The Opportunity Gap

In the spring of 1954, like so many Black families, mine waited anxiously for theBrown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. My father and I talked about it and what it would mean for my future and the future of millions of other Black children who were attending segregated but unequal Black schools. He died the week before Brown was decided. But I and many other children were able, in later years, to walk through the new and heavy doors that Brown slowly and painfully opened.

It was a transforming time that set into motion a spate of other challenges to Jim Crow laws and yet 60 years after that historic May decision the doors to true educational equality have never fully opened wide enough for millions of American children to walk through especially those living in poverty. The most recent findings from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), called the “richest, fullest” collection so far measuring education access and equity in our nation’s public schools, show many children are still receiving an unequal education.

This is the unfinished work of the civil rights movement.

The new Office for Civil Rights data cover the 2011-2012 school year and are the first universal data collection since 2000, with information about all 97,000 schools in the nation’s 16,500 school districts serving 49 million students. Some information was collected for the first time, including one of the most startling findings: new data on preschool suspensions that show Black preschoolers are 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs in public schools, but 48 percent of children suspended more than once. While the data show only six percent of the districts offering preschool in public schools reported that they had suspended preschoolers, there is something terribly wrong when we are suspending any children from preschool in the first place. We now know Black children are more likely to be pushed out of school before they’ve even made it to kindergarten, and other numbers in the recent OCR release confirm those disparities do not go away.

Overall, Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students. Boys receive more than two out of three suspensions, but Black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and higher rates than most boys. Students with disabilities (those served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) also are more than twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as students without disabilities. And inequities in school discipline continue right up through the most consequential responses: Black students represent 16 percent of student enrollment but make up 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of school-related arrests.

These differences in discipline can’t be explained simply by differences in student behavior. The Equity Project at Indiana University has reviewed the research on the role of student behavior and characteristics in disparate suspension rates and found that in fact schools and districts that have taken seriously their responsibility to educate all of their students have seen significant improvements by adjusting the policies and practices of adults. Both Buffalo, New York Public Schools and Denver, Colorado Public Schools are heralded as examples of school systems’ ability to change to better serve students. The Children’s Defense Fund and AASA, the School Superintendents Association, have been funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies to work with ten school districts from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania whose leaders are committed to reforming their school discipline policies to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and address racial disparities. 

Children’s unequal chances in school go well beyond discipline. Black, Latino, American Indian, and Native Alaskan students have less access to experienced teachers than White students. While most teachers are certified, nearly half a million students nationwide attend schools where 60 percent or fewer teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements, and racial disparities are particularly acute in schools where uncertified and unlicensed teachers are concentrated. Black students are more than four times as likely and Latino students are twice as likely as White students to attend schools where 80 percent or fewer teachers meet these requirements. There are also teacher salary disparities: Nearly one in four districts with two or more high schools reports a teacher salary gap of more than $5,000 between high schools with the highest and the lowest Black and Latino student enrollments.

All students don’t have equal opportunities to take the most challenging courses to prepare them for college and career. While 81 percent of Asian American and 71 percent of White high school students attend high schools where the full range of math and science courses are offered (Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics), fewer than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan high school students have access to the full range in their schools, and Black students, Latino students, students with disabilities, and English language learner students also all have less access. Black and Latino students are also disproportionately less likely to be enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement (AP) course. The new data also show students with disabilities, English learners, and Black students are all more likely to be held back each year. Twelve percent of Black students were retained in ninth grade— about double the overall rate.

Six decades into the “post-Brown” era, will the doors of opportunity finally open wide or continue to stay half shut on our watch? Most students know the phrase “knowledge is power.” CDF is happy that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is taking new steps to expand the range of data about inequalities that still exist in our nation’s schools. But now that we have more knowledge—what are we going to do with it? If you are interested in learning more and taking action, you can find out how the schools in your community are treating their students at the Civil Rights Data Collection’s website, and you can find new guidance on school discipline and positive alternatives to suspensions and other exclusionary discipline practices atthe National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments’ website. It’s time to close the opportunity gap and fulfill the promise of education as a great equalizer and a strong pathway to opportunity for all of our nation’s children.

The Budget Is Not Fair, Mr. Chair

“The budget is not fair, Mr. Chair, if 69 percent of the cuts comes from programs for low-income children and families and we are giving extra tax cuts to the wealthiest among us…. If we can afford to give new tax extenders to wealthy corporations and people, we can afford to expand Head Start for every child and to make sure that every child is housed and is fed.”

That’s part of what I said when I had the opportunity to testify at the House Budget Committee Hearing “A Progress Report on the War on Poverty: Lessons from the Frontlines” on April 30. I shared my belief that the budget proposal by House Budget Chair Paul Ryan recently passed by the House of Representatives would turn progress in the war on poverty backwards by cutting critical funding to safety net programs that help millions of poor children and families while giving tax breaks to the wealthiest and most powerful among us. The Ryan budget will widen the already indefensible income and wealth inequality gaps.

 

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities at least 69 percent of the Ryan budget cuts to non-defense programs over the next decade would come from programs that serve low-income children, families, and individuals including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), school lunches and other child nutrition programs, Pell Grants, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the low-income portion of the Child Tax Credit and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that helps children with very serious disabilities. At the same time the Ryan budget slashes programs for children and the poor, Citizens for Tax Justice estimates it would give millionaires an average tax cut of at least $200,000 by lowering the top personal income tax rate from 39.6 to 25 percent, repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, and reducing the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 25 percent, as well as other tax breaks.

The Ryan budget is not the only unjust decision Members of Congress have made. On April 29, the House Ways and Means Committee approved without any offsets a permanent extension of six corporate tax breaks that would drain the treasury of $310 billion over 10 years. That same committee in the very same meeting dropped a provision in the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Improving Opportunities for Youth in Foster Care bill because of its cost. This tiny, positive provision that would have ensured foster youth had documents like Social Security cards, birth certificates and health insurance cards to help them make it on their own when they aged out of foster care would have added $12 million to the 10-year cost of the bill—four thousandths of a percent of the cost to taxpayers of those huge non-offset corporate tax break extenders.

Some of the same lawmakers who routinely support massive corporate tax breaks are among those currently opposing proposals to invest $90 billion in early childhood programs over 10 years as too expensive and refusing to pass an extension without an offset of long-term unemployment benefits that would cost $10 billion. And on April 30, the Senate voted against opening debate on a Democratic bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour that would move 900,000 people out of poverty, cost the federal government not one cent and in fact could save federal and state governments money by reducing the need for nutrition and other safety net supports.

I don’t know what religious texts Members of Congress read, but when I look at the prophets and gospels and the teachings of every major faith I learn that not caring for the poor, the sick, the lame and the orphan is wrong. Acting as Robin Hood in reverse and taking from the poor and needy to give to the wealthy and powerful is even worse. America’s dream and promise of a level playing field has become a nightmare for millions of poor children and families struggling to get a foothold in our $17-trillion economy.

