A Dream Deferred

At 7:50am the bell rang as twenty-five or more seventh graders poured through the door of Mr. Pennix’s classroom. For fifteen minutes I had been wandering about the classroom observing the American history posters upon the walls around me. In vain, I scanned the posters upon which the faces of white American heroes were proudly displayed for faces of color. As the time drew near for classes to begin, I noticed the presence of inquisitive brown eyes peering through the window of Mr. Pennix’s locked door. Before I knew it, a mob of middle schoolers had swarmed like flies around the classroom door, waiting impatiently for Mr. Pennix’s indication that it was time to come in. Whether their eagerness to enter the classroom stemmed from a fascination with my presence or from sheer excitement at the prospect of learning about mixed numbers and improper fractions, I shall never know.

Calvin Pennix, a 25 year old black man, teaches both mathematics and history at View Park Middle School in South Central, Los Angeles. During the time that I observed Mr. Pennix’s eighth grade U.S. history course, I was simultaneously amazed and disturbed by what I noticed. Mr. Pennix stood at the front of his classroom and proceeded to read off a list of questions that quizzed students on their knowledge of individuals like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin to mention a few. Staring at the backs of more than twenty braided, waved, twisted, permed, weaved, kinky heads of hair I began to reflect upon my own experience in the educational system. I attributed the subjectivity of my middle school and high school curricula to the fact that I attended a predominantly white school. As such, the Euro-centrism that characterized the curricula at schools where the students and staff looked like me surprised me to say the least.

After class Mr. Pennix commented that, “The state of California gives us a list of things that our students need to know by the end of the school year, and I have to find the material to teach it. The history that we’re required to teach is definitely biased. We start at The Scientific Revolution and end at The Civil War which is the only place where black people show up. I try to parallel everything that we do to black history because there’s absolutely nothing about the contributions of blacks. The worksheet that I handed out at the end of class that talked about blacks in the Revolutionary War was mine. It wasn’t part of the curriculum. If the head of the department were to come into my class and see me handing out that worksheet, I could get into a lot of trouble. But I don’t care.” When I asked Mr. Pennix why he feels obligated to incorporate blacks into his curriculum, he answered, “I try to incorporate black history where I can because I think it’s important to open my students’ eyes even if it’s in some small way.”

In 2006 I spent the month of January teaching history and mathematics at the all-black Frederick Douglass Middle School in South Central, Los Angeles. My brother, Drew, taught about blacks in science, the various gene inhibitions of viral proteins, and HIV while I discussed the contributions of blacks as Africans and African Americans. Throughout our presentations, the students stared in awe as Drew took them on a step-by-step journey through the cell and as I introduced them to individuals like W. E. B. Du Bois, who was the father of sociology; Granville T. Woods, who was the black Thomas Edison; Medgar Evars, who for a season, was the civil rights movement in Mississippi; and Langston Hughes, who challenged America with a question yet unanswered, “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?”

Evidence of newfound pride was made plain upon the kids’ faces as they discovered that Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was the first person to perform an open heart surgery; Charles Drew saved millions of lives through the invention of the blood bank; Lewis Howard Latimer, not Thomas Edison, invented the carbon filament in light bulbs, and that yes, American history belongs to them too.

For centuries, blacks have accepted a position of marginalization as majority white society parades biased and misconstrued models of Americanism. Assumptions about white entitlement are affirmed by the society in which we live; a society that functions on a distorted image of democracy yet is sustained by inequality. Curricula tend to glaze over, exclude, or completely mute the systemic oppression intermingled with the ideology of American liberty, hence a race of children continue to struggle in classrooms without a history to tell them that America belongs to them as well. Reality proves that today’s black children are left without an image of blackness of which they can be proud; without knowing who they are, they have no means of conceptualizing what they can become.

Later that day one of the boys approached me grinning and said, “Miss Bass, without black people, we’d still be in the dark!” His laughter as he picked up his backpack and ran down the stairs from the second story classroom is a sound that will forever resound in my ears.