If the past is prologue, what’s next?
8th July 2019 · 0 Comments
U.S. Senator Kamala Harris’ attack on fellow presidential candidate, former Vice -President Joe Biden, for his vote against busing was a break-out moment for the only Black female candidate in the race. She blazed past several top contenders in post-debate polls, creating an aura of viability around her candidacy and drawing rave reviews from some media pundits, who lauded her courage and toughness in confronting Biden. Conversely, Biden lost points in the polls for what some reported to be a lackluster performance.
While many voters celebrated Harris’ victory, her affinity for being bused to integrate schools in California, caused many here to scratch their heads and reflect on the horrible, failed attempts at school desegregation, which began here in the late 1940s and continues today.
Harris’ rosy memories of her desegregation experience is a reminder why history is important. Starting from the beginning, not from just any point in time, is crucial to understanding the trajectory of where Black Americans are today.
Clearly, circumstances and perceptions change over time, but one thing is a historical constant that Black people do well to remember and monitor: Whites have been using laws to disenfranchise Blacks since the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores 400 years ago.
As for busing, it’s a term that was a disservice to Blacks before it was a service. In the 1950s and 1960s, Black children were bused because the schools in their neighborhoods, where they could walk would not take them. So, for them to get an education, they had to be bused to the few schools in an entire city set aside for Blacks. Harris grew up in Berkeley, an upscale northern California town, for example. So, busing has not always been the Godsend Senator Harris makes it out to be.
When Harris called Biden on the carpet for voting against federally-mandating, Biden said that he believed local governments should legislate such issues. Rev. Al Sharpton recently interpreted Biden’s response as a wink and nod to states’ rights.
Historically speaking, what worked in California did not work here in Louisiana back then nor is it working today. New Orleans’ public schools a.k.a. charter schools, are as segregated today as they were during the alleged start of integration in the Big Easy.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, in 1948, New Orleanian Alexander Pierre Tureaud, Sr., the chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), filed Rosana Aubert v. Orleans Parish School Board, in which he sought better conditions within segregated African-American schools. After two years of waiting on a decision, the NAACP wanted to take further action, so on September 5, 1952, Tureaud filed a new suit, Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, with 21 sets of students as plaintiffs including Earl Benjamin Bush.
On November 14, 1960, three 6-year-old girls-Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost and Gail Etienne-known as the McDonogh Three attended the previously all-white school McDonogh No. 19 and Ruby Bridges attended William Frantz Elementary School. All four girls faced public humiliation, taunts, and racial slurs as they walked to school daily. A race riot broke out on November 16, 1960 in front of the Orleans Parish school board meeting. There were numerous death threats against the Black children and the presence of United States Marshals was required to accompany the girls. It took ten more years for the New Orleans public schools to show any semblance of integration, with a few whites attending the predominately-Black schools.
There was scant busing back then to integrate the schools, because whites left New Orleans in droves, preferring to live in the surrounding parishes, rather than allow their children to attend the same schools as Black children.
However, New Orleans charter school students today are bused all over town, including to the Westbank, but not for the purposes of integration, though. They’re being bused because those responsible for dismantling the public school system, via state laws, decided to close, sell, and abandoned many neighborhood schools, rather than invest the money to modernize them or build new schools on those sites. A short drive through the eighth and seventh wards provides an eyeful of boarded up schools.
“What’s past is prologue,” William Shakespeare’s character Antonio said in “The Tempest.” The phrase was used to suggest that all that has happened before that time, the “past,” had led Sebastian and himself to do what they were about to do: commit murder, or make another choice. Today, the phrase stands for the idea that history sets the context for the present.
Now that Harris has taken Biden to task over his past vote, ostensibly against desegregation, what is her plan to integrate public schools and charter schools? Does she have one? Or is she just poking what she thinks is a weak spot in Biden’s record? It’s one thing to be outraged about past discriminatory practices but it’s an altogether different thing to see it happening in real time.
Maybe Senator Harris should have slammed Biden for his support for the 1994 three strikes law that helped to fill the jails with Black and Brown men, or tougher sentences for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, or Biden’s handling of Professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. During the confirmation hearing, then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Biden opted not to call three other witnesses who would have echoed Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.
If the past is prologue, then what are all the democratic presidential candidates, including Harris and Biden, going to do about the reality in which today’s Black Americans find themselves? De facto segregation, racism, discrimination, harassment, white supremacy, redlining, gentrification, voter suppression, low wage jobs, lack of educational, housing, and career opportunities, and mass incarceration are still with us.
If the past is prologue, Black Americans must accurately remember our historic struggles, recognize that they emanated and continue to emanate from local, state, and federal elected officials. We must hold them accountable, call them out, and stop them from passing laws that will become the prologue to our future.
This article originally published in the July 8, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
