The Negro Family: The Case For National Action

The Negro Family: The Case For National Action
Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor
March 1965

The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations. In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met. The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it — least of all the Negroes. The present moment will pass. In the meantime, a new period is beginning. In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made. There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest. The most difficult fact for white Americans to understand is that in these terms the circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years has probably been getting worse, not better.
Indices of dollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. The gap between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening. The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. The thesis of this paper is that these events, in combination, confront the nation with a new kind of problem. Measures that have worked in the past, or would work for most groups in the present, will not work here. A national effort is required that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area, directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure. This would be a new departure for Federal policy. And a difficult one. But it almost certainly offers the only possibility of resolving in our time what is, after all, the nation's oldest, and most intransigent, and now its most dangerous social problem. What Myrdal said in An American Dilemma remains true: "America is free to chose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity."

Chapter I. The Negro American Revolution
The Negro American revolution is rightly regarded as the most important domestic event of the postwar period in the United States. Nothing like it has occurred since the upheavals of the 1930's which led to the organization of the great industrial trade unions, and which in turn profoundly altered both the economy and the political scene. There have been few other events in our history - the American Revolution itself, the surge of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830's, the Abolitionist movement, and the Populist movement of the late 19th Century - comparable to the current Negro movement. There has been none more important. The Negro American revolution holds forth the prospect that the American Republic, which at birth was flawed by the institution of Negro slavery, and which throughout its history has been marred by the unequal treatment of Negro citizens, will at last redeem the full promise of the Declaration of Independence. Although the Negro leadership has conducted itself with the strictest propriety, acting always and only as American citizens asserting their rights within the framework of the American political system, it is no less clear that the movement has profound international implications.
It was in no way a matter of chance that the nonviolent tactics and philosophy of the movement, as it began in the South, were consciously adapted from the techniques by which the Congress Party undertook to free the Indian nation from British colonial rule. It was not a matter of chance that the Negro movement caught fire in America at just that moment when the nations of Africa were gaining their freedom. Nor is it merely incidental that the world should have fastened its attention on events in the United States at a time when the possibility that the nations of the world will divide along color lines seems suddenly not only possible, but even imminent. (Such racist views have made progress within the Negro American community itself - which can hardly be expected to be immune to a virus that is endemic in the white community. The Black Muslim doctrines, based on total alienation from the white world, exert a powerful influence. On the far left, the attraction of Chinese Communism can no longer be ignored.) It is clear that what happens in America is being taken as a sign of what can, or must, happen in the world at large. The course of world events will be profoundly affected by the success or failure of the Negro American revolution in seeking the peaceful assimilation of the races in the United States. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Martin Luther King was as much an expression of the hope for the future, as it was recognition for past achievement. It is no less clear that carrying this revolution forward to a successful conclusion is a first priority confronting the Great Society.
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School discipline harder on blacks

School discipline harder on blacks
Analysis of federal data shows racial inequality in suspensions and expulsions nationwide; locally, the gap is widest in Lake and DuPage
By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent September 25, 2007 AUSTIN, Texas

