It all would be so much easier to sort out if seven young black men had gone to a lunch counter in Decatur and been told they wouldn’t get served.
It would be so much easier if seven young black men had wanted to register to vote in Decatur and been turned away. Or if they had simply wanted to enroll at Eisenhower High School, new students with a fresh slate, and been blocked at the schoolhouse door.
More than 30 years after Greensboro and Montgomery and Philadelphia, Miss., we know the answers to those questions. Give Jesse Jackson credit, he helped to provide the answers.
But what’s happening in Decatur is something different. America’s oldest and most vexing problem, racism, has run up against America’s newest and most frightening problem, violence in schools. This time, Jesse Jackson doesn’t quite have the answer.
There was a big fight in the stands during an Eisenhower football game on Sept. 17. Apparently the only weapons used were fists, not guns or knives or pipe bombs. No one was seriously hurt. But the school board came down hard on some of the students. They were expelled for two years.
That was harsh, too harsh, because it amounted to an academic death penalty for those kids. Everyone knows that if they were barred from their school for two years, they would never go back.
But I’m not going to kick the school board, nor assume the penalty would have been more modest had the students been white.
You watch that videotape and it is frightening, seeing that fight roll through the stands, seeing the people scramble to get out of harm’s way. I have a daughter who’s a freshman in high school, and I watch that tape and think that if she had been in the stands, in the way, I’d still be purple with rage.
The weapons in Decatur were fists, but the backdrop was Columbine High School and guns and murder. And that probably has more to do with the school board’s overreaction than the race of the students.
Look at what has been happening around the country.
A Kansas school canceled classes just on the rumor somebody was going to bring in a gun. A Downstate Illinois 7-year-old was suspended for bringing a nail clipper to school. A New Jersey teen was suspended and arrested for drawing a picture of a man in the cross hairs of a rifle sight. A Texas 7th-grader was arrested for writing a scary Halloween essay. In the last year, at least three suburban students have been expelled for bringing toy guns to school. I don’t know that anyone has done a survey, but I would guess that many of the students who were punished in these seemingly crazy post-Columbine cases are white.
Ever since the shootings in Littleton, Colo., every parent sitting on a school board in this country has been on notice. You can’t let it happen here. What are you going to do? Cops in the hallways? Metal detectors at every door? Daily backpack searches? Mass expulsions?
And every parent on a school board has known that if they go only halfway on security and something terrible happens, somebody dies on school grounds, they’ll be haunted by it. And they’ll be blamed. Have all these overreaching school board people gone off the deep end? No. This is a time for a shaking out, for figuring out how schools can be made safe without being armed camps. A lot of mistakes are being made, but they’re not necessarily being made by bad people.
The confrontation in Decatur has revolved around race. Jesse Jackson says it isn’t race–“it’s not black and white, it’s wrong and right”–but race is underlying the whole thing, from the school board vote on the expulsions that divided along racial lines to the students’ lawsuit claiming their civil rights have been violated.
Where Jackson has miscalculated is in understanding America’s oldest problem but not its newest problem–the real fear of school violence.
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When the Decatur school board offered a compromise Monday night–one-year expulsion and enrollment in an alternative school, Jackson should have declared victory. But he insisted that the fighting students be returned to Eisenhower High right away. He lamented the lost education opportunities for several chronic truants while his made-for-TV confrontation kept 950 students out of school for two days.
By Wednesday, after the videotape of the fight had clearly undermined Jackson’s position, he started to retreat. Jackson opened the door to accepting an arrangement similar to the one he had rejected two days earlier.
But even after he viewed the videotape, Jackson declared it was a milder dust-up than the average hockey or National Basketball Association game. He compared it to the New York Knicks playing the Miami Heat. In likening that scary Decatur melee to millionaire jocks at play, Jesse Jackson looked as out of touch as Jesse Jackson has ever looked in his life.
Jesse Jackson’s political career is over. The old and flirtatious question–Will he run for president?–is now moot. What Jackson brings to the country now are the skills he brought as a young preacher fresh from his service to Martin Luther King Jr., an ability to bring awareness and clarity to issues of justice and fairness. Thus far, Jackson hasn’t shown his old mastery of either trait in Decatur.