learn this type of curriculum and are they coming into this community to these schools?

Martin:
Well just to use that example, it's a very small elementary, about 280 students. We have 8 white students who chose and selected that school. It also has an arts theme, it's very close to the North Carolina School of the Arts. And we do not have any white students who have selected to be a part of the Afrocentric curriculum. But just as were talking earlier, we also have an African-American infusion project for every student, that's in its fifth year of implementation, which is, as Reverend Eversley will tell you, is a different approach and a different curriculum.

Holloway:
Well that's a good question. What is the difference between this African-American infusion project and this Afrocentric curriculum? And I want Ms. Collins to comment on the benefits.

Eversley:
I know, we'll do that, but I think I need to do some responding from the NAACP side to the Superintendent, and again, it should be made clear that we are at this point in an adversarial relationship because this redistricting plan was something that we feel was imposed upon the black community by the white community. In other words, it was the 7 white members who voted for this plan that he's now describing as choice, and the 2 black members, Mr. Walker Marshall and Ms. Denita Brown, voted against it. So this is not something that the black community had some democratic say over. In fact, in the summer of 1992, the school board happened to be all white and was going to put this on us without any black people being at the table, and we had to actually engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to stop their meeting in order to get Ms. Brown and Mr. Marshall at the table. So I just want to put this in a context. This is not something that everybody got together on and said, "Isn't this a great school choice plan?" And again, what has happened is, white folks in this county have built brand-new, multi-million dollar middle schools in the suburbs, Kernersville, Clemmons, and so forth. And what they have given to black people, like a school like this, is a conversion of a school that is much older than I am, and I'm over 40 years old-for a cost of about a quarter of a million dollars and said, "You guys should be satisfied with this equity in resources." It is, in our opinion, an unfair plan, a racist plan, a willfully, intentionally resegregation plan, and we are going to be taking them to court.

Holloway:
Dr. Martin, can you understand where he's coming from? Is this a racist situation?

Martin:
I think our school board would agree that the choice in parents choosing their school is very important. And the issue of building the middle schools that Reverend Eversley mentions, we had no middle schools out in the County. Basically all of our middle school students were bused into the city, and then we bused elementary children out into the county, and we did not have elementary schools in the county. And we have two brand new elementary schools, one that opened last year, North Hills Elementary, and another, Petree Elementary, that are in 100% African-American neighborhoods. And the issue of equity in building is you either tear down an existing building and start over or you bring it up to speed. I think our board is committed to choice, and it is certainly, in fact, every rule that we have that allows no racial isolation, the ability to go to another school, provide transportation from door to the school, is exactly the intent not to resegretate schools. And Reverend Eversley has mentioned elections, we just had one back in the fall of 1998, and every single one of our school board members were up for election, and they all were reelected with the exception of one who had lost in a primary. And I think our school board members interpret that particular election as somewhat of an affirmation on the redistricting plan of the last four years. So I think there's a probably a difference of opinion in terms of who the board is representing in this redistricting plan.

Holloway:
Well, I tell you, we have a statewide audience and many of our communities across the state are dealing with these redistricting issues, and it's not unique to have a controversy like this. But Ms. Collins, you sit physically in the middle, and perhaps in the middle of the issue! [LAUGHTER FROM PANEL]

Holloway:
Tell us how a group like yours can bring two adversarial sides like this to the table to work out something mutually beneficial.

Collins:
Well it's always a difficult thing to do, but one of the most positive things is to hear what people have to say and to get those issues out on the table. But one of the issues that always comes up for us is the sense that we have a responsibility to educate all of our children to know about each other, that we have a responsibility to have a curriculum in schools in which our children of this city are prepared to move into the year 2020 when people of color will be the majority in the country. And we cannot use old ideas or old theories or old systems to approach a massively changing global world. Our children deserve better from us than that we're still mired in that kind of argument. So I think that one of the big things that we feel we have to do is to try to get people to the table, and to help people to really listen to each other, particularly to work with the white community to get us to listen to and understand what the concerns are. Dr. Martin often quotes that 30%, I believe you said, of the children who attend what would be all-white schools are African-American because their parents are willing to transport them to another school for a better education.

Martin:
We transport them.

Collins:
You transport them, as long as it's within the zone.

Martin:
Yes.

Collins:
Okay. We need to help white parents to realize that their children could be benefited by being in African-American schools. We need to develop African-American schools which are so good that white parents will want their children to be in that school. We need to make changes that guarantee that white people are magnetized into African-American education because it's so fine in this city.

