Doing More With Less

This past May, my mother told me that my father, Clinton Collins, Sr., was probably going to be posthumously inducted into his high school hall of fame. Right about that same time, actor Bill Cosby began catching hell from certain so-called African-American leaders and their liberal apologists because he said publicly what most black people have said privately—the teen pregnancies, the underachievement, and the gangbanging—ain’t all Mr. Charlie’s fault. Cosby recently went one step further and told those who fault him for airing “dirty laundry”: “Your dirty laundry gets out of school every day about 2:30….It’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they are hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling and going nowhere.”

Initially, I did not link one event—a well-deserved recognition for a Mississippi Civil Rights pioneer—with the controversy surrounding Cosby’s observations. However, during my trip last month with my mother and sisters to accept my father’s award, I came to understand why Cosby is so angry that many younger African-Americans have squandered what my father’s generation bought through sacrifice, courage, and just plain guts.

My father graduated in 1946 from Oak Park High School, Laurel, Mississippi’s black high school. Before the school opened in 1929, Laurel did not provide any formal education for its black citizens beyond the eighth grade. Whites saw the high school primarily as a place where, in the parlance of the times, the “local Nigras” could learn a trade. However, the black people of Laurel and the black teachers at Oak Park saw something far greater: a place where students could acquire the education to escape the feudal confines of a racist and dirt-poor Mississippi.

My father’s life growing up in small-town Mississippi in the thirties and early forties was hard. He knew first-hand the stomach pangs from going to bed hungry. White folks called him “nigger” so much that he was surprised when they did not. He used an outhouse until he was seventeen years old.

The other students at Oak Park also came from what by today’s standards would be Third World-level poverty, but the school’s all-black faculty did not permit that as an excuse for mediocre work. To keep the white folks happy, they made sure every student learned a “trade.” They also taught them how to write well, made sure they read great works of literature, and ensured that everyone learned “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” an anthem of black pride and old-fashioned patriotism.

In other words, they were taught that they could achieve. They learned to shun mediocrity and to be proud of their African-American heritage.

At the Oak Park hall-of-fame induction ceremony, I saw a group of proud, happy people whose collective credentials would be impressive in any setting. Oak Park graduates include opera star Leontyne Price, Olympic gold medalist Ralph Boston, university professors, medical doctors, lawyers, real estate moguls. Sitting there in Laurel, I thought about my North Minneapolis neighborhood and all the dysfunctions that exist there—teen pregnancies, trash-dumping, drug-dealing—and the collective accomplishments of the Oak Park crowd become even more impressive.

How did generations of Oak Park students achieve more in the face of overwhelming adversity than many of today’s African-American kids, who have barely swallowed crumbs of the crap my dad was forced to eat every day?

Then it came to me. Pain—induced by hard-core racism and the segregation it spawned—motivated the Oak Park crowd to take affirmative steps to improve their lives. What’s more, their families, most of which had a father at the helm, supported the teachers. And for the teachers, education was not just a paycheck—it was a calling.

Each speaker in his own way said largely the same thing. Retired Army General David Price, who graduated with my dad in the Class of 1946, told of being rousted out of a theater by the assistant principal while cutting chemistry class. “Hopefully appreciation of your education will come later,” he was admonished. “But you are sure as hell going to class right now.”

If Oak Park could do so much with so little, then young African-Americans have few excuses losing ground with the far greater resources available to them now.