The way to end poverty is not to cut the very programs that are making the difference between a child eating and a child going hungry. Nothing in my decades of work for poor children makes me believe that cutting vital lifelines for millions of families who have fallen on hard times because of economic downturn is the way to create well-paying jobs or help parents have the time and resources to be able to nurture and support their children. Nothing in my experience makes me believe that putting college further out of reach for low-income students will help them compete for well-paying jobs. Nothing in my experience makes me believe that the current Ryan budget proposal will help create the economic opportunity and support systems every American needs when hard times hit. And nothing in my experience will ever make me believe that snatching food and shelter and early childhood and education lifelines from children and hard-working poor families to further enrich those who already have far more than their fair share of government help is economically and morally defensible. What kind of leaders believe we can afford massive tax breaks for the richest one percent but cannot afford to meet the survival needs of all our poor children?

We don’t have poverty in our midst because we have done too much for people. We have poverty because we have done too little and have not been fair to all our people, especially our children. We should be fixing the policies that have fueled inequality and given birth to an economy that has stopped working for the majority of hard-working people in our country. Congress and all of us should be striving to ensure there is a job with a living wage for every working-age person in this country, that every single child, regardless of his or her parents’ income or skin color or country of origin, has access to nurturing and enriching early childhood programs and effective schools, that no families have to choose between paying the electricity bill or buying medicine for their sick child, or have to figure out how to make the last $20 in food assistance stretch till the end of the month. It is profoundly unjust and immoral to pretend to be trying to reduce poverty for those struggling to survive -- including 16 million children -- and cutting the very programs enabling them to survive in a hostile economy, cutting the very programs that help ensure the next generation’s adults won’t be scarred by a childhood of deprivation.

In his last Sunday sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral, calling for a Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. retold the parable of the rich man Dives and the poor and sick man Lazarus who came every day seeking crumbs from Dives’ table. Dives went to hell, Dr. King said, not because he was rich but because he did not realize his wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf separating him from his brother and allowed Lazarus to become invisible. He warned this could happen in rich America, “if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” I hope we will heed Dr. King’s warning before it’s too late.

The Seed Experiment

A perennial favorite science project from preschool on up is the “seed experiment”: A child plants identical seeds in two pots. She places the first pot inside a dark cupboard and leaves it there, and she puts the second one in a sunny spot and waters it every day. She waits to see what will happen. It’s very easy for even the youngest children to figure out that their seedlings need the basics -- sunlight and water -- if they are going to survive and thrive.

The same is true for children, and “the basics” during children’s earliest years can have long-lasting effects. Arloc Sherman, senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and one of the contributors to the new Harvard Education Press book Improving the Odds for America’s Children, put it this way:

“I think sometimes we forget to say how important for children’s futures the day-to-day basic assistance of food, clothing, shelter is... We’ve had help from the research community recently, striking studies that help make the case that when you just provide the basics, that’s one key cornerstone for children’s future success. So it’s not just that we’re meeting an important need—which would be enough in itself—but we’re also providing for opening future doors of opportunity.”

He pointed to a 2012 study on the long-term effects of what began as the food stamps program. Researchers went back to the earliest days of the program, when it was rolled out county by county to identify children who had access to food stamps in early childhood and whose mothers had access during their pregnancies. They tracked their progress from the 1960s and 1970s into adulthood, comparing them to similar children who didn’t have access to food stamps. The results showed the power of nutrition: The children who had access to food stamps were less likely to have stunted growth, be obese, or have heart disease as adults -- and the positive effects weren’t just health-related. One of the largest differences was that children in families with food stamps were 18 percent more likely to graduate from high school.

This echoes other studies on the positive effects of federal nutrition programs that found needy children who received food assistance before age five were in better health as adults and girls who received food assistance were more likely to complete more schooling, earn more money, and not rely on safety net programs as adults. Putting food on children’s plates helps build healthy minds and bodies today and helps set children up for better futures later. And the benefits don’t end there. Better graduation rates mean better jobs with higher salaries with cascading benefits to the community, the national economy, and the next generation.

The case for providing the basics for all children in America is hard to refute. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2.2 million children were lifted out of poverty by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, in 2012. Yet right now we are fast approaching a critical time for hungry children: summer vacation. School-based federal nutrition programs have proved to be a lifeline for needy children. In fiscal year 2012 more than 21 million children received free or reduced-price lunch through the National School Lunch Program and nearly 11 million children received free and reduced price breakfast. Hunger doesn’t end on the last day of school -- yet only 11 percent of the number of children who relied on those lunches during the school year received meals through the Summer Food Service Program. Even though the program is 100 percent federally funded and can create desperately needed jobs for cafeteria workers and others during the summer months, many states and communities have created needless bureaucratic hurdles to establishing summer feeding sites resulting in not nearly enough sites to serve all eligible children. But it’s not too late to find out how you can help -- or how children you know can participate.

The Children’s Defense Fund is encouraging CDF Freedom Schools® partners to use the summer feeding program to provide nutritious meals and snacks for children attending summer CDF Freedom Schools programs. The USDA, which administers the summer feeding program, says there are many ways individuals and organizations can get involved: “You can serve the meals, promote the program, provide transportation, volunteer at summer food sites, or even go out and find sponsors.” The USDA’s “Summer Meals Toolkit” provides information on sponsors, sites, links to state agencies, and much more, or call 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE or use this online map. If there are not enough summer feeding sites in your community, ask why not. Help make sure children in your community are getting the basics and that there are no hungry children in your community this summer.

Many plants blossom and thrive all summer long. Children should be able to do the same.

Making Strides for Preschool

New York City received a lot of attention recently with a bold promise made to some of its youngest residents: Mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a campaign to fund full-day public preschool for all New York City children through a modest increased income tax on residents making more than $500,000 a year. Although Mayor de Blasio’s tax proposal was not approved by the state legislature or supported by New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, the legislature did approve statewide funding for pre-K that included a $300 million increase for New York City’s preschool program. This means that for the first time fully funded full-day quality preschool will be available for all four-year-olds in the city. New York City is moving forward for children -- and it isn’t the only major city and school district making strides towards providing high-quality public preschool programs to as many children as possible. Several large districts that have been doing this for a while are already seeing strong results. 

In Massachusetts, the Boston Public Schools system (BPS) offers a full day of prekindergarten to any four-year-old in the district regardless of income, although funding limitations prevent the district from serving all eligible children. BPS ensures the quality of its prekindergarten program through high-quality teachers, professional development delivered through individualized coaching sessions, and evidence-based curricula for early language and literacy and mathematics. Prekindergarten teachers have the same requirements as K-12 teachers in BPS and are paid accordingly. And it’s working. A study conducted by researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education examined the impact of one year of attendance in the BPS preschool program on children’s school readiness and found substantial positive effects on children’s literacy, language, mathematics, emotional development, and executive functioning. 

Tulsa is another city making great strides. Oklahoma has offered universal preschool to four-year-olds since 1998, and in the 2011-2012 school year three-quarters of all four-year-olds in the state were enrolled in the preschool program. High-quality year-round programs are also available to some at-risk Tulsa children from birth through age three through the Community Action Project (CAP) of Tulsa County, which combines public and private funds to provide comprehensive services for the youngest and most vulnerable children. Oklahoma’s preschool teachers are required to have a bachelor’s degree with a certificate in early childhood and are also paid equally to K-12 teachers. Preschool is funded through the state’s school finance formula, although districts can subcontract with other providers of early care and education by putting public school teachers in community-based settings and Head Start programs. Researchers from Georgetown University have conducted multiple evaluations of the four-year-old preschool program in Tulsa over the last decade and found evidence of both short and long term gains, with the most persistent gains in math for the neediest children who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. A long term economic projection of the future adult earnings effects of Tulsa’s program estimates benefit-to-cost ratios of 3- or 4-to-1.

New Jersey has offered high-quality state-funded preschool to three- and four-year-old children in 31 high poverty communities since 1999 in response to a series of state Supreme Court rulings starting with Abbott v. Burke that found poorer New Jersey public school students were receiving “inadequate” education funding. In the 2011-2012 school year more than 43,000 children were served through these preschools, and a partnership between the Department of Education and the Department of Human Services has established a wrap-around program of daily before and after school and summer programs to complement the full school-day year-round preschool program. These programs, often called Abbott preschools after the original court decision, are delivered through a mixed public-private delivery system overseen by public schools. Head Start programs and other community providers serve roughly two-thirds of the children. Researchers at Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) have conducted a longitudinal analysis of the impacts of the Abbott preschool program on the cohort of children served in 2004-2005, and the fifth grade follow up shows participation has had a sustained significant effect on students’ achievement in language arts and literacy, math, and science and reduced grade retention and special education placement rates.

Other cities also are finding new ways to move forward. In 2011 San Antonio, Texas Mayor Julian Castro convened a task force of education and private sector leaders to identify the best way to improve the quality of education in the city. The task force concluded the most effective solution would be a high-quality, full-day four-year-old prekindergarten targeted at low-income and at-risk children. The San Antonio program was launched after city residents voted for a small one-eighth of a cent sales tax increase in November 2012 to fund it. It will serve 3,700 four-year-olds annually when fully implemented. The majority of these children will be served by model Education Centers, which include master teachers, professional development and training for teachers, aides, and community providers, and parent support, including training and education. 

We know high-quality early childhood development and learning interventions can buffer the negative effects of poverty and provide a foundation for future success with lifelong benefits, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable children. Studies have shown children enrolled in high-quality early childhood programs are more likely to graduate from high school, hold a job, and make more money and are less likely to commit a crime than their peers who do not participate. High-quality preschool is a critical piece of the early childhood continuum — and we need to celebrate and support the cities, states, and political leaders who are successfully providing this experience for all children. Congress needs to follow their good example now by enacting the Strong Start for American’s Children Act to enable millions of the nation’s children — not just thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands — to get quality early childhood education including home visiting through kindergarten and be better prepared for school and for life. This should be a litmus test for our vote this November. If leaders don’t stand up for children, they don’t stand for anything and they don’t stand for a strong American future which requires educated children.

Improving the Odds of America's Children

“. . . We see repeated efforts in Congress in recent years to take resources away from poor and middle-class children and families, like food stamps and tax credits and education funding and access to affordable health care, and give even more to the wealthy and powerful. Bipartisanship has taken a severe beating in recent years, as has the willingness of Congress to enact or support policies driven by evidence-based research that help children and families and our country as a whole.”

--Congressman George Miller, Foreword, Improving the Odds for America’s Children

  

More than 40 years ago the earliest planning for what would become the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. CDF began in 1973 in a Harvard University-owned clapboard house. Our beginning was bolstered by a two-volume publication of the Harvard Educational Review in 1973 and 1974 among whose top editors were CDF staff, many of them graduates of or students at Harvard’s education and law schools. Another young staff attorney, Hillary Rodham, in her first job after law school contributed an article on the “Rights of Children.” 

At the same time, CDF staff knocked on doors to look for children out of school in Massachusetts and all across America. A local group, Massachusetts Advocacy, had issued a report on Children Out of School in Boston and we wondered whether this was a statewide or national problem. After knocking on many thousands of doors in census tracts across our country, CDF documented it was a national problem with at least 2 million children out of school, including 750,000 the census said were between 7-13 years old but did not tell us who they were. We found many were children with disabilities. Other children were pushed out by discipline policies, language, and the inability to afford school fees. Children Out of School in America became our first report in 1974. We followed it up by organizing with parents at the local level and collaborating with national organizations concerned with children with mental, physical and emotional disabilities and many others to help push Congress to enact 94-142 -- now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act -- which for the first time gave children with disabilities the right to a free, appropriate public education. CDF’s first report led to publication of School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children describing many of the practices we are still combating today with school discipline policies that suspend children for a wide range of nonviolent offenses include truancy and subjective offenses like disruptive behavior. 

After 40 years we are now blessed with a new indispensable evidence-based book from Harvard Education Press -- Improving the Odds for America’s Children: Future Directions in Policy and Practice. Dr. Kathleen McCartney, President of Smith College and former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was the driving force behind this volume which she coedited with Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Laurie B. Forcier. It features articles from a wide range of scholars, child and family policy experts, and practitioners. Their combined expertise documents the benefits to be gained by closing the gap between what we know and what we do for children -- and we know a lot more than we did 40 years ago. Hillary Rodham Clinton, now informed and seasoned by many years of state, national and international experience, says of the book: “This important collection of ideas about how to improve the odds for America’s children should be required reading for policy makers across the country.”

Each chapter suggests a prominent pathway for moving forward to level the playing field and improve the odds for children. In their recommendations for future directions in child and family policy and practice, the contributing authors to Improving the Odds for America’s Children affirm a foundational belief that CDF has acted on for decades: children don’t come in pieces and require a continuum of comprehensive and quality support throughout their lives. The volume starts with prenatal and infant health and development, emphasizing parent and caregiver support in a child’s earliest years, moves through the school years and adolescence, and addresses the special needs of the most vulnerable youth involved with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Common threads essential to sound policy and practice emerge quickly -- including the impact of poverty and inequality on children’s well-being. Unifying refrains include the need to bring multiple supports together to seek change for children and families; the need for more intensive supports for children and parents with special health and mental health needs; recognition of the harm done to children by withholding help to children and adults who are not citizens nor legally present in the U.S.; and the call to pay attention to the well-being of parents and caregivers and all those who care for children. The book reinforces the importance of never giving up on a child.

This second decade of the twenty-first century is a crucial one for the children’s movement and the nation’s future, as poverty and child poverty have resurged in a prolonged recession and jobless “recovery,” and with wealth and income inequality at near record levels and achievement gaps among children who are poor and of color unacceptably wide. Our children, are in trouble and our nation is in trouble, and we must reset our moral and economic compasses. CDF has been sounding the siren with urgency and persistence over four decades and will not stop until it is heard.   

In our fifth decade, CDF is committed to implementing the comprehensive policy vision in this fine book and building the critical mass of servant leaders and transforming voices needed to build and sustain the political will to do for all children what we know works. We must band together across all racial and income groups and be clear that we cannot wait any longer to ensure our children’s healthy development and well-being. It is the right thing to do, it is the cost effective thing to do, and we can start right now by putting into place a comprehensive early childhood development system, including a continuum of care from birth through age five. Children have only one childhood, and it is now. We know what to do. We know what works. We must make it happen now by working together. Improving the Odds for America’s Children is a blueprint for action.   

