Can we reach the smallest children?

7th November 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

It had been a while since I had driven the Shreveport route to New Orleans. About 15 miles out of Natchitoches, a young doe caught the corner of my right eye as she grazed in the inky, late-night darkness. Momentarily, she looked up to check out my car. She lowered her head again to resume her leisurely meal beyond the highway shoulder.

I was on my way to celebrate the fortieth wedding anniversary of Labertha Darensburg McCormick. Most females wear a pigtail directly behind their head, but Labertha wore hers across one shoulder when I first met her in New Orleans as her theology instructor at Xavier University in 1969. A lifelong friendship was kindled there.

Ransom McCormick entered Labertha’s life during that time, culminating in an exchange of wedding vows to which I was the prime witness on October 23, 1971. To that marriage made in heaven God gave the gift of a baker’s dozen children — seven boys and six girls. All of them are grown, mature, well-adjusted adults.

Ever the matriarch, Labertha’s mark as poet, artist and entrepreneur is stamped indelibly on each child in a family that is a hotbed of dancers, rappers, poets, artists and generous, yet opportunistic entrepreneurs who are sure of themselves and each other.

“We love you, Dad!” was said over and over again by the grown men, unashamed to express openly the same strong emotion displayed routinely for mother. They never forgot how 13 children always had little but always enough to live well.

Through all the tribulations of marriage and family life, especially with a baker’s dozen livewire gifts, Ransom and Labertha are role models of how to reach, teach and rear the little ones under the trying conditions of everyday living and tough environment.

Later that week, such role models weighed heavily into a round table discussion that quickly spread like an octopus into the status quo of our children and the ways and means to win their minds, hearts and souls before the streets captivate and capture them.

Convoked by the Batiste Cultural Arts Academy, the roundtable discussion was the core of a compressed symposium aimed at identifying, rallying and deploying the human resources available for a full-press drive to rescue, motivate, educate and direct our youngest children while they are still pliable.

Black family statistics spell urgency.

From the splendid pinnacle of 86 percent in the early 1990s, nuclear black families have fallen to a scary, destructive low of some 30 percent in 2011. Due in great part to the War On Poverty’s “missing man condition” for financial aid to a mother, the inner fiber of black families began to unravel at an alarming rate that runs unabated.

Needless to say, the combined efforts of all available hands everywhere are hard put to understand, discipline, elevate, motivate, educate and direct children who come from a family environment that lacks most or all the above. Even worse, the children’s low self-esteem is heavily laced with abusive curses, profanities and obscenities.

The main cogs in this roundtable machine were Damon J. Batiste and his father David who cofounded the Batiste Cultural Arts Academy in a post-Katrina effort to support educational reform in partnership with ReNew Charter Management.

Children in grades K-8 can receive after-hours additional instruction in reading, math, business education, visual arts, Pro Tools recording, film production and the Batiste specialty – the performing arts that include music, of course.

This education-through-arts initiative is geared to create synergy between Education and Cultural Arts, using the rich history and resources of the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana in conjunction with International Partners.

Other cogs in the roundtable machine were Larry Skoller, International Festival Producer / Musician; Matthew Skoller, Band Leader, Music Business; Arden Lowe, Music/Film Producer; Jeffery Thomas, Business Dir/Ef­fect Leadership Group; Davon, Michael Jackson Dance Imperson­ator; Harald Marcho — Mu­sic/Film Production.

An online idea to start YES – Youth Empowering Souls — uniting parents, children, teachers, police, gangs and all civic organs into a single youth-empowering force was put into action by web designer Michael Baptiste and youth activist Kelwynn Napoleon.

This article was originally published in the November 7, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper