Child of the Sit-Downs by Carlton Jackson

Author:Carlton Jackson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2011-11-24T05:26:39+00:00

Seven “It Makes My Heart Sing”

The status of education in America worried Genora and other reform-minded people throughout the country. Some Los Angeles schools were graduating students who could not read and write in any language or even do elementary arithmetic. Here was a ready-made crusade, and in only a short time the lady from Michigan was fully involved in it, adding education to her lengthy list of causes. She feared the situation in Los Angles might reflect—in a sort of microcosm—the rest of the state and country. She spearheaded the founding of the Los Angeles High School Community Advisory Committee (becoming its vice president) that ultimately represented 362 schools and had such notables as Ralph Nader and Paul Erlich on its board of directors. She and her colleagues wanted to involve the entire community in educating children. Parents should visit schools on a regular basis. There should be improved counseling services, a special school for incorrigibles (except Genora wanted to know how to define “incorrigible”— perhaps because she herself had been called incorrigible in her early life?), and opportunity classes where students could learn productive skills and become future tax-paying citizens. Parents and teachers should enlarge social contacts by inviting each other to functions at their homes. Efforts should be made to retain black faculty in the Los Angeles schools, and student-teacher committees should strive for good teaching and learning conditions.1 As the old adage tells us, easier said than done.

This council had its work cut out for it. Some of the schools were so bad, Genora claimed, that they should be closed outright. “They are unsafe,” and their educational programs reflect a “sham and waste of money.” Class sizes were too large, there were not enough textbooks, and a third of the students dropped out of school before graduation. Los Angeles city schools, she said, “had the worst reading scores” in the entire country and were not educating children for life in a complex industrial society. Members of school boards, however, seemed not to care. Made up primarily of “capitalists,” she declared, they have “made us pawns in this struggle.”2

With an affiliate of the council called the “People’s Lobby,” Genora set up petition drives to get citizens behind antismog laws after a young student died, presumably from pollution. “How many other children who are developing asthma and cancer and heart conditions are dying—really of the smog and pollutants to their young bodies?” she asked. Nearly 10,000 signatures were obtained in one day. They set up petition booths at shopping centers throughout the city. Genora reported that “we are witnesses to a number of older people who come up to our petition tables with tears in their eyes and tell us they are dying of emphysema.”3 Some shopping center directors tried to block the tables, and the group, represented by lawyers known as “Nader’s Raiders,” went to court against them. The People’s Lobby won as the court decreed that “owners [of shopping centers] may not rely on their private ownership to justify blanket prohibitions on First Amendment activities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.