In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
In Minnesota, black students are suspended six times as often as whites.
In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.
Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.
In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.
In 21 states -- Illinois among them -- that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.
No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less. Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research has found.Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods and come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conform to behavioral expectations in school. While such socioeconomic factors contribute to the disproportionate discipline rates, researchers say that poverty alone cannot explain the disparities. "There simply isn't any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids," said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools.
"In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."
Academic researchers have been quietly collecting evidence of such race-based disciplinary disparities for more than 25 years. Yet the phenomenon remains largely obscured from public view by the popular emphasis on "zero tolerance" crackdowns, which are supposed to deliver equally harsh punishments based on a student's infraction, not skin color. That's not what the data say is happening. Yet the federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with investigating allegations of discriminatory discipline policies in the nation's public schools, has opened just one such probe in the past three years. Officials declined requests to explain why.
There's more at stake than just a few bad marks in a student's school record. Studies show that a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a strong predictor of future trouble with the law -- and the first step on what civil rights leaders have described as a "school-to-prison pipeline" for black youths, who represent 16 percent of U.S. adolescents but 38 percent of those incarcerated in youth prisons. Relatively few school districts scattered across the country -- about 6 percent -- have begun to acknowledge the issue of racial disparities in discipline and tried to do something about it.
In Austin, after administrators discovered that black youths accounted for 14 percent of the school district's population but 37 percent of the students sent to punitive alternative schools, they introduced a program in some schools based on encouraging positive student behaviors rather than punishing negative ones.
At one school, Pickle Elementary, which serves mostly Hispanic and black pupils, the results were dramatic -- disciplinary referrals dropped to 20 last year from 520 in 2001-2002. "I am not going to give up on a child and suspend him or send him to an alternative school," said Julie Pryor, who was the school's principal when the behavioral program was implemented and is now a district administrator. "Washing our hands of a child will never change his behavior, it just makes it worse. These are children. It's up to us to be creative to find ways to help them behave."
But academic experts say many more school administrators, when confronted with data showing disparate rates of discipline for minority students, react like officials in the small east Texas town of Paris and strenuously deny accusations of racial discrimination. Paris is the sole school district in the nation currently under investigation by the Department of Education to determine whether higher discipline rates for black students there constitute institutionalized discrimination. The probe has been under way for more than a year. "The school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations," Dennis Eichelbaum, attorney for the Paris Independent School District, said in an interview earlier this year.
That perspective is not shared by the families of many of Paris' black students, who make up 40 percent of the school district's nearly 4,000 students. "They say there's no racism here, but if you go inside a school and look in the room where they send the kids for detention, almost all the faces are black," said Brenda Cherry, a Paris civil rights activist who assembled some of the complaints that sparked the federal investigation. "Unless black people are just a bad race of people, something is wrong here."
Exactly why black students across the nation are suspended and expelled more frequently than children of other races is a question that continues to perplex sociologists. "Studies of school suspension have consistently documented disproportionality by socioeconomic status. Students who receive free school lunch are at increased risk for school suspension," according to "The Color of Discipline," a 2000 study by Skiba and other researchers in Indiana and Nebraska. Another study concluded that "students whose fathers did not have a full-time job were significantly more likely to be suspended than students whose fathers were employed full time."
But those studies and others have repeatedly found that racial factors are even more important. "Poor home environment does carry over into the school environment," said Skiba, who is widely regarded as the nation's foremost authority on school discipline and race. "But middle-class and upper-class black students are also being disciplined more often than their white peers. Skin color in itself is a part of this function."
Some experts point to cultural miscommunications between black students and white teachers, who fill 83 percent of the nation's teaching ranks. In fact, the Tribune analysis found, some of the highest rates of racially disproportionate discipline are found in states with the lowest minority populations, where the disconnect between white teachers and black students is potentially the greatest. "White teachers feel more threatened by boys of color," said Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a watchdog and policy group. "They are viewed as disruptive. What might be their more assertive way of asking a question, for example, is viewed as popping off at the mouth."
Nor has the decline of court-ordered integration across the nation and the gradual resegregation of urban schools in recent decades made much difference in disciplinary rates. Even in urban schools where most of the students are black, black youths are still disciplined out of proportion to their population, the data show. In Washington, D.C., for example, black students are 84 percent of the public school population but 97 percent of the students who are suspended.
Other researchers believe that zero-tolerance policies, which encourage teachers and administrators to crack down on even minor, non-violent misbehavior, are exacerbating racial disparities. Some states, such as Texas, are so zealous that they have criminalized many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing or disrupting class. The school security climate, in turn, can reinforce race-based expectations about which students are most likely to require discipline.
"Most suburban schools, where the students are more likely to be white, purchase security equipment that is meant to protect children -- for example, hand scanners that make sure that the parent/guardian picking up the child is legitimate," said Ronnie Casella, an expert on the criminalization of student behavior at Central Connecticut State University. "In contrast, urban schools choose equipment such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras that are meant to catch youths committing crimes."
The new behavioral program being tried in Austin and some 6,500 schools nationwide, including some in Chicago area, seeks to turn zero tolerance on its head in a bid to slash the number of suspensions, expulsions and other punishments meted out by teachers. Called "Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports," the intensive regimen requires a commitment from an entire school, including training of students in the behaviors that are expected of them and re-education of teachers and administrators in the use of positive motivational techniques. The interactions of individual teachers with their students are scrutinized by a team of experts to pinpoint communication breakdowns, and specialized counseling teams are deployed to work with students who present the most serious discipline issues so that classroom teachers are not left to deal with the problems on their own. "Most schools use a get-tough, punish-the-kids kind of perspective, which results in the kinds of racial disciplinary disparities we see across the country," said George Sugai, a professor of education at the University of Connecticut who helped create the positive behavioral program. "We come at it from the other perspective: If you teach kids the behaviors that are expected, you have a greater likelihood of success. It's really more about changing how adults interact with kids than it is about changing the kids." Schools such as Pickle Elementary in Austin that are using the positive behavioral program often report sharp reductions in disciplinary referrals. But Skiba, who is studying the effectiveness of the program, cautions that it doesn't always eliminate racial disparities.
"They've been very successful at reducing rates of suspension and expulsion while making schools function more effectively," Skiba said of the schools using the program. "But if you look at the data by race, what you find is that some discrepancies still exist. It's not enough to put this program in place and say, 'We are happy to reduce our rates of suspension,' because what we might have done is reduce our white suspensions and increase our African-American suspensions.

