San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
To become literate, must Black, brown men go to prison?
I wasn’t surprised when the daughter of a woman who sold crack across the street from my house brought me a manuscript written by an inmate friend. It was a memoir about 300 pages in length. While Black and brown boys score low on literacy tests in public schools, literacy seems to be flourishing in some of the nation’s prisons.
I learned that in 1974. At about that time, I received an invitation to visit Houston. Part of my schedule included visiting Ramsey Prison. I found myself a passenger in a car traveling to the prison on a highway littered with dead armadillos. I entered a room where stetson-wearing Texas Rangers sat holding their shotguns and was escorted into a classroom. About 30 inmates were sitting there quietly. They had copies of my novel “The Last Days of Louisiana Red,” a book about fratricidal urban warfare. Its morality was like the Westerns we saw when we were kids. Good guys versus bad guys.
I spent about an hour in a Q&A session with prisoners, who asked intelligent questions about the book and had made notes in the margins of their copies. Since that visit, I have been a guest at prisons in Pennsylvania, California and other states.
In the 1980s, I visited Attica with Buffalo Evening News writer Jeff Simon and Professor Celes Tisdale. Tisdale published a book of Attica prison writings in 2022 entitled “When The Smoke Cleared. ” The writings rank favorably with some of the best writings published today.
These writers are part of a tradition in writing. Chester Himes was an inmate when he began publishing in the nation’s leading magazines. The prominent poet Jimi Santiago Baca learned to read and write in prison. Though some dismiss Malcolm X as a pro-Black firebrand, when I met him, I found him acquainted with the writings of Dante and Virgil. He was an inmate at a prison where a philanthropist had donated 2,000 books.
So why do some Black and brown boys and men acquire literacy in prison yet fail in public schools?
Could it be because they are not exposed to Black male
writers like Tisdale? Or because some Black and brown writers who’ve won major awards don’t have access to teaching credentials that would put them in contact with Black and brown boys. The girls do fine. That’s why the majority of those in colleges and universities are women.
Though the media embarrass Black boys by citing low reading scores, white boys also struggle.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston opposed school integration because she said it would deprive Black students of a connection with Black teachers. Literature Professor Leah Milne writes: “Hurston foresaw the benefit of Black students and other students of color seeing more people who look like them in teaching and administrative roles. She correctly predicted that integration
would mean Black teachers and administrators losing their jobs: All-white schools already had better educational resources, teachers, and infrastructure, and white administrators and parents in 1954 were less than receptive to deferring to Black principals, teachers or superintendents. She highlighted this hypocrisy, stating, ‘It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.’ ”
I had one Black teacher in grammar school. She encouraged me and gave me tickets to concerts. Most other teachers, white women, viewed me as a discipline problem. I was reminded of them when a feminist critic Laura Miller called my work “rowdy.”
Is it sexist to point out that 61% of American school teachers
are white women and that some of those individuals are likely some of the same people who clutch their purses when encountering a Black or brown male on an elevator?
In 2015-16, 76.5% of African American students in K-12 were taught by white teachers, and only 7% had African American teachers. Given how few Black teachers there are, I doubt whether the situation has changed.
There were exceptions. A white grammar school principal, a music teacher and two white women in high school. I probably would never have tried my hand at plays had it not been for a white high school teacher named Nanette Lancaster, who insisted that I learn theater. I didn’t know that much about politics in those days, but now I know that she was a right-wing
American firster. She cast me as the doctor in John Van Druten’s stage play, “I Remember Mama.” A progressive would cast me as a member of a dysfunctional household.
Some of the success of prison writers can be attributed to their exposure to male teachers who resemble them and literature they can relate to.
I remember a successful Black Assembly candidate who told me that he learned how to read because he wanted to read Eldrige Cleaver’s “Soul On Ice.”
We also need prison administrators who don’t look away when sadistic guards are brutalizing prisoners or staging gladiator fights, encouraging sexual assault or allegedly placing feces in their food.
They should follow the example of an enlightened prison administrator like former San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who arranged my visit to San Quentin. I’m sure that readers of the local newspaper were surprised to see a graduating class of convicts, who were wearing caps and gowns. This was because of an education program established by Hennessey.
In our magazine, Konch, my daughter Tennessee and I are running a series of installments by a prisoner who lives in a halfway house. He’s an original. He just needs a copy editor. But lucky for him, unlike in the old days, we have Grammarly.
The education community must discover why some prisons succeed where the public school system has failed.
Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated “Central Park Five,” won a seat on the New York City Council. Few politicians possess this elected official’s eloquence. He grew up in prison. He’s not alone. Recently, Yale University awarded degrees to inmates for the first time.
Those who believe in harsh treatment for inmates or tolerate prisons where criminals learn to be more sophisticated at crime don’t seem to understand that when they’re released, they don’t return to the neighborhoods of Northeastern columnists who earn a living by scolding Blacks; they return to neighborhoods like mine.