Universities Record Drop In Black Admissions

sybbie719
Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:07:38 +0000

I remember when my daughter was in 2nd grade she had to interview her grandparents on how life was when they were kids. She interviewed her paternal grandparents (as my parents were deceased).

Her grandmother told her about going to school in a on room school house in Fayetville, NC. During school they had to go out and gather wood for heat, watch the younger kids and even cook during school. Fo her going to school was a luxury because her mother worked as a domestic and her father worked in the fields.

The highlight of school was when they went out to sing. Her grandfather went to school “in town” in Wilmington , NC and told her the story of having to walk 2 miles to school during the time of the Jim Crow laws. He told my daughter that he was grown before he had a coat that someone else had not worm before him.

When they moved to NY he got a night job as a pressman in a dry cleaners and she worked days was a stock clerk in a department store. They took turns going back to school where she eventually became a teacher and he became a minister.

I told my daughter about my parents experience growing up in the rural south and how they both missed a lot of school because they had to help out when the havest came in. My mother always stressed to us the value of an eduation because when she finished 8th grade you had to go to high school “in town”. She told us the only thing she ever asked her father for was to go to school and he told her that she could not afford it. My mother always wanted to be a teacher and the closest that she got to teaching was teaching us how to read, write and do math before we started school. I remember having a set of world book enclyopedias and the dictionaries had the green pages where there were spelling words at all grade levels and vocabulary words . She used to test us on those words once a week growing up. I mother was a firm believer in not continuing the cylce and said that her situation would never happen to her childdren. Even though there was 10 of us growing up 7 completed college (thankfully because CUNY was free, I remember starting college the first year you had to pay) While we were all smart kids, my mother knew nothing about the college process and the opportunites that were available.

When I became a parent, I knew that I was going to be an active participant in the educating of my child. I have always raised my child with the knowledge that many people have shed blood and died so that she could have the opportunities that she has today. I told her that Brown vs, the board of education was passed a few years before I was born. Because we lived in NYC, it did not have a major impat on my going to school but for others its was a monumentous occasion. For her the best way to honor her history is to do well in school, get the best education she possibly can and to excercise her right to vote.

There are days when I read these threads and the talks about AA always comes back to a black person taking someone’s spot. But we tend to forget the blacks and whites that marched, were beaten and jailed to have the freedoms that so many others were able to take to take advantage of today. We tend to forget those word

Give me your poor and tired and huddled masses yearning to breathe free
It saddens my spirit that the same AA system that has helped so many, to hear those that have been helped by it now decry that same system. But yet we don’t talk about the fact that blacks have not been the biggest benefactors of AA.

The one thing I loved about the south, was going to church, because someone always sang a song that lifted your spirits

So now, I will leave many of those who complain about AA , you need to be reminded of the old spiritual because at some level it is everyone’s song.

How, I got over , How, I got over
My sould looks back and wonders how I got over.