The Importance of Race in the Classroom.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 3, 1990, p. 18

RACE, CLASS, AND EDUCATION: The Polities of Second-Generation Discrimination by Kenneth J. Meier, Joseph Stewart Jr., and Robert E;. England (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, xiv, 194 pp., $37.50 cloth, $14.95 paper).

Three political scientists present the case for viewing education as a “political process.” They conclude that the most important determinant of discrimination against black children is the proportion of black teachers in the classrooms. “Without the political action that results in more black school board members, which in turn produces more black administrators, who in turn hire more black teachers, second-generation discrimination against black students would be significantly worse.” This is a book that should be useful to school reformers and administrators, especially those equipped to deal with statistics.

Movement Profiles.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16

The Long Haul, an Autobiography by Myles Horton, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. (Doubleday, 1990. xvi, 245 pages.). Whitney M. Young, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights, by Nancy J. Weiss. (Princeton University Press, 1990. xv, 286 pages.).

Whitney Young and Myles Horton represented the breadth of and variety within the civil rights movement. One was black, one white. One held the confidence of corporate and political leaders, one was avowedly radical and worked almost exclusively among the poor and dissidents. One believed in the efficacy of political processes, the other cared but little for policies that did not arise from the understanding of the people. Horton with the help of the Kohls sat down his own story before his death this year and Princeton historian Weiss tells Young’s. I knew and had some working relationship with both men, though I was not close to either. People who knew them will find little in these books to change or deepen their opinions of them. All will find the books useful additions to their knowledge of American reforms, in Horton’s case from the 1930s to the present, in Young’s tragically shorter and intenser period from the mid-1950s to his drowning in 1971. The books are, moreover, interestingly written.

If you want democratic society, wrote Horton, you have to act democratically. “If you want love and brotherhood, you’ve got to incorporate them as you go along, because you can’t just expect them to occur in the future without experiencing them before you get there.” Whitney Young, as I knew him, would believe and act on that rule as consistently as Horton, though, as Professor Weiss writes, he “spent his life making the needs and interests of black Americans comprehensible and compelling to the whites who had the power to do something about them.”–L.W.D.

Of Genteel Hardness.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16

Ely, An Autobiography, by Ely Green. Foreword by Bertram Wyatt Brown, Introduction by Lillian Smith, Afterword by Arthur Ben Chitty. (University of Georgia Press, 1990, xxiv, 246 pages.).

Here is a book that can be read for any number of reasons, beginning with simple pleasure. The present edition is a third incarnation. The first was published by Seabury Press in 1966, with Lillian Smith’s introduction. It was followed in 1970 from the University of Massachusetts Press by Ely, Too Black, Too White, edited and with a foreword by Elizabeth N. and Arthur Ben Chity (the latter having been the book’s discoverer and patron).

Unlike either the 1966 edition or this present one, that of 1970 was of Mr. Green’s whole autobiography. He had lived his first two decades in and around Sewanee, Tennessee. That time is the subject of this edition. In 1912, he fled in fear of his life to Texas. He lived there end elsewhere until 1968. Late in life, this semi-literate man began writing his memoirs. He wrote with a wonderful sense of composition, actions and feelings both tautly expressed. The post-Tennessee part is triple the length of this. I have not read it. Having now read Ely, An Autobiography, I am resolved to do so presently.

There may be no ocher place anywhere quite like Sewanee, and at the turn of the century when Ely Green was a boy and then a young man it was no less distinctive. Ely’s father was of the white elite–and most of the town seems to have known his identity; his mother was a black housemaid. Hence the title of the University of Massachusetts edition. Neither the place nor person is, therefore, typical, and so the reader becomes primarily absorbed in this remarkable man’s recollection of his growing up, of his realization of self within a society that gave him no identity, or none that he would accept. But because he did live within the black society, the book is also revelatory of the hardness of that, even in what may well have been the most genteel spot in the South.–L.W.D.