All history is only one long story to this effect: Humans have struggled for power over other people in order to win the joys of earth at the expense of others and shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders to the shoulders of others. (From William Sumner)
It is upon this concept that America’s slavery institution was built
Slavery was so profitable, America’s Racist Plutocrats and Counterfeit Clerics deemed it morally justifiable and worth the Civil War.
White Supremacists stole potential scientists, doctors, architects, astronomers, teachers, and entrepreneurs and made them slaves.
White Supremacists showed the world how to make human beings into slaves; America’s Black communities showed the world how to transform slaves into human beings. – Frederick Douglass
Despite the relentless evil effort to extend the effects of slavery into the Emancipation Proclamation Era, descendants of slaves during the first three generations post-slavery achieved significant advancements, unique in American history.
In 1865-75, nearly all “freed slaves” in the southeast were poverty stricken, illiterate, frightened, and ignorant in the use of freedom. That starting point and onerous persecution, notwithstanding, by the Third Generation — 1955-1965 — nearly 50% of us were NOT POOR; our median-years-of-schooling completed was 10.5; nearly 40% of us were high school graduates; close to 5.5% of us were college graduates (nearly 100% from HBCUs); and 5% of us were professionals: managers, physicians, attorneys, engineers, elected officials, military officers, members of congress, state legislators, mayors, city council members, superintendents, college presidents, professors, principals, school board members, and federal judges.
If it takes wealthy, educated parents, liberated from brutal oppression to produce educated, successful children, how did our early forebears propel so many of us to first-class American citizenship in just three generations?
The key, non pareil factor was education in Black controlled Pre-K through Twelfth-grade schools and their linkage directly with HBCUs.
Prior to the mid-sixties, because of college degrees conferred to Black students, HBCUs in combination with Black Pre-K through Twelfth-grade schools had done more to desegregate America than all the Historically White Institutions (HWIs) combined. During a fifteen year period before 1900, about 165 African-Americans graduated from northern white colleges, while HBCUs conferred degrees on nearly 1100. Most of the HBCU graduates returned to Black communities to teach.
Of all the teachers at Lucy Addison High School in the early decades, only one had earned the bachelor’s degree from a white college. I knew where all of my elementary school teachers lived. I worked at the homes of several of them, cleaning their yards and performing other chores. Their presence in our communities created an exponential effect in high school graduation, college attendance, and college graduation rates. They connected the dots between our schools, college and life success.
In the 1930s, nationally, only about 6% of African Americans had with high school diplomas. In the southeast, where the great majority of the slavery descendants lived, the rate was much lower. The fact that my mother and my father earned high school diplomas was attributable to the presence of Lucy Addison High School in our Black community.
The importance of my parents’ education level is reflected in these facts: All five of their children who survived infancy – five of nine – earned high school diplomas. And from their five children and their offspring, their grandchildren, there were 18 post high school degrees, including masters degrees, a doctorate, and a law degree.
Roanoke, Virginia’s Black community, my community, exemplified the all-encompassing purpose of education:
“It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences — both physical sciences and social sciences — but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” –Noah Webster
My academic achievements despite a 2.5 GPA from Lucy Addison High School*:
Honor Graduate from Air Force Radar school; highest grade in an advanced intercept control course that included white officers with BS degrees; received Air Force “scholarships” — BA through the PhD — which included education expenses and all pay and allowances; earned a 4.0 GPA my freshman year at the University of Maryland; placed on the Dean’s list or President’s List in every college semester; graduated with High Honor from Michigan State University’s Honors College; inducted into three academic honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa; Distinguished Graduate from Officer Training School; and finished Number One in my master’s degree class at UNC.
*NB: I attribute these achievements to my Pre-K through
high school education, especially Pre-K through sixth-grade, not to me! Imagine the America we would have if all poor students were to receive such an education.
