White House Panel on Sustaining the Dream through Education

Hugh Price, former head of the Urban League and civil rights luminary (and a professor of mine from graduate school) explained yesterday at a White House Panel on Sustaining the Dream through Education that "schools can not do it alone and should not go it alone." A part of the ongoing celebration in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, Price was joined by Jim Shelton (Acting Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Education), David Johns (Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Education Excellence for African Americans), Rev. Brenda Girton-Mitchell (Director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the US Department of Education), and other leaders from the White House, Department of Education, and the civil rights community. I was honored to be among them.

Mrs. Dorothy Height

Both Rev. Brenda Girton-Mitchell and Hugh Price remembered leaders of the past, while calling on leaders of the future. They paraphrased the words of Dorothy Height (the only woman to be on the stage during King's "I Have a Dream" speech) that "the table is big enough," and it's up to us to make sure community leaders have a seat at that decision-making table. Rev. Girton-Mitchell recalled the moment she met Height --- though the leader of a large organization, she was licking stamps for a mailing. Height explained she wouldn't ask others to do any work she wasn't willing to do herself. 

I had the honor of meeting Height when I was a student at the University of Virginia. I was on the leadership of the University's Minority Rights Coalition (representing the National Organization for Women, and later, serving as chair of the MRC). She was sitting in a chair, and I remember kneeling down next to her. She placed her hand on mine, looked me in the eyes, and encouraged us to keep working for equity. Likewise, yesterday, Price reminded us all that 50 years after the March on Washington, there is "urgent and unfinished business to do." According to the most recent data available, today in America, about half of African American males (52%) do not graduate from high school on time -- but that's a 10 percentage point increase from 10 years prior. So, while that's encouraging news, and success is more common than failure, there is much work to do. As he said, schools can't do it alone, so we must all continue to step up, and step in.