Eversley:
I need to respond, because the Superintendent's comments, because they seem so blithe and neutral and reasonable on the face, but we're sure that the Superintendent and the School Board is following the will of the electorate. What we're saying is that the electorate of Forsyth County is racist, and that's why they've elected these people, and that's why they've hired you to do this to us, to work this upon us. Let me give you some quick examples. He talks about diversity, and wanting to avoid resegregation. In the first of these zones, we knew and had a long history of exactly what Ms. Collins is saying, of white parents putting their children in a black school, which is the Kimberly Park Magnet School in a historically black neighborhood. White parents were very happy to put their children in it because it was a great school and it emphasized the theme that they wanted the most: the math and science theme. So we knew that that's what white parents wanted. And so we said to the School Board and the Superintendent, "Look, if you want white people to come to a white school, put the math/science theme in a black neighborhood, and a black neighborhood only." Well what happened? They put a math/science theme in a black neighborhood, and they put a math/science theme in a white neighborhood. And lo and behold, Sherlock, the white folks went to the white one, and the black folks went to the black one. And they said, "We're shocked, we're amazed that white folks did this and black folks did that." And so they said, "We will make substantial adjustments in this plan as it unfolds from 1994 to 1999." And I am waiting to this day for the substantial adjustment that has been made since 1994.

Holloway:
Well you've got our audience up and there's a line now. Let's go to our first question or comment from the audience. Go right ahead, sir.

Male:
For 30 years here in this community, we had cross-busing in order to achieve integration. That taught us that young folk could get along together. It is awfully interesting to me that at this period in our existence when we talk about wanting racial integration, we did away with the plan that provided an integrated experience for every child in this county in lieu of something that segregates them.

Holloway:
So we've been working on this for some time now, and we still have the problem. What does it say if we as the adult community are having these problems, still working on them. We haven't heard from our youth yet, and we want some of you to come up to the microphone. But what are we teaching our kids about race relations? And I want you to think about that. But let's go to our next, we have another person in the audience here now. Ma'am, please go right ahead with your question or comment please.

Female:

I am an elementary school teacher here in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system, and have been for quite a few years. I have two comments to make, and one has to do with equity. I believe Brown vs. the Board of Education back there in the '50s, the Supreme Court at that particular time said that separate was not equal. And many people in the community do not understand, including myself, I do not understand how separate can be equal. As I hear the community grapple with this issue, one of the terms that continuously comes up is equity. And if the resources are not equitable, then it is a dream that schools are equal and after equality comes excellence. That is the reality of the situation. Then, to answer your question about how does it affect elementary school students, how does if affect students? I'm in the capricious capacity to observe and to learn every single day from across the county how students respond to each other, what they bring with them to the table.

I'm here to say to you that the family is the most important entity in this whole situation, and kids as early as kindergarten, first and second grade are being taught to be racist, to be separatist, to make distinctions based on color, and they're being taught that very overtly by their parents. For example, if a person would like to invite a child of color to a birthday party, and the white child may bring invitations to school to give to certain people, I have heard white children say, "My mother told me I cannot invite anybody black to my birthday party. I like you here, but I can't invite you." So racism is being taught, and that is the sad thing about what is happening. It is sad in light of the future, because we live in a very mobile society, we live in a very integrated world. Are we actually doing what we need to do for our children to prepare them for the realities of their adulthood, even after perhaps we are gone?

Holloway:
Thank you very much. Let me ask our panel that. What are we doing in the capacities of the community, the NAACP, the school system and organizations bridging together to offset these? These are the realities that I hear all across the state.

Martin:
Let me say first, I just want to comment about, I mean our real issue in education is student achievement, and I think most people know that the North Carolina legislature created a pretty comprehensive accountability plan for public schools that includes punishments and rewards for teachers and others. And I think in the case of all the 30 years of cross-district busing that we talked about, we have a minority-majority achievement gap that is staggering. And in fact, we have a new way of reporting that information now, basically that's called, we can determine someone on grade level based on how our tests are administered. So you're either proficient or you're not. If you're proficient you're on grade level, or you're not, you're below, and there are two levels below. So when we report that kind of information, we have a tremendous gap between our white students and our African-American students and Hispanic students. And we have actually looked at that, we've broken that down by free and reduced lunch students, by male and female students, by the free-reduced-paid lunch students, and we've analyzed this statistically and it is not just income. It is not just poor children, there really is an interaction between race and income. And this is something, that is a mystery that every single one of us in this community need to be concerned about solving. And that particular gap exists across North Carolina. In fact, ours is almost identical to the state of North Carolina, but it is almost 2 to 1 in terms of, we're 80% proficient roughly for white students, about 45% for African-American students.

