Detroit's sands are shifting like quicksand

Note: This post originally appeared as a column in the March 2012 edition of Detroit Native Sun.

One night in 2009 at Detroit’s Scarab Club, I read an excerpt from A Life on the RUN – Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice, my tell-all memoir on our troubled city and schools. Local poet Laura Apel told the audience that it’s good to write autobiographical poetry, too — and she read her most personal and gripping poem, which inspired me to pen this one, titled "Shifting Sands":

In nascent 1950s nether lands,

I sported speed — stocked sheer

within my bones,

Consuming it and burning it with glee,

While beating the best

sprinters in the world.

Then blazing yet, I after-burned it still,

Down dwindling days, in dedicated thrall

To man- and womankind (the latter long,

And far too much indeed, I need to say).

The current leaders in suburban schools

Where years before I’d brought

Black principals

Lent no strong hand enabling

children there

To hear our young Black

president’s address.

My castle crumbled so, in shifting sands.

Yet my cause consumes me even now—

And on one sunless, late November day,

A slouching lout ingenuously scrawled

On borrowed loose-leaf in

his all-Black class,

"Doctor T., you cool—you be the man!"

His old re-treaded teacher duly basks

And glories in that priceless scrap of scrawl

I fasten to my overflowing heart—

With dreams untold, in ever-shifting sands.

 In my poem, I was referring to a speech President Obama made to the nation that some school districts in white neighborhoods wouldn’t let their students hear.　 This poem actually manages to squeeze my memoirs’ 430 pages into just those eighteen lines of iambic pentameter—but you still need to get the book to view the whole picture!　 Anthony Neely, a press secretary to then-Mayor Dennis Archer, pronounced it the best book on Detroit he has ever read, and Archer himself called it "Spellbinding."　　　

You also need to get What OLD MEN Know, my newest book, because in addition to making savage fun of the Republicans (Congressman Clarke ordered a copy for every Democrat in Congress), it contains "timeless wisdom," according to Dr. Wayne Dyer.　

　　　　

The sands may not be shifting yet in the suburbs, but they’re definitely shifting now in Detroit—for the worse.　 Our city teeters over the abyss of Legislature-mandated receivership, and Lansing continues its decade-long hijacking of the schools by assigning non-educators and non-Detroiters to run them and rename them to kill our sense of community.　 Under their "leadership," they have plunged our once-nationally predominant district to the lowest ebb in its 143-year history. 

However, while education secretary Arne Duncan has pronounced us "educational ground zero," and a recent survey called our city the most violent in America, it is well to remember that we aren’t alone among urban centers.　 New York has many teachers on long-term layoff from shuttered schools, Los Angeles’ gangs are out of control, and Chicago’s teen violence problem proportionately approaches ours. Unquestionably, though, the ultimate key to our city’s rebirth lies in our public schools.　 We’ve got to take them back from the corporate crocodiles.　 Detroit’s future depends on it.　　　

Forgive DPS' Debt

 

Note: This post originally appeared as a column in the December 2011 edition of Detroit Native Sun.

Before my sponsors ran out of money in 2007, in the wake of George W. Bush's wars and his deregulation of the banks, I had a show on NewsTalk 1200 whereupon I brought distinguished guests to opine on how to repair the broken Detroit Public Schools (DPS). In my memoirs, "A Life on the RUN: Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice" (www.harmonieparkpress.com), I recount the commentary of Jennifer Granholm, Hansen Clark, Ken Cockrel, the late Clyde Cleveland, Dr. David Snead, ARISE! Detroit director Luther Keith, then-NCCJ director Dan Krichbaum, Children's Hospital president Herman Gray, retired Naval commander David Points, former World Boxing champ Hilmer Kenty, and 40 other luminaries when they came on the John Telford Show to offer their advice for fixing our failing schools.

When then-state legislator (and now DPS school board member) Lamar Lemmons III came on the show, we discussed my column in the Michigan Chronicle that had expressed our mutual plea to the legislature to forgive the $250 million debt that the DPS "reform" board had accrued. The 1999 state takeover of DPS via Public Act 10 was Gov. John Engler's and the Republican-dominated legislature's doing, not the thus-disenfranchised Detroit voters. It was - and remains - our opinion that this same Republican-dominated legislature should assume the responsibility for cleaning up its own mess. Several listeners who called in at the time agreed with us.

Former Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb also called upon the legislature to forgive that debt, along with an additional $150 million debt that DPS had accumulated since the second and more recent board disempowerment. Mayor Dave Bing has made a similar request of the Legislature regarding $250 million in revenue sharing they owe our city. Bobb wanted to use the $400 million in tobacco settlement money to cover that entire debt - old and new. I supported this if indeed they were willing to use the tobacco money to forgive the entire debt and give rightful control of our schools back to our elected school board. A majority of current board members make this the best board we've had in more than 11 years, even though it is now illegally dis-empowered. It also has its best president in over a decade in the person of Anthony Adams, with whom I interacted on a weekly basis when I was the executive director of DPS' Community Affairs Division and he was a board attorney - before the then-acting chief of staff fired me for starting to organize a grass-roots watchdog parent organization.

P.A. 10 violated both the Michigan Constitution and the U.S. Constitution by disenfranchising Detroiters and barring formerly elected board members from appointment to the "reform" board. Both constitutions forbid the denial of of voting rights based on race, yet Detroit's 85 percent black population was denied - and is again being denied - those rights. Despite the most recent emergency manager legislation inflicted upon our schools, the onset of charter schools, the city's dwindling demographic count, and Bush's unjust wars and collusive bank deregulation, most of DPS' fiscal woes can be placed at the doorstep of the 'reform' administration and the legislators who engendered it.

In my newest book, "What Old Men Know - A Definitive Dictionary and Almanac of Advice", I define "legacy" as "An inheritance for all posterity." We old men's legacy should be to have worked to make our beleaguered city worthy of its children. That's what we all need to make happen in DPS - and happen soon and permanently.