'Mama, Get Me Away From Around Here!'

Almost one year after I first wrote about Ka’nard Allen, his story—and the stories of several other children whose lives are connected to his—remain a searing example of how pervasive gun violence in our nation’s cities is killing, injuring, and traumatizing our children. As Pulitzer Prize-winning New Orleans journalist Julia Cass reports for the Children’s Defense Fund, on May 29, 2012, Ka’nard celebrated his 10th birthday at his grandmother’s house in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. He and his friends and family members were playing games in the front yard and on the porch. “We was having a party and then it’s a shooting,” Ka’nard said. Four young men carrying guns and an AK-47 ran up and unleashed a volley of bullets. Police said they were attempting to kill members of a rival group at or near the party. Ka’nard felt the sting as he was struck in the calf and on the side of his neck. 

 His mother, Tynia Allen, saw blood running down his neck. To get help she had to step over Ka’nard’s 5-year-old cousin Brianna Allen’s lifeless body on the porch. The reach and power of the assault rifle was so great that a bullet fired near the party also struck and killed Shawanna Pierce, 33, in her car at a stop sign three blocks away, leaving three young boys without a mother. 

That year, along with many before it, New Orleans had one of the highest per capita murder rates of any city in America—close to 95 percent of them committed with guns. The carnage at Ka’nard’s party, as well as at other shootings before and since, sent out waves of fear, grief and anger that linger on in the lives of the children affected.

Shawanna Pierce’s youngest son, now 3, doesn’t remember his mother. But her two older boys, Kelby, now 12, and Kolby, 8, began to cry when asked about their mother. Their maternal grandmother, still deeply grieving herself, asked them to recall things they did with their mother, who worked in the coding department of a local hospital. Disney World, she prompted, the zoo, the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival. “I can’t,” Kelby said. “I’m too sad.” Both boys have photos of their mother on their cell phone cases. Their grades suffered, although now, almost two years later, the boys’ school work is beginning to improve.

Ka’nard became frightened. “I always think somebody wants to shoot me,” he said. Less than a year after he was shot at his birthday party, he was shot again—in the cheek—when he and his mother went to a Mother’s Day parade last May. Two gunmen fired into the crowd, wounding 19 people, including Ka’nard and a 10-year-old girl. 

“He panicked,” his mother said. “He said, ‘Mama, get me away from around here!’”

The body of Londyn Unique Samuels, 1, lies in the casket at her funeral as her sister, Paris, 3, looks up at her. Londyn was killed by a gun on a street in New Orleans while in the arms of her babysitter. (Photo by Chris Granger,Nola.com /The Times- Picayune/Landov)

That could be the cry of every child and teenager growing up in a violent neighborhood. Some never have the chance to grow up. In the last six months of 2013 in New Orleans, a 1-year-old girl was shot to death on the street in the arms of a babysitter, an 11-year-old girl was killed in bed by stray bullets entering her home, and a 7-month-old boy was shot in the head while riding in a car with his father. 

Even children who are not directly hit by gun violence suffer the collateral damage of living in an unsafe environment saturated with guns that are routinely used to settle conflicts or to exact retaliation. A striking number of low-income children in New Orleans have witnessed gun violence and murders, according to a 2011-2012 screening of children between the ages of 11 and 15 who participated in a teen pregnancy prevention program. Of the 700 interviewed by the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, 29 percent had witnessed assaults with guns; 14 percent had witnessed gun homicides. More than half cited concern about “personal safety” as a source of worry, more than twice the number who worried about “being unloved.” Not surprisingly, the children reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression at a much higher rate—about one-third—than typical teenagers.

The Children’s Bureau of New Orleans, a non-profit agency that offers mental health counseling, runs a program called Project LAST—the Loss And Survival Team—that works with some of the city’s children who have had multiple exposures to gun violence. “They’ve had loved ones murdered by guns, they’ve seen people carrying guns, they’ve been threatened by guns, they’ve seen a dead body in the street—three or four different exposures to gun violence,” said its president and CEO Paulette Carter.

The trauma these children suffer—depression, anxiety, anger, post-traumatic stress disorder—is especially hard to ameliorate because “we can’t remove the threat,” Carter said. “The best thing you can do for a child who has experienced a traumatic event is to make sure they are safe afterwards. But for kids and gun violence in New Orleans, you can’t reinstate the safety, and this makes the recovery process difficult. We can’t assure children that this won’t happen again to somebody they know or they won’t see guns again or hear gunshots because they probably will.” She said that “a lot of kids we work with have a sense of hopelessness that things are never going to change.” Their schoolwork is affected, as is their potential to go on to live productive adult lives. 

Most of the victims and the perpetrators of gun violence in New Orleans are 15- to 25-year-old Black males with low educational achievement. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study of homicides in New Orleans in 2009 and 2010, many of the perpetrators and victims knew each other; some were childhood friends. Most grew up in the city’s poor and more violent neighborhoods and had easy access to guns, legal or illegal. Under Louisiana law, anyone 18 or older can purchase a gun unless he or she is a felon.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the world they come up in—the environment, the social norms of their peers, the normalization of violence as the way to deal with conflict,” said Jamaal Weathersby, pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in the Central City neighborhood. “They don’t see the relevance of school. They’re not thinking there is an opportunity for them to get a good job. I don’t think many of them can see past the block.”

David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the City of New Orleans’ consultant for reducing group violence, said that most of the murders are committed by undisciplined, random leaderless groups of high rate offenders often organized around neighborhoods or blocks—and are not about money but about “personal friction, respect and disrespect, retaliation and vendettas. It is so important that they literally live and die for it.” Dr. Kenneth Hardy, a professor of Family Therapy at Drexel University in Philadelphia, believes that the reason disrespect is so often a trigger point relates to the devaluation—the “constant lacerations to dignity”—of poor young Black males who are considered a threat and a problem, with the worst rather than the best expected of them. 

Kennedy said that alienation from law enforcement underlies personal retaliation. “If representatives of the law in your neighborhood are seen not only as not legitimate but as the enemy, then when you have a grievance or somebody you know got shot, you don’t call the cops. You get a gun and friends and do it yourself.” A scathing 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Justice found that New Orleans police officers “too frequently use excessive force and conduct illegal stops, searches and arrests with impunity,” almost exclusively in Black neighborhoods. City, state and federal law enforcement agencies in New Orleans recently began focusing more on identifying and prosecuting members of the violent criminal groups committing most of the murders, including the four men charged with killing Brianna Allen and Shawanna Pierce. This strategy appears to be paying off since the city’s murders dropped by 20 percent in 2013.

Ka’nard still sees a psychologist because “I get mad real fast,” he said. His mother said he doesn’t like to go places by himself. But he attends a school he likes, has a mentor, has taken trips thanks to a local foundation, and plays drums in his school’s band. This year he was looking forward to marching in some of the city’s Mardi Gras parades—an event that should be a simple childhood pleasure, but one Ka’nard, like so many of our nation’s children, can no longer take for granted.

