On behalf of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), I congratulate President Barack Obama for becoming the 44th President of the United States. His acceptance of the oath of office with hand laid on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible birthed a new kind of freedom in the American Republic.
Obama’s presidency, as have past presidencies, ushers in a bold opportunity for the nation to address critical policy issues of the day. In Lincoln’s America, slavery reigned as a critical issue of the day. In Obama’s America, another form of slavery reigns supreme.
President Lincoln in his first inaugural speech delivered on March 4, 1861 reiterated a theme employed during his campaign for the executive office: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” Yet the rush for liberty upset the natural order of things.
Lincoln’s actions after his inauguration as the 16th President of the United States proved decisive in uprooting the peculiar institution; thus opening 148 years later the doors of the White House—built by slave labor—to a beautiful Black family with millions of cheering, multicolored faces waving America’s red, white and blue flag from sea to shining sea.
President Obama’s inaugural call to transform American schools to meet the demand of a new age is a declaration to interfere directly with the institution of educational slavery. The type of institution that equips our high school students with a passport to work on a prison plantation; that offers up our elementary and middle school children as fodder for a drug culture hungry to digest untapped potential; that mislabels gifted students as inattentive and eager learners as hyperactive; and that leaves American college graduates unprepared for too many jobs. This tenacity of failure—and its ugly twin…the pretense of progress—gnaws daily at the soul of American education, thereby eroding the foundation of our Constitution, our form of government, and our economy. Abolishing educational slavery is necessary. Therefore, upsetting the natural order of things is inevitable.
Not because President Obama identified a common enemy of school reform to conquer, or because he unveiled a ten-point plan for action. Rather, because he inherits an American system of education—public, private, home school, virtual—divided by class as much as Lincoln’s America was divided by caste. As in Lincoln’s day, there is a rising tide of discontent for slavery—this time it is educational. Also similar to Lincoln’s day, Americans look to the president for leadership, particularly if a season of change propels him into the fray of reconstructing education policy—whether he made reform part of his inaugural speech or not.
For example, nothing in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first inaugural speech delivered on January 20, 1953, after taking the oath of office with his hand laid on George Washington’s Bible, hinted at an interest in education reform—even as he referenced in passing “the spiritual knowledge of our free schools.” Yet Eisenhower’s transition to the presidency thrust him knee-deep in an ideologically-spirited Second Civil War following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
President John F. Kennedy made no reference at all to education in his January 20, 1961 inaugural speech. But the brutal reaction to a federal demand to expel Jim Crow from American public schools at all levels of learning encouraged President Kennedy to address the nation by television on June 11, 1961. Kennedy referred to the educational matter of the day as “a moral crisis” in need of an executive and legislative action.
Neither did President Lyndon B. Johnson address schools nor education in his 1965 inaugural speech about the American Covenant. However, signs of the time demanded a presidential prerogative in American education. So President Johnson spearheaded a federal civil rights movement for equal educational opportunity—echoing in spirit—covenantal themes billowing through the singing of “America the Beautiful” by Leontyne Price during Johnson’s only presidential inauguration. Aretha Franklin’s queenly performance of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” surely offers a nice springboard for President Obama to launch a new era where the nation’s systems of education promote liberty, freedom and options to pursue the American dream.
Poet William B. Yeats assures us in the Second Coming that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” American presidents have used their capital during crucial seasons in our nation’s history to untangle the grip of intolerance that threatens the speed of progress. “Our schools fail too many” is an intolerable fact President Obama acknowledged in his inaugural speech. Now that he is pregnant with desire, millions of families—most particularly the poor and working-class—are positioned as a midwife, ready to birth a new kind of educational freedom in America.