Education as the great equalizer

“We have come a long, long way, but we have a long way to go.”

Those words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. more than 65 years ago at an NAACP rally still ring true today.

His words come to mind just a few days after the anniversary of his assassination on April 4, 1968.

Our community has plenty of progress to celebrate.

In doing research, one striking example of that forward movement involved Black women.

In 1940, 60 percent of employed Black women worked in domestic service; today, fewer than 2 percent do, while 60 percent of working Black women hold white-collar jobs.

Black people are a constant presence as candidates for public office, on college campuses, on athletic fields, in entertainment and a host of other fields.

One need only drive through several Richmond area neighborhoods where Black people live, attend school and worship.

We have come a long way from the days when just a scant 5 percent of Black men were engaged in white-collar work of any kind, while the majority made do with ill-paid, insecure manual jobs.

In March, the unemployment rate for Black individuals dropped to a record low of 5 percent.

There are plenty of challenges and issues, not the least of which is the level of gunfire in our communities. Disparities in health and longevity still plague Black and Brown people.

But there remains an inexplicable disparity that would appall Dr. King and calls for greater attention – the persistent and unresolved educational gap between Black and white students.

We have many examples of educational success. But in general, results on measurement tests show a significant gap between Black students and white students in math, science, reading and writing.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, educational measures showed dramatic learning gains among Black students.

Somehow that progress has stalled. It is as if there is less faith in learning and education, which Dr. King regarded as the great equalizer.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card on what students know in elementary and secondary schools, continues to show a gap of 20 to 30 percentage points in scores for Black students compared with their white counterparts.

Others have called education the civil rights issue of our time. Word knowledge, reading comprehension, reasoning and math skills affect job opportunities that increasingly demand specialized skills and technological savvy.

Unless everyone has come to believe that Black children cannot learn as well as white children, this continuing disparity is cause for alarm.

It starts at home. Parents are the most important educators. We remember our own parents taking action if we did not earn good grades. And in those days, good meant excellent. Attending class, paying attention, completing homework assignments and following the teacher’s instructions not only were demanded, but expected. Parents, particularly mothers, knew they would be in trouble with their child’s teacher if they did not attend parent-teacher conferences or show up for PTA meetings.

Yet, learning is a personal thing. No matter how hard they try, none of our teachers can take the knowledge they have and transfer it through some kind of mind meld.

If our progress is to continue as Dr. King envisioned, it is time to drop the excuses and to reinstate the importance of reading, writing and arithmetic. If we want our children to succeed, then this must become our top priority.

Clarence Thomas and high court’s low ethical standards

It must be more than a little embarrassing for a Supreme Court justice to lament that he took some bad legal advice.

But the embarrassment will be worth it for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas if it helps him to get out from under the bigger embarrassments reported by the investigative news service ProPublica.

I’m refer ring to his fail ure to report more than two decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury trips around the world on the sort of super yacht and private jets lifestyle that I usually associate with the Roy family on HBO’s “Succession.”

The largesse came courtesy of Harlan Crow, a Dallas billionaire and longtime friend of Justice Thomas’ and his wife. The core of the controversy is not so much that Justice Thomas received the gifts but that he did not disclose receiving them.

For example, Justice Thomas did disclose a 2015 gift from Mr. Crow—a bronze bust of abolitionist Frederick Douglass valued at $6,484, ProPublica’s report said. But his reports don’t mention the vacations and other travel on Mr. Crow’s plane.

On Friday, more than 24 hours after ProPublica’s report, Justice Thomas responded in a statement that he and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, were among the “dearest friends” of Harlan and Kathy Crow, and, “as friends do,” had joined the Crows on family trips for more than 25 years.

He also pleaded innocent to any suspicions that he was trying to slip past ethics rules. Since his early days on the court, Justice Thomas’ statement said, he was advised by “colleagues and others in the judiciary” that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable.”

Well, that may sound lovely, as far as the Thomases and Crows are concerned but, in today’s fashionable parlance, it’s not a good look.

In that vein, ProPublica couldn’t help but compare Justice Thomas’ luxurious vacationing among the rich and famous with the modest “RV park” reg’larguy version he describes in a documentary financed partly by Mr. Crow.

“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,” ProPublica quoted Justice Thomas as saying. “I come from regular stock, and I prefer that—I prefer being around that.”

Well, I don’t think anyone should begrudge Justice Thomas’ enjoyment of an old friend’s generosity, as long as he discloses it. That way, in keeping with our nation’s democratic principles of governance and accountability, we all get a chance to be the judge.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said his panel “will act” based on the ProPublica report, although he did not specify what steps they would take.