Ella Baker: My Civil Rights Generation's 'Fundi'

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a White mother’s son—we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.
--Ella Baker 

During this last week of Women’s History Month, I wanted you to learn about Ella Baker, a transforming but too-little-known woman and overpowering justice warrior for my generation of civil rights activists. The quote above is from Ella Baker 50 years ago, and like so much about this visionary civil rights leader it is still just as relevant today. She was talking about the murders of civil rights movement workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who disappeared together in Mississippi in June 1964, and reacting to the fact that searchers sent to comb local rivers and swamps to find the bodies of Chaney, who was Black, and Goodman and Schwerner, who were White, also found the bodies of other missing Black men for whom authorities had not bothered to search. Ella Baker was an outspoken warrior against injustice and inequality her entire life, and always, always unwilling to rest. Her words continue to be a rallying cry for all of us who believe our nation still does not see and value Black and White children’s lives the same way.  

Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Johnson Reagon featured these words in the stirring “Ella’s Song.” She was one of hundreds of young people Ella Baker mentored during the civil rights movement. I was one of them who first met Mrs. Baker during my senior year at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was a staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was often a powerful behind-the-scenes advisor to close colleagues like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ella Baker believed in servant leadership and shared leadership rather than charismatic leadership and encouraged young people like me to find and lift our own voices and join them with others. She was instrumental in founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and fought to make sure we retained our own independent organization as students rather than simply becoming the youth arm of the Dr. King-led SCLC. Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and many other fellow student activists and young activists were all influenced by her example, counsel and convening and share a special debt of reverence and gratitude. Ella Baker was tough and disciplined and demanded the best of the young and older adults around her. She understood that movement building was about more than protests and meetings and speeches—it was hard, daily, persistent, and sacrificial behind-the-scenes work. She was an institution builder and stressed the importance of strong institutions that could last over time rather than reliance on a single strong leader. 

Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia. She had a strict mother, a warm and caring father, and a large extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who shared what they had with the poor. She was a fighter and as a child beat up White children who called her names. Since there was no schooling for Black children beyond elementary years in her area, she went off to boarding school at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was valedictorian of her high school and college graduating classes. She moved to Harlem, got caught up in its excitement, and went everywhere to hear lectures and speeches and read in libraries to learn everything she could. After working as a domestic and as a waitress, she got a job with the Negro National News published by George Schuyler who later recommended her for a job at the NAACP. She rapidly rose through NAACP ranks. “Wherever she went,” her biographer and friend Joanne Grant wrote in Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, “she created a whirlwind, leaving a scatter of papers, notes, leaflets, church programs, and phone numbers in her wake. . . She never let up her struggle to increase the role of the rank and file.”

Ella Baker pushed for organizational structure and rules in the NAACP just as she did later at SCLC and SNCC. Ella Baker was the one who sat down with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson to discuss how to create a continuing movement out of the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to SCLC’s formation. As the first staff member hired for SCLC, it was Ella Baker who tried to put the new organization in operating order so that Dr. King was not just a leader who reacted to and jumped from one event to the next. She worked to give SCLC the capacity to plan and implement action. And Ella Baker convinced Dr. King to bring me and about 200 other Black college students who had been arrested for engaging in sit-in protests to open up lunch counters around the South to a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University. My first plane ride ever was from Atlanta to Raleigh for that meeting. SNCC was the meeting’s result.      

Ella Baker was fully aware of but unintimidated by the men she worked with who devalued the advice of women and sometimes resented her forcefulness, prodding, and “mothering.” She made no special effort to be ingratiating. She labored at SCLC as she had at the NAACP to raise money, conduct voter registration drives, speak to citizens groups (sometimes ten times a day), and travel to community after community to help people help themselves. She warned against SCLC becoming “a cult of personality” for Dr. King rather than a means of empowering others, and she eventually left SCLC after deciding that movement building was more important than the specific organization and personalities involved—another of her lessons that is so relevant today. 

At a gathering celebrating Ella Baker’s 75th birthday, Bob Moses called her the “Fundi,” the person in the community who masters a craft with the help of the community and teaches it to other people. Fundi became the title of a film on her extraordinary life and work. Ella Baker died in 1986 on her 83rd birthday. I remember her counsel as I think about sustaining and strengthening the Children's Defense Fund’s mission today and future tomorrow for the long haul struggle to create and maintain a level playing field for every child. I learned from her the crucial importance of training a successor generation of young servant-leaders which has been a strong priority of CDF’s since its inception. Policies are no better than the people who are implementing them and their commitment to just treatment of children and the poor. I am so proud that over 13,000 college students have gone through training at CDF’s Ella Baker Child Policy Institute at the former Alex Haley Farm, that more than 113,000 children have gone through the CDF Freedom Schools® program with a sense of commitment to something beyond themselves, and that many CDF alumni are doing wonderful public service across the country. This is one way CDF honors her legacy along with other great unsung women justice warriors like Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, and Septima Clark who too few ever hear of but we all owe a great debt of gratitude. 

We also all honor Ella Baker by keeping her belief in freedom and equality alive until it becomes reality for every mother’s child. In a nation where Black children are more than three times as likely to be poor as White children; where Black babies are more than twice as likely as White babies to die before their first birthdays and Black children are twice as likely to die before their 18th birthdays as White children; where more than 80 percent of fourth and eighth grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level and Black children are more than twice as likely to drop out as White children; where gun violence is the leading cause of death among Black children ages 1-19 and Black children and teens are nearly five times more likely to die from gun violence than White children and teens; and where Black mothers’ sons can be seen and treated as lethal threats for wearing hoodies in the rain or refusing to turn their car radios down, we who believe in freedom still cannot rest.

The Invisible Backbone Leaders of Transforming Social Change

Women’s History Month is a reminder that in every major American social reform movement, women have always played a critical role. Women at the forefront, acting as the catalyst for progress when it needs to happen, make the front pages and the history books. But women have also always been the invisible backbone, unseen but strong, of transforming social movements and of all anchor institutions in society -- our families, congregations, schools, and communities -- employing behind the scenes quiet essential leadership and organizational, communication, and fundraising skills to get things done. 

 

Many people know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first rose to national prominence as a civil rights leader by serving as a spokesperson in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. Not enough of us recognize that there would not have been a bus boycott that needed a leader without a vigilant community catalyst working behind the scenes looking for the right spark to challenge hated bus segregation. The December 1955 arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks, who refused to move from her seat at the front of the “colored” section of her bus when the White section got too full, was not the first such arrest in Montgomery but it made history because she was the right public face that could mobilize the entire Black community. And behind that bus boycott was an unknown community leader named Jo Ann Robinson who had been pushing for change in Montgomery buses and had been putting the community infrastructure in place long before Rosa Parks was arrested. Robinson was vigilant and ready to spring into action when the right opportunity arose. 

Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, was president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women civic leaders in Montgomery. She had been thrown off a city bus in 1949 for sitting too close to the front although the bus was nearly empty. This infuriating experience was all too common among Montgomery’s Black residents -- and the WPC had already chosen to make changing the bus system one of their priorities. Their 1954 letter to Montgomery Mayor W.A. Gayle raised the possibility of a city-wide bus boycott: “More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers . . . We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.” But when the women’s requests for “agreeable terms” went unanswered, their plans for a boycott went forward. They just needed the right moment and face -- and when that moment came Jo Ann Robinson knew what to do. 

She and other women did not wait for male leaders to decide on a response before acting. She later wrote about the night after Mrs. Parks was arrested: “Some of the [Women’s Political Council] officers previously had discussed plans for distributing thousands of notices announcing a bus boycott. Now the time had come for me to write just such a notice.” She called her colleague John Cannon, chair of Alabama State College’s business department, and two trusted students, who immediately agreed to meet her at the college where Cannon had access to the copying machines. They worked together until four in the morning making copies of the leaflet Jo Ann Robinson had prepared:

“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down . . . This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday.”        

She and her two students worked for three more hours mapping out distribution routes, and as soon as she finished teaching her 8 o’clock class that morning Jo Ann Robinson began calling other members of the WPC and driving around the city to meet them at strategic drop-off locations with bundles of leaflets. She said:

“By 2 o’clock, thousands of the mimeographed handbills had changed hands many times. Practically every black man, woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along. No one knew where the notices had come from or who had arranged for their circulation, and no one cared. Those who passed them on did so efficiently, quietly, and without comment. But deep within the heart of every black person was a joy he or she dared not reveal.”

Under Jo Ann Robinson’s direction, more than 50,000 leaflets were produced and distributed that day. The boycott was an enormous success, and as the day-long boycott became a year-long crusade, women remained its backbone. When a public spokesperson was needed at the very start of the boycott, behind the scenes Robinson, who was an active member of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, recommended her congregation’s new 26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association. The WPC continued to be instrumental in organizing the carpools that made the boycott possible. Women formed fundraising clubs to sell sweet potato pies and other baked goods and competed every week to see which club could earn the most money to support the Montgomery Improvement Association. The federal lawsuit that was filed and successfully struck down bus segregation, Browder v. Gayle, had four Black women plaintiffs. Black women were the unrecognized faceless leaders of change aided by some prominent White women like Virginia Durr. 

Jo Ann Robinson continued to work quietly behind the scenes, but was known well enough to become a target of violence like Dr. King and many others: one police officer threw a rock through her home’s window and another poured acid on her car. That did not stop her. As Dr. King put it, “Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest.” Meanwhile the boycott she and other women began sparked a movement that changed our nation and world. Jo Ann Robinson and other unsung heroines of the civil rights movement remain role models for the tireless indispensable behind-the-scenes leaders whose strength and determination we desperately need right now. Our children are waiting every day for strong black female leaders and their allies to break up the cradle to prison pipeline crisis and get them the quality early childhood education and schools that will prepare them for the future.

Make Hard Work Pay -- Again

One of our country’s most cherished values is the idea that if you work hard you can get ahead, be part of the middle class, raise a family comfortably, and ensure your children will do better than you did. But this is a hollow promise to countless families today. The sad truth is you can work full time in America and not be able to meet your family’s basic needs. A parent working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour earns $15,080 a year before taxes. That’s $4,700 below the poverty level for a parent with two children. Two-thirds of the 16.1 million poor children in America live with an adult who works, and 30 percent live with an adult who works full time year-round.

 

As CDF’s recently released The State of America’s Children 2014 report highlights, in no state can a parent working full time at the minimum wage afford a fair-market rent two-bedroom apartment and have enough left over to pay for food, utilities, and other necessities. Child care costs alone can eat up more than half of a parent’s paycheck: The average cost of center-based child care for an infant is $9,500 a year. Most experts agree that families need to earn twice the poverty level to be able to begin to provide adequately for their children.

Today we have an opportunity to begin to realign our values by enacting the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013 which would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, the first increase since 2009, and raise the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time since 1991. The current federal minimum wage is worth 32 percent less in inflation-adjusted terms than at its peak in 1968. If it had grown at the same rate as wages for a typical worker in America since 1968 it would already be $10.65 an hour. But if it had grown at the same rate as productivity of the economy during that period it would be $18.30 today. So increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would restore the minimum wage closer to what it would have been if it had kept up with average wages but still leave it far below what it should be, given productivity and economic growth since the late 1960s.

Nationwide, increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase a full-time worker’s salary to $21,008 and put $31 billion additional dollars in the pockets of as many as 24.5 million low-wage workers according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congress’ official budget arbiter. It would lift 900,000 people above the official poverty threshold. Nearly 90 percent of those benefiting would be 20 years or older and over half would be working full time. According to the Economic Policy Institute those affected by the minimum wage increase earn on average half of their family’s total income. The Economic Policy Institute has also found more than a quarter of those benefiting would be parents. 

Most importantly, the increase to $10.10 an hour would improve the lives of an estimated 14 million children — nearly one in five children in America — by helping their parents put nutritious food on the table, keep a roof over their families’ heads, and make sure their children get the health care they need to ensure they can develop to their full potential. And an increase in the minimum wage would not cost the government anything — as the CBO acknowledged, it might even save money in the short term as people with increased incomes need fewer government benefits and pay more in taxes.

The increase also would help spur the economy. Recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that raising the minimum wage to $10 could increase U.S. gross domestic product by up to 0.3 percentage points in the short term. Some resist a minimum wage increase because of fears it would lead to job losses, but after extensive research the latest consensus in the field is that this is not the case. This is why more than 600 economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, have endorsed the increase to $10.10, saying in a joint letter to President Obama and congressional leaders: “In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of the evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effects on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weaknesses in the labor market.” And even if you don’t believe the newest research is the most valid, and look instead at all the research combined, as the Congressional Budget Office conservatively did in its February 18^th report, CBO’s best estimate was that this change would reduce employment by 0.3 percent. Should we really deny a certain income boost to 24.5 million workers to spare a much smaller number uncertain job loss? Of course not. If Congress is worried about uncertain job losses from a minimum wage increase, they could offset them through complementary policies like changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which boosts employment among low- and mid-income earners, or private or public sector jobs programs.

Increasing the minimum wage would give an immediate pay raise to millions of workers in America who are still waiting for the country’s economic recovery to reach them. No one in rich America should be working full time and be forced to live in poverty. That’s why nearly three-quarters of Americans support raising the minimum wage, including a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. There is no reason for Congress to continue to deny hard-working Americans, many of them parents, a long overdue and needed pay raise. It’s long past time to begin to make work pay again.

Struggling to Change What You're Given

I feel like a lot of people when they encounter adversity—a lot will just say, “Oh, well, I guess I can’t do that. I’m going to sit here and not do anything,” or, “I’m going to throw myself a pity party.” But beat the odds. I feel like it’s an opening, and it shows you that whatever you face in life, that there is a way out, and that you can change what you’re given. You don’t have to accept what happens to you. You’re fully capable of doing whatever it takes to change whatever has happened to you, to change your future—maybe not your past but your future.

