By 1967, the six African American Cultural Tenets — instructive, behavior-based, prescriptive, and proscriptive — were clearly becoming disconnected from the descriptive words in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, no matter how eloquently and passionately spoken. While the tenets remained viable for us Black Americans who had escaped illiteracy and poverty by the mid-sixties, they no longer prevailed across all demographic segments of the African American people. Our lowliest, in terms of opportunities for improved education and income, began to fall behind our best and brightest and continue to do so today, exponentially.
Between the first of January and the end of February, we will hear numerous time “I have a Dream;” but few will hear Dr. King’s most important speech for our people, which is Be the Best. Like the African American Cultural Tenets, the Be the Best speech came before the Dream Speech and was grounded principally on two of the Cultural Tenets:
- Highest quality performance in the workplace no matter what one’s job happened to be; and
- Educational Superiority. MLK was adamantly opposed to variable, amorphous academic criteria designed to make black students feel satisfied about grades rather than challenging them, and holding schools accountable, for outcomes based on high academic and behavioral standards.
A few years ago, Florida declared in essence that Black students had only about three-quarters of the intellectual capacity of white children and set the academic achievement standard for Black children at 75% of the white standard, and couched it as beneficial to Black people.
Look to the heights that are worth your attaining. (Dunbar)
In his Be the Best speech Dr. King advised black Americans to transcend racism in all of our endeavors:
Don’t just set out to do a good Negro job. You see, if you’re setting out merely to be a good Negro teacher, or a good Negro doctor, or a good Negro lawyer, or a good Negro skilled laborer, or a good Negro barber, or a good Negro beautician – you have already flunked your matriculation examination for entrance into the university of integration.
We must set out to do a good job and try with all of our might to do that job so well that the living, the dead, and unborn couldn’t do it any better.
We African-Americans who made our way into mainstream American organizations, institutions and universities in the mid-sixties had been prepared principally for successful leadership and service in Black communities.
The fundamental Cultural Values encompassed in Be the Best and I Have a Dream had been tightly linked for us through the first three generations after slavery. In behavioral terms, those Cultural Values were always mandatory for success and respect in Black Communities; were found to be necessary to achieve success in mainstream America; and they remain essential for anybody to survive, thrive and achieve freedom with dignity and respect in America today, as well as in any other modern nation. Our community prepared us to achieve success before we were told to Dream it.
Given the linkage between education and personal freedom, the most horrendous crimes committed against Black people since Emancipation was committed in the nineties when our most powerful local and national leaders promised that by the year 2000 our education system would be the best in the world, and would apply to ALL students! The “law/decree/promise” which I call the Great American Tragic-Comedy: Goals 2000, stated:
By the Year 2000…
- All children in America will start school ready to learn.
- All students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, the arts, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our nation’s modern economy.
RELIANCE ON THE PROMISE WAS TRAGICALLY DETRIMENTAL
Fifty years after BROWN was enacted, Jack Greenberg, of the NAACP, said: measured purely by its effects on the poor Black schoolchildren, Brown was in many respects a failure. (Newsweek, May 17, 2004)
THE RESULT OF THE ACADEMIC FRAUDULENCE: In 2018, a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that there had been “no progress” for African Americans on homeownership, unemployment, incarceration/Criminal Justice and poverty (I add Education) in 50 years
Much of what was uncovered in the EPI study about African American progress was astonishing. Fifty years after the Kerner Commission Report identified “white racism” as the driver of “pervasive discrimination in employment and education” for African Americans, the EPI concluded that not much had changed. All of the issues negatively affecting African Americans as a people will worsen under Trumpism.