We probably have a clue in another bill, the Supreme Court Ethics Act, that was introduced earlier this year to close what Sen. Durbin called “the inexcusable Supreme Court loophole” in federal judicial ethics rules.

“The highest court in the land shouldn’t have the lowest ethical standards,” Sen. Durbin said.

He makes a good point. In fact, a federal statute already governs gifts to judges. But, perhaps because it was produced by arguing lawyers, its wording is open to interpretation and the justices have questioned whether it can be constitutionally applied to them.

To end that confusion and clarify the value of ethical conduct, the proposed Supreme Court Ethics Act calls for a code of conduct for the Supreme Court and a mechanism for the public to report potentially unethical conduct by justices.

Judges below the Supreme Court are instructed to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Another lynching in Tennessee

The abolitionist journalist

Ida B. Wells’ quest to document lynchings began when three of her friends, Tommy Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, were lynched because white people were envious of their economic success.

Mr. Moss, a highly regarded pastor, postal worker (a great job in the South in the 1890s), and activist started the People’s Grocery with two of his friends in the Curve area of Memphis, Tenn., partly because the white owner held a monopoly and provided substandard service to Black shoppers. The white owner chafed at the competition and that Black men dared to stand up to him. When two youths got into a scuffle over marbles, white men went to confront Black men at the People’s Grocery.

Shots were exchanged, and three Black men were eventually incarcerated, then lynched. Tommy Moss was a dear friend of Ida B. Wells. Her outrage at that lynching propelled her into documenting lynching around the South.

What would Mrs. Wells write today about how the Tennessee legislature politically lynched Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, two young Black Democrats who protested that legislature’s inaction after the massacres of three children and three adults at the Nashville Covenant School? The details are less important than the fact that the shooter used automatic weapons, had an arsenal, and was prepared to massacre others. In the face of this carnage, the Tennessee state legislature refused to act on measures curtailing the ownership of automatic weapons. Thus, three legislators joined others protesting the inaction. In addition to the two Justins, a white female legislator, Gloria Johnson, was threatened with expulsion. She avoided it by one vote.

Tommy Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart were lynched because they dared take a stand against the economic exploitation of a white grocer whose monopoly power denied Black shoppers fair prices and hassle-free shopping experiences.

Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were expelled from the Tennessee legislature for taking a stand against the gun violence that their fellow lawmakers refused to take a stand on. The Nashville Metro Council unanimously voted to reinstate Justin Jones, but he may have to run to regain his seat in a special election. As of this writing, Justin Pearson is waiting to find out whether he will be reappointed to his seat by the Shelby County Board of Commission, although some worry that state legislators may retaliate against Memphis.

Ida B. Wells was a principled woman whose writing about lynching resulted in her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, being destroyed. She was threatened with lynching and left Memphis for New York, where she continued writing. She was undeterred by her pointed writing putting her in physical jeopardy.

Like Mrs. Wells, the two Justins were undeterred by the potential consequences of their anti-gun protest. Like Mrs. Wells, they are a profile in courage and conviction.

Both Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are under 30. The resistance to their activism must encourage other young people to be similarly active. Unfortunately, too often, young people are discouraged from political participation. Many don’t vote because they find it cumbersome or because they feel it doesn’t make a difference. But the Justins are not only making a difference but inspiring others to do the same thing. People are thronging to Nashville, the state capital, to protest both the treatment of the Justins, but also the inaction of the legislature in the face of gun violence.

The Tennessee legislature behaved unjustly in expelling the Justins. Their selective discipline of these young men is in sharp contrast to their treatment of Rep. Paul Sherrell, who advocated “hanging from a tree” as a form of capital punishment. Sherrell offered a tepid apology after members of the Black Caucus called his resignation or, at the very least, censure from his colleagues. He was not rebuked. He did not resign. He was unscathed by his abhorrent statements. He apologized for his “poor judgment,” but it was more than poor judgment that lynched Tommy Moss and his colleagues.

May the treatment of the Justins inspire us to resist racism. One of the signs outside the State Capitol said it succinctly. “No Justins, no peace.”

The writer is an economist, author, and dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at Cal State LA.

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That’s an excellent standard that should be fundamental to all of the Supreme Court’s business. None of the justices should feel insulted or inconvenienced by the need to protect their own integrity—on which rests the rule of law itself.

Despite his reputation for abundant silence on the bench, Justice Thomas has spoken wisely and at length in other forums about the importance of honesty, integrity and the danger of victimhood mentalities and entitlement attitudes.

Whether his failure to file all of his disclosure statements resulted from bad legal advice or not, he is hardly the only person who needs to have a code of ethics to help end that confusion.

The public needs it too. The demands of self-government call on all citizens to appreciate sound standards of ethical conduct—and then do our best to live by them.

The writer is a syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.

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