Seventeen-year-old Theresa Tran is one of this year’s winners of the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio’s Beat the Odds® scholarships after overcoming tough odds including physical disability, the death of a beloved sibling, and a father who suddenly abandoned the family and left her mother to raise four children alone. Theresa says she had to be a survivor right from the start:

The odds were against me from the moment I was born. The chances of my survival were very slim, since I was born three-months premature and weighed only 1 lb. and 10 oz. The doctors just looked at my mom and said, “She won’t make it until tomorrow.” My dad refused to come see me and instead argued with my mom, saying that there wasn’t a point to my living, because I was already messed up. My mom didn’t give up on me, though, and I began to fight for my life, unaware that this was the first of many times where I’d be a fighter.

Soon after birth Theresa was diagnosed with spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy. Her closest brother Daniel, only eight months older because Theresa had been born so prematurely, and their older brother David helped protect Theresa from other children’s teasing and stares. Five days before her fourth birthday, Theresa underwent corrective surgery to allow her to walk more easily. It's a date that should have been a happy milestone, but as family and friends were picking up balloons and flowers later that day to celebrate, they were in a car accident, and 5-year-old Daniel was killed.
Theresa says:

After Daniel passed away, I wasn’t the same, because he was my best friend, confidant, and protector. During elementary school, I was mourning, but that didn’t stop kids from viciously teasing me and humiliating me constantly because of my limp and an unusual gait. I didn’t want to go to school, because I was defenseless, so going to school was a daily nightmare. Yet because of the constant torment, I became emotionally strong. I figured if I were strong, if my tormentors couldn’t see me cry, then I’d be OK.

By middle school Theresa had finally started to believe the worst of the hard times were behind her when her world fell apart again. Her father left one day without mentioning where he was headed and never returned. After filing a missing person report her frantic mother eventually learned that he had paid a coworker to drive him to the airport and boarded a flight to his native Vietnam, leaving his family behind with no warning and no way to contact him.
As her mother continued working several jobs to keep the family afloat, Theresa quickly took on much of the responsibility for caring for herself and her two younger siblings, and she began to look at school in a new way—as a refuge. “School is the place I can get away from all the stress and troubles going on around me,” she says. “I have no control over many things in my life, but my academics are up to me.” Theresa loved the feeling of being able to see all the hard work she put into a project or test immediately pay off, and good grades were an even greater incentive for her to “focus on what you’re good at and what you can do and not what you can’t.”
Theresa is now a high school senior and president of her class, with a grade point average above 4.0. She hopes to major in biochemistry pre-med and become an orthopedic surgeon. “I’ve always felt the compelling obligation to help others, and that I must give back to all the doctors who’ve helped me,” she explains. She also says:

I hope [my story] can help others going through adversity and show those people that they’re not alone. ... Despite these challenges, I’ve gotten back up and faced each day with an optimistic attitude. My past does not define me or my future, but all of these hardships have molded me into the person I am today.

Theresa and her 15 fellow Beat the Odds scholarship winners the Children’s Defense Fund is honoring in Ohio, Minnesota, and New York in March are a genuine inspiration for other young people and all of us who face steep odds. How many children are we losing who lack Theresa’s resilience and grit? How do we instill and nurture the same sense of hope and perseverance in their ability to struggle to make the future different despite the odds stacked against millions of them by poverty, disabilities, and inadequate school and community support? And how do we all struggle together to change unjust policies and practices, structural poverty, racial disparities, violence, and disabilities children can’t control while we lend a helping hand and encouragement to help as many individual children as possible? Every child deserves a level playing field on which to grow and contribute. That is America’s dream.

Honoring Septima Clark

During this Black History Month I was deeply honored to be inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame at the same time as Mrs. Septima Clark -- the woman Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “Mother of the Movement.” Readers familiar with Brian Lanker’s marvelous book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America will recognize Mrs. Clark as the proud, strong, and beautiful woman with silver braids whose portrait graces the front cover. Brian captured her indomitable spirit a few weeks before her death in 1987 at age 89 and called me with excitement saying he knew after a very few moments and a few shots that he had found his cover. Throughout much of her long life Mrs. Clark was often at odds with South Carolina leaders and made other enemies as she traveled throughout the Deep South pioneering literacy and citizenship education for Black Americans. Yet her richly deserved Hall of Fame induction symbolizes just how far South Carolina and the nation have come -- in part thanks to the work of citizen heroines like Mrs. Clark.

Mrs. Clark was born in Charleston in 1898, the second of eight children born to a former slave father and laundrywoman mother. She graduated from Avery Normal Institute in 1916 with a teaching certificate, but because the city of Charleston would not hire Black teachers, she found a job in a rural community on Johns Island, South Carolina. The White teacher in that community had only three White students but was paid $85 a month, while the Black school had two teachers for 132 children and the two Black teachers were paid a combined salary of $60. It was the first of many injustices throughout her long career. But as time went on she started speaking out even when others around her would not. As she put it simply years later: “They were afraid, but I wasn’t.” 

In 1919 Mrs. Clark returned to Charleston, where she volunteered for a NAACP petition effort that ultimately changed the local law prohibiting Black teachers. For the next several decades she taught primarily in Charleston and Columbia while continuing her own education in the summers -- at Columbia University in New York; at Atlanta University, where W.E.B. DuBois was one of her professors; at Benedict College, where she finally received a bachelor’s degree; and at Hampton Institute; where she earned her master’s. She fought for equalization of salaries for Black and White teachers in South Carolina. After Federal District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, following the law rather than White southern mores, ordered equal pay for teachers and also ruled that Black citizens must be permitted to vote in primary elections, he and his wife and Septima became friends and social pariahs in their communities. But after forty years her career as a South Carolina public school teacher came to an abrupt halt in 1956 when the state legislature ruled that state employees could not belong to the NAACP. Mrs. Clark refused to resign or lie about her membership, and was dismissed.

Mrs. Clark signed her name to a letter to 726 other Black teachers asking them to protest the law, but only 11 of them agreed to attend a meeting with her and the superintendent, and on the day of the meeting only four showed up. She later said that effort was the big failure of her life, and she believed it failed because she tried to push the other teachers into something they weren’t ready for. The lesson she learned was that people needed to be trained first so that they would be prepared to act -- and the trainings she went on to develop helped shape the course of the civil rights movement.

Mrs. Clark had already attended several meetings at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the legendary grassroots education center devoted to social justice. In the summer of 1955 she led a workshop at Highlander on developing leadership whose participants included a shy, quiet NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Rosa Parks. After Mrs. Clark was fired from her teaching job in 1956, Highlander’s extraordinary director, Myles Horton, invited her to be Highlander’s full-time director of workshops, where she pioneered innovative programs that combined literacy education for adults with citizenship and voter education. When the state of Tennessee forced Highlander to close in 1961 Mrs. Clark continued the same work as director of education and teaching for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)’s new Citizen Education Program. Her workshops formed the basis for the Citizenship School movement she helped establish across the South.