DuPage 1st in Chicago-area student expulsion disparity
By Stephanie Banchero, Tribune staff reporter Tribune staff reporter Darnell Little contributed to this report September 25, 2007
In Chicago-area public schools, African-American students are five times as likely to be suspended and nearly eight times as likely to be expelled as white students, according to a Tribune analysis of state data. The expulsion disparity was greatest in DuPage County, where blacks were expelled at a rate nine times as high as whites. African-Americans represent 6 percent of the public school population in DuPage yet accounted for 32 percent of all the students expelled in the last school year, the data show.
Lake County schools in the north suburbs had the largest suspension gap. Black students, who make up 10 percent of the school enrollment, are six times as likely as whites to receive a suspension.African-American students in Illinois have long been overrepresented in school discipline statistics.
The issue came to national prominence in 1999 when six black students were expelled from a Decatur high school after a fight. Their expulsion touched off a firestorm and brought Rev. Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders to the Downstate town. The following year, the number of expulsions dropped statewide. But it has crept back up.
"These numbers are a wake-up call for those of us who went to sleep after the Decatur incident," said Mark Allen, who worked for Jackson and helped open the Rainbow/PUSH Decatur chapter. "When we were agitating and protesting, things got better. Now that we stopped monitoring, things went right back to the old way. It's a travesty."
Several area school districts, including Chicago, Oak Park and Carpentersville, have grappled with racial disparity in discipline in recent years. In 2005, African-Americans in Oak Park and River Forest High School demanded an audit into the disparate suspensions and expulsions of black students. District officials eventually crafted new policies, including plans to train teachers in non-confrontational discipline methods.
www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-discipline_wittsep25,0,3079611.story

BIO

Harold Lee Rush

Master of the Media

The creative genius and performance energy of Harold Lee Rush has been recognized and celebrated for over four decades. At Chicago’s famed Englewood High School, Harold was a multi-year President of the Drama Club and was voted Most Talented and Most Likely To Succeed of the class of 1968. He then toured nationally with the Robin Hood Players Professional Children’s Theatre Company and appeared in the first Black produced dramatic TV series, “Bird of the Iron Feather” on Chicago’s Public Television Station WTTW. During this time, he also performed with various Black theatre organizations in a variety of roles. In addition, Harold was among the voices in the first radio commercials produced by Black ad agencies in the ‘Black Pride’ era.
During the 1980’s, Harold became the producer and co-host of the powerhouse morning show at WGCI radio, first with Bob Wall (as the only Black-White morning duo in a major market), then with the legendary Doug Banks, where he created the “Front Page” segment, which has been copied across the country. Harold became one of the most well-known media personalities in Chicago, hosting several TV shows, teaching at Columbia College and speaking at high schools, universities and organizations all over the U.S.
The new millennium found Harold in Atlanta, having expanded his broadcast horizons to include talk radio and emerging Internet technologies. In 2003, he relocated to Chicago to take up marketing responsibilities for The Bronzeville Press’ release of ‘KINGS: The True Story of Chicago’s Policy Kings and Numbers Racketeers’, which has become a Best-Seller for author Nathan Thompson. Harold also returned to the airwaves at WKKC FM, the official radio station of the City Colleges of Chicago.
During his 40 year career, Harold has honed his skills as a poet, creating a unique body of work written in ‘Spoken Word’, meant to be read aloud, to oneself and with others. His award winning poetry has gained an international following.

I Am Black Chicago