Poor schools and packed prisons mock Martin Luther King's dream
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
King became an icon because for acted forcefully against segregation, economic inequality and the Vietnam War.
Today's mass protests restore the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. to his militant roots and away from an annual holiday that for many had become a three-day weekend brought to you by a sepia-toned and content-bereft "dream." King, the Black Lives Movement reminds us, did not become a polarizing icon because he picked up litter or painted hallways (all laudable activities), but because he acted forcefully against segregation, economic inequality and the war in Vietnam.
Philly protesters will begin the rally at the headquarters of the beleaguered School District at 1:30 p.m., calling for fair school funding, real police oversight, an end to stop-and-frisk and for raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
On Friday, the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that the number of "intensely segregated schools" in Pennsylvania, "where over 90 percent of students are minorities, have more than doubled in the past two decades." It is a form of "double segregation" — 85 percent of students attending those racially segregated schools are poor.
Outgoing Gov. Tom Corbett's massive budget cuts, alongside unfettered charter school expansion, no doubt pushed schools into crisis. But the basic problem is much deeper. Despite the pervasive talk that American public education is in crisis, the truth is that rich and middle-class districts often excel while poor and downwardly mobile districts everywhere have long struggled to deliver even a second-class education.
Anger at Corbett no doubt played a role in securing his defeat last November. But that anger has not yet been sufficiently organized, as the city's dismal voter turnout makes clear. Now, incoming Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf must deal with Republican legislators, hostile to raising taxes on the rich and on natural gas companies, who are energized by expanded majorities and as indifferent to the plight of Philly students as ever.
Today's protest might sow the seeds of the sort movement that will be necessary if protesters hope to render the pessimistic calculus of partisan Harrisburg vote-counting into a moral imperative. Legislators opposed to funding education might find opposition less tenable if their offices are occupied by students, parents, teachers and religious leaders. Only a movement that is larger and more militant than what we have witnessed over the past four years will save Philly public schools.
"One day the South will recognize its real heroes," King wrote in 1963 while locked up in a Birmingham jail, including "the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake."
More might now be willing to go to jail for justice. But far too many are already imprisoned in what has over the last three decades become the largest prison system on earth. The very same government that so profoundly fails students by furnishing poverty and poor schools is more than happy to incarcerate: More than 2.2 million Americans were behind bars as of 2013, and nearly seven million under some form of correctional control. "If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males — compared to one of every 17 white males," the Sentencing Project found in 2013.
The evils that hundreds of thousands protested during the civil rights era — economic marginalization, segregation and war — remain the watchwords of American public policy. Wealth is redistributed from workers to their bosses, the Black and Latino poor are hyper-segregated in ghettos and taxpayer dollars are diverted away from health or education to the military.
Detractors who say that Black Lives Matter lacks focus should consider the civil rights movement's broad demand for jobs, freedom and peace. Today's movement has expanded its reach and taken a huge step in ensuring its longevity in reclaiming King from his posthumous Hallmark stupor.
Philly activists will win if they, like King and our own militant hellraiser, Cecil B. Moore, refuse to budge. Today should be celebrated as the first Martin Luther King Day of many to follow that goes beyond a day of service or leisure.