In addition to teaching basic reading skills using familiar materials like the Sears catalog and covering practical topics like how to write checks, these “schools” taught basic civics and citizenship rights and focused on the arcane voting requirements specific to each local community that were being used to disenfranchise Black voters. Classes met on evenings and weekends in churches, store backrooms, and other available spaces. Lessons were written on dry-cleaning bags in place of blackboards. They relied on training local citizens to teach other community members; Fannie Lou Hamer was among the local leaders who volunteered. Mrs. Clark eventually helped establish and recruit and train teachers for hundreds of Citizenship Schools: “They were in people’s kitchens, in beauty parlors, and under trees in the summertime. I went all over the South, sometimes visiting three Citizenship Schools in one day…One time I heard Andy Young say that the Citizenship Schools were the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built. And that’s probably very much true.” Rosa Parks also said that while she may have sat down once, Mrs. Clark kept on working and building: “I am always very respectful and very much in awe of the presence of Septima Clark because her life story makes the effort that I have made very minute. I only hope that there is a possible chance that some of her great courage and dignity and wisdom has rubbed off on me.”

As a woman in the movement, Mrs. Clark said she felt the men around her often did not do a good job of listening to or including her or other women. Yet she observed that it was largely women who got things done: “In stories about the civil rights movement you hear mostly about the black ministers. But if you talk to the women who were there, you’ll hear another story. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.” Even later in life Mrs. Clark was never hesitant to speak up. One of the injustices after her 1956 firing was that South Carolina refused to pay the pension she had earned for her forty years of teaching or the pay she would have earned in the few years before her retirement if she had not been dismissed. She did not give up on waiting for those wrongs to be righted, and in 1976 the governor reinstated her pension and in 1981 the legislature approved paying her back pay.

Although her signature accomplishment may be the programs she established for Black adults, she never lost her original and enduring passion for educating children. She celebrated her 78^th birthday by becoming the first Black woman elected to the Charleston School Board. Near the end of her life she said:

“Education is my big priority right now. I want people to see children as human beings and not to think of the money that it costs nor to think of the amount of time that it will take, but to think of the lives that can be developed into Americans who will redeem the soul of America and will really make America a great country.”

Let’s honor Septima Clark’s legacy right now by making this priority our own with urgency and perseverance.

Killed by a Gun

The headlines in the case were sadly familiar. An angry adult armed with a gun used it to shoot and kill an unarmed black teenager he thought seemed “bad”—this time, because the teenager and his friends were sitting in a car listening to music the grownup didn’t like. In this outrageous Florida case, a middle-aged white man, Michael Dunn, was convicted of three counts of attempted murder and one count of shooting a gun into an occupied car. Jurors agreed he faced no threat after he was annoyed by loud music -- coming from a car he had deliberately chosen to park next to -- and then started an argument, pulled a gun on the car’s black teens, and fired three shots at the young men inside the car as they tried to drive away from him.

But the jury could not agree on the most serious charge of first-degree murder for shooting the first seven bullets at the stationary car and hitting 17-year-old Jordan Davis in his lung, liver, and aorta. Florida’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” law, which gives gun owners a license to kill if they feel threatened, was allegedly enough for three jurors to vote against conviction. At least one juror said she believed Michael Dunn did get away with murder: “There is no longer a Jordan Davis, and there is only one reason why that is. The boy was shot and killed for reasons that should not have happened.”

In an interview with Good Morning America Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, said she believed the jurors in her son’s case did the best they could with the laws they had, but also made it clear she believes our nation’s existing laws did not protect Jordan or millions of other victims of gun violence in America. When asked what justice for her son would look like she answered:

“Justice for Jordan will be, ultimately, really when we change the laws. Because that will be not just justice for Jordan, and justice for Trayvon, and justice for all the children at Sandy Hook, and justice for Aurora, and justice for Virginia Tech, and the Navy Yard -- it will be justice for everyone that has suffered because of these laws, and will continue to suffer. So once the laws are changed, that’s the ultimate justice for all.”

Researchers at Texas A&M University studied the impact of Stand Your Ground laws, like the one enacted in Florida in 2005, across the country and concluded in a 2012 study that “the laws do not deter burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault” but do “lead to a statistically significant 8 percent net increase in the number of reported murders and non-negligent manslaughters.” Evidence is also clear that these laws have a disparate racial impact. Researchers from the Urban Institute found that when White shooters kill Black victims, 34 percent of the homicides are deemed justifiable, while only 3.3 percent are ruled justifiable when the situation is reversed.

Now researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research have released the results of a new study on the effectiveness of another crucial segment of our nation’s gun laws: those requiring background checks before purchasing a gun. For this study the scholars took a close look at the state of Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase law. Before it was repealed this law required all handgun purchasers in Missouri to obtain a license verifying that they had passed a background check. The researchers wanted to know what happened when this requirement was taken away -- and they learned that repealing that law has led to a 16 percent increase in Missouri’s murder rate. The study showed between 2008 and 2012 there were an additional 55 to 63 murders in Missouri each year associated with the law’s repeal. During those same years, the national murder rate dropped by over 5 percent.

The research controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other laws adopted during the study period that could affect violent crime. The spike in murders only occurred for murders committed with a gun and happened statewide, while bordering states showed no increase. The number of handguns recovered from scenes of crimes or from criminals quickly doubled after the repeal. In a press release, lead author Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said: “This study provides compelling confirmation that weaknesses in firearm laws lead to deaths from gun violence.” Co-author Jon Vernick, JD, MPH, deputy director for the Center for Gun Policy and Research, added:

“Because many perpetrators of homicide have backgrounds that would prohibit them from possessing firearms under federal law, they seek out private sellers to acquire their weapons. Requiring a background check on all gun sales is a commonsense approach to reducing gun violence that does not infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners.”

Requiring a background check seems like common sense to most Americans -- and yet some lawmakers refuse to make it happen. Others, like those in Missouri, are actually moving backwards. The same press release noted:

“Only fifteen states require individuals purchasing handguns from unlicensed sellers to pass background checks, with ten of these states requiring all purchasers to acquire a permit-to-purchase license. A 2013 public opinion survey from Johns Hopkins found the majority of Americans (89 percent) and gun owners (84 percent) support requiring a background check system for all gun sales. The majority of Americans (77 percent) and gun owners (59 percent) also reported supporting requiring people to obtain a license from a local law-enforcement agency before buying a gun to verify their identity and ensure that they are not legally prohibited from having a gun.”

This latest Johns Hopkins study is another key step in finding out what works to reduce gun violence. The available evidence is clear: Stand Your Ground laws do not reduce gun violence. Background checks do -- just one part of a network of solutions that can help. We need a robust commitment to much more research on the epidemic public health threat of gun violence to identify all of them. And when we know what works, we need leaders who will listen to and act on the research and public opinion to preserve lives. We do not need any more suffering families. Jordan Davis’s father Ron said:

“All the other 17-year-olds out there -- they shouldn’t have to fear the adults with the guns that are running around here shooting them at will. If you throw popcorn in someone’s face, they want to shoot you because you threw popcorn in their face. That’s what we’ve come to. But we have to stop.”

We really do have to stop!