During the last couple of days, I’ve been reading Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Crown Publisher ( 2005, $25.00, 335 p.).

Back in 1991, in his book, Savage Inequalities, Kozol quoted one high school girl in East St. Louis High School as saying, “We have a school named for Dr. King.  The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains.  Every student in the school is black.  It’s like a terrible joke on history.”  And the joke continues through our nation today. 

In between that book and The Shame of the Nation, arrived Lawrence Otis Graham’s book, Our Kind of People, which provided the missing piece of my personal mystery regarding the lack of black leadership for blacks. Countless thousands of whites from all walks of life had shared King’s dream long before he knew he had one. 

Their dream went something like this: “We’ll educate these children to the best of our ability, and the leaders will go on to higher education, find good employment, then return to the ghetto to mentor their younger brothers and sisters.”  Not that they would need to live in the ghetto, only come back to help  lift the spirits of those living in dire poverty, and give hope to not only the young people, but to the parents and teachers, as well, often weary and alone on the back roads of society.

Never happened, at least, not so one would notice.  “Where did all those well-educated blacks go?”  I asked myself year by year, decade by decade.  Disappeared, they did, as though afraid that the broken glass in windows up and down the debris-strewn streets would cut them and their dreams asunder, hurtling them back to former addresses, as frightened and confused as before success had carried them to homes with carpeted living rooms, and fireplaces, extra bedrooms and baths, manicured lawns and two cars in the garage.

Graham mirrors our dream, telling us how different would be our national social fabric today had the highly successful blacks and whites pooled their resources to contribute leadership, money and educational resources to bring hope, inspiration and help to our people, for, black or white, all are our people, our kind of people.

With such support, enlightened, dedicated mentors would have encouraged children of every race to move beyond the world of rap music, degrading videos, and sports heroes, many of whom are addicted to drugs and violence, and who have acquired little education beyond expertise in counting the point spread in the games.  Not only did whites and blacks not work together toward that end, neither did the blacks work to serve their own. In an article, titled “Children at Risk,” I wrote about Graham’s explanation for the indifference on the part of successful blacks to those much less fortunate.

Graham illustrates that fact in the person of his maternal great-grandmother, a light-complexioned, straight-haired black Southern woman, who discouraged Graham and his brother from associating with dark-skinned children, and warned them that staying in the sun too long would deepen the color of their skin.

As a child in Memphis, Tennessee, Great-grandmother Porter had worn silk taffeta dresses, had studied the piano and was fluent in French. Her daughter followed in her footsteps.  The family avoided the turmoil of the 60's by riding in a car, rather than buses, and attending private schools, rather than segregated, substandard public schools.

Great-grandmother Porter said she didn’t think much of the civil rights movement: “I don’t see anything civil about a bunch of nappy-headed Negroes screaming and marching around in the streets.”  However, Graham later learned that she and her church friends often gave money to the NAACP, but they couldn’t, wouldn’t cross the social barrier to visit the “nappy-headed” youngsters, who would have stood in awe of lovely dresses, fancy hats and pearls, worn by Negroes on the other side of town, a sight that might, just might have set them to dreaming their own dreams. The writer describes two worlds for blacks:

There were children who belonged to “Jack and Jill” and summered in Sag Harbor, Highland Beach, or Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and there were those who didn’t.  There were mothers who graduated from Spelman or Fisk, and joined AKA, the Deltas, the Links and Girl Friends, and there were those who didn’t.  There were those Fathers who were dentists, lawyers, and physicians from Howard and who were Alphas, Kappas, or Omegas and members of the Comus, the Boule, or the Guardsmen, and there were those who didn’t.  There were those who could look back on three generations and point to relatives who owned insurance companies, newspapers, funeral homes, local banks, trucking companies, restaurants and catering firms, or farmland, and those who couldn’t.

Graham tells us that the Africans who arrived in Plymouth in 1619, courtesy of Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British and American slave traders, came from different areas of Africa with unique languages, skills and cultural backgrounds.  Many came from villages with advanced skills in crafting iron, gold and leather, shaping silver and bronze into tools, artwork and housewares, and where they were weaving clothes, growing vegetables and fruits, practicing different religions, and establishing laws, banking mechanisms, and medical treatments.

Yet, the fifteen million men, women and children were all treated the same on the auction block, their cultural heritage stripped from them.  Only the selling price mattered: $500 per man, $250 per woman or child.

Graham tells us he finds both pride and guilt among the black elite:

On one level there are those of us who understand our obligation to work toward equality for all and to use our success in order to assist those blacks who are less advantaged.  But on the other level, there are those of us who buy into the theories of superiority, and who feel embarrassed by our less accomplished black brethren..
We’ve got some of the best-educated, most accomplished and most talented people in the black community – but at the same time, we have some of the most hidebound and smug.

Come, you black business men and women on the list of “Fortune Magazine’s” The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives in America. Stand up, assume leadership.  Your people need you. We all need you. Young people are dreaming great dreams. If not, why not?       

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