Holloway:
We'll come back and talk about that, equity and education and performance for race in just a second. Let's go back again to our audience. Sir, go right ahead, your question or comment.

Male:
Yes, my name if Jimmy Bonham and I like the equity in education, but I like the equity in finance as well. A couple of years ago we voted for a $94 million bond referendum in which we used a lot of high-profile African-Americans in the community to pass this $94 million bond referendum. We were promised certain things from that referendum, in which one was we would get an African-American school, an Afrocentric school, but only we got Afrocentric studies, particularly one course. My question is, why is it when money is involved, they come and lobby us to pass the bond referendum, but when it's passed they kind of turn their backs on us as far as construction is concerned. They built 9 schools in the urban area, and just last week we were trying to get one middle school converted into a high school, or if not, build us a high school in the eastern sector of our community.

Holloway:
Let's deal with that, because we've got just 5 minutes left, and I want to get to another question. But let me have our panel respond to that. And let me just say, I heard a gentleman speak at the King celebration not too long ago talking about when it's black it's always racial, but if it's white, it's economics. And so I kind of want to echo what he's saying here. It's an economic issue. Who would like to respond to that.

Eversley:
Well, usually when white people raise the "it's the economics, not race," they're not serious about dealing with either one. What we're dealing with is the oppression of poor people, a disproportionate number of whom happen to be African-American. So race is where economic oppression and exploitation intersect. If we could get the white power at least to work seriously on either one of them, I'd be happy. But what you get is a lot of obfuscation and game playing. The fact of the matter is, in this county there's a long history of black folks being lied to by the white power elite in education over these bonds which we historically have voted for. The great coach of this university, they trot out Coach Gaines to sell these bonds to us, they trot out the former math professor who we all love and regard, Dr. Newell. And then once the bonds are passed, oftentimes we find ourselves deeply disappointed. In fact, Dr. Martin can recall that the only reason I supported these 1995 bonds was his personal promise and others' to do the renovation of Atkins Middle School, which had been promised in 1989! As well as the Afrocentric piece. And so we have been dissed, and in many different ways.

Holloway:
Let me let Ms. Collins respond, then we'll have time for one last question if we can get the next person after this. Okay?

Collins:
I wanted to go back and respond to something that Dr. Martin had said before about the gap in achievement, which I think is incredibly important, and I'm not saying it's not tied to economics. But there was in that statement almost an implication that working on race relations and improving Afrocentric curricula and that developing more programs to develop the self-esteem of students and to do diversity work is somehow in conflict with promoting the education of African-American students. We're in a school system where nearly 40% of our students are African-American, and nearly 70% of our teachers are white. One of the things that we must have if we're going to educate African-American children is a belief on every person that works with those children that high expectations are there, that that child can reach the moon. And in order to do that we have to work with people like me to change our understanding of the expectations of these children to develop new history and understanding and information. I don't think that conflicts with the desire for us to change that gap. I think it's essential to us changing the gap. Children need to learn about themselves, teachers need to learn to respect their students if anyone's going to achieve.

Holloway:
Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

Holloway:
Listen, we have one other person to question. Can you make your comment maybe in less than 30 seconds? Because we'll have to close there.

Holloway:
Can't wait for next week, the next program. Okay, we're going to do our next program, and we'll calling your first.

Male:
Well let me give you 30 seconds.

Holloway:
Quick, very quick please.

Male:
Okay. The black community--and I'm a part of the black community-I attended Catholic schools back in the early 60s, before integration. Our focus has left academic excellence and we have been distracted by this racial get-along nonsense. We need to first get along with ourselves. Now the responsibility of the economics being unfair is a result of our inefficient leadership. Period.

Holloway:
Okay, well sir, I'll have to cut you off there.

Male:
Okay, I'll come back. And I want you, I recommend this as reading for all Caucasian people.

Holloway:
All right. Well we thank you so much, and we're going to have to end the program right now. We thank you so much. Time has run completely out, and we thank you so much. We certainly hope that you've been influenced to think more about the issues of equity, education, how it interferes with performance, school achievement, and your role in discussing and improving race relations. I want to thank Winston-Salem State, and thank you for watching, thank you to our studio audience. Join us again next week for Part II of the town hall meeting in Winston-Salem on the campus of Winston-Salem State. I'm Jay Holloway, you have a blessed evening and good night. [END]