Full dedication ceremony transcript as delivered Saturday, Sept. 12, 2015
by Lloyd V. Hackley, Class of ‘58
Today is a time for celebration: to express gratitude to past and present heroes, and to offer, through their spirit, the same dream for justice, but also the way.
The proponents of today’s activity do NOT want the wall and this event to be dilettantism and nostalgic. They want all children, but especially Black children, to be inspired to inculcate the same motivation and drive to excel in America as Lucy Addison High School triggered in their predecessors.
In fact, if Roanoke’s Black children — across the full economic and educational range — who attended Miss Heller’s kindergarten with me — were as successful today as we were at the time when Lucy Addison High School sat atop our moral education community, today’s celebration could simply be a celebration of past history.
Our specific history truly is about the best of times and the worst of times. And as Grigorenko stated – Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.
SO, today we celebrate one of the most powerful educational histories in the American experience, perhaps the world, at least up to about 1970.
The 1st African America Generation, Post-Slavery, starting in 1875, was Penniless, Powerless, Persecuted, Illiterate, and Ignorant of the use of freedom.
By the 3rd Generation, my generation, maturing during the 1955-70 time frame, nearly 50% of us were NOT POOR; our median-years-of-schooling was 10.5; nearly 40% of us were high school graduates and nearly 5.5% held college degrees. 5% of us held professional positions as: managers, physicians, attorneys, engineers, elected officials, military officers, members of congress, state legislators, mayors, city council members, superintendents, principals, school board members, college presidents, and federal judges. And the successes came from the entire range of family income and education demographics.
It was these successes that Brown vs. the Board of Education purportedly was going to improve. HOWEVER: With Brown, America disregarded and even denigrated Black educational excellence. Black community educational power was destroyed, along with hundreds of Black schools, especially high schools.
Despite assertions to the contrary, Lucy Addison High School, and before that, Harrison, were not preparing their students for success in a desegregated America, but rather for leadership and service in Black communities.
But when the Civil Rights Laws forced America to “desegregate,” African-Americans who had been educated in Black schools and colleges were the ones who desegregated America, not the Brown generation.
We who had been steeped in Black culture and educational excellence ventured into white dominated arenas and paved the way for subsequent generations. If it had not been for the pre-Brown generation, America would not be as diverse as it is.
To borrow from DuBois, our success experiences during the first three generations after slavery should have been used as the MODEL for the uplift and enlightenment of mankind; not just African-American youth, even for success in today’s educational and social milieu.
Lucy Addison High School’s history presented The WELLNESS MODEL, focused on monumental accomplishments and successes against tremendous obstacles.
Instead of the WELLNESS MODEL, America locked in the SICKNESS MODEL – focused on the failures, disappointments, and emphasis on the AVERAGE, which is driven down by the bottom of the curve. This perspective prevails to this very day.
With Brown, the MEANS to high quality and high quantity education, which proponents asserted would be derived from desegregated schools, became ENDS. Black-White numerical ratios in buildings became the litmus test for compliance with the letter and the spirit of the law, not educational outcomes by Black students.
The principal supporters were able to relegate INTELLECTUAL COMPETENCE, the true key to freedom, to a lesser role because Brown became the HOLY GRAIL, not only for education, but also to eradicate the vestiges of centuries of slavery and racism.
Oppression that leaders can define as in the best interests of a group of subjugated people, or for their own good, e.g., paternalism, is the worst form of despotism imaginable.
Since the oppressors believe their cause is righteous, even “God’s Will,” no matter how absurd, their own consciences are clear — hypocrisy is non-existent. Thus, the strategies they will implement will be of infinite variety, although unscrupulous, cruel and long-lasting. When this form of repression is practiced long enough, the victims themselves will become the unwitting co-conspirators in their own destruction for generations going forward.
As the Holy Grail, the act imbued sponsors with righteousness and freed them from guilt, culpability and questionability; sanctioned intentions, irrespective of results, as long as advocates touted as the solution to our “Black Problem.”
The Holy Grail lent rationality to alterations in racial make-up in schools because visible numerical change implied that the evils of segregation were being eradicated. It also allowed leaders to obscure that world of difference between Desegregation and Integration.
Asserting tacitly, after Brown, that Black students were incapable of succeeding in the core science and mathematics courses we had been passing in segregated Black schools, leaders in desegregated schools added weak courses and placed Black students in them disproportionately.
Special education, Ritalin, low content courses, low expectations, grade inflation, and social promotion took the place of separate schools by segregating curricula and outcomes in desegregated buildings.
Certainly there were many remote locations in southern states where Black children’s education was not sufficient for success in the American mainstream. However, this did not mean that all Black education communities were inferior.
Lucy Addison High School provided higher quality education – curricular, co-curricular and spiritual — than many white schools in the south. I found this out within 15 minutes after I entered fully into white America from Lucy Addison High School and began competing with white youth.
Fifty years after the Brown decision, Jack Greenberg, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc., and a principal litigator, stated: “…measured purely by its effects on poor schoolchildren of color Brown is in many respects a failure.” Kenneth Clark, father of the Doll Test, said it more strongly, citing it as a series of glorious defeats.
Our SUCCESS MODEL would tell Black boys, for example, that there are 12 times more black lawyers; 2 1/2 times more black dentists; and 15 times more black doctors than Black athletes.
With regard to earnings, 3 1/2 million Black people earn between $100,000 and $200,000 a year; 610,000 earn more than $200,000 a year; and more than 35,000 are millionaires.
If you track back to how nearly all of them got their positions and salaries, you don’t wind up in Rap music studios or athletic venues, but on college campuses.
There are 227 times more Black AA degree holders; 319 times more Black BA degree holders; 127 times more Black MA degree holders; 32 times more Black doctoral and professional degree holders than Black athletes.
And the great majority of these successes are from families one or two generations out of poverty and education in Black schools!.
At the national level, conditions are getting much worse for poor Black children; and will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future; but there are hundreds of success ventures that are saving Black children. Find one in your area and lend whatever assistance as you can. But make sure the outcomes they claim to achieve are real, lasting and directly relative to success in America. Have the moral courage to subject both friends and enemies to the same intense, objective scrutiny with respect to means, motives and outcomes.
It may sound unfair, but the very Black people who feel themselves to be victims must assume a disproportionate burden of personal and political action to eliminate the harm being done to Black kids, or disproportionate harm will continue to worsen.
