Last year, the Alabama Humanities Foundation honored The Rev. Shuttlesworth with a resolution, applauding “his lifetime of dedication and service to humankind and his unwavering belief and courage in upholding the dignity of all human beings…” Below is the full resolution, presented to The Rev. Shuttlesworth on September 13, 2010.

We invite you to share your comments about this courageous civil rights leader. Or submit a blog post sharing your thoughts to: jdome@ahf.net.

A Resolution Honoring the Reverend Fred Lee Shuttlesworth

WHEREAS, Fred Shuttlesworth has helped shape Alabama and American history through his tireless advocacy for civil liberties and struggle against racial discrimination.  He marched for justice and equality with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., organized boycotts and Freedom Rides, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and

WHEREAS, a loving servant of God, Fred Shuttlesworth began his 58-year ministerial career in the rural Alabama church, prior to accepting the call for leadership at Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, where the Movement for change began, and

WHEREAS, his historical legacy has been memorialized in two scholarly biographies, Step by Step and A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and

WHEREAS, he has received numerous awards and citations including the Presidential Citizen’s Award in 2001, induction into the International Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2005, and the renaming of the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport in 2008, and

WHEREAS, Fred Shuttlesworth has generously given of his time, energy, abilities, and resources to better the world around him.  We note that it is through the efforts of public-spirited individuals such as he, who are dedicated to preserving the inalienable rights and freedoms of all citizens, that our nation continues to grow and prosper.  We applaud him on his lifetime of dedication and service to humankind and his unwavering belief and courage in upholding the dignity of all human beings; therefore be it

RESOLVED That we, the members of the Alabama Humanities Foundation, in adopting this Resolution, honor Fred Shuttlesworth for his exemplary record of public advocacy that embodies the values and perspectives of the humanities.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this Resolution be formally presented to Reverend Fred Lee Shuttlesworth on this day, September 13, 2010.

By Bob Stewart, AHF executive director

Compared to railroads, riverboats and covered wagons, hitchhiking doesn’t hold a lofty place in America’s transportation history. But there’s no doubt of its place in popular culture. Think of Jack Kerouac (On the Road), John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), and Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), to name just three writers who have included hitchhiking in their classic works. Science fiction writers have even described interstellar hitchhiking (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and inter-dimensional hitchhiking (Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice). Add to these literary works the many references to hitchhiking in music and film, and it’s safe to say that the lone traveler thumbing a ride on an interstate ramp or a dusty two-lane highway will remain an icon of the American imagination.

Fortunately for my generation, the golden age of hitchhiking on a mass scale occurred when some of us needed it most—the 1960s and early 1970s. Not that we were penniless or homeless. But in much of the country, hitchhiking was simply an accepted mode of travel without having to invest in a personal vehicle. Until I bought my first car in 1974, I relied on the outstretched thumb for a good part of my travels and transportation during my first two years of college. In the Five College area of Massachusetts (Amherst-Hampshire-Mount Holyoke-Smith-UMass), a reliable, free bus system allowed you to easily move around from campus to campus for classes, parties, etc. But the area was also filled with students and “townies” offering equally reliable, free—and safe—rides for the asking. You could stand outside my fraternity house on Route 9 and catch a lift to virtually any local community, and even farther destinations such as New York and Boston, as quickly as you could catch a bus. So everybody hitched, even women.

Some of my most memorable hitchhikes included:
• A series of rides with my fellow Alabamian, Rik Williams, to the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire during our first Thanksgiving break. One ride was in the back of a pickup during a driving snowfall.
• Standing alone with my thumb out on I-95 in the notorious South Bronx area of NYC. That I jumped into the cab of a semi shows how desperate I was to get off that stretch of highway.
• A college chum and I being picked up on the Bessemer Superhighway by another friend’s mother and sister after hitchhiking from Nashville (having already bummed a nonstop ride from Massachusetts to the Music City). They were so shocked to see us on the side of the road that they actually stopped and took us to Tuscaloosa! We were undoubtedly the first and last hitchhikers that either of them ever picked up!

After I acquired my own automobile, I regularly returned the favor by picking up hitchhikers myself. I even gave a ride to three total strangers from Boston to San Francisco—and back for another one.

There must be an “invincibility delusion” gene among 21-year-old males, which leads them to not think twice about catching a ride from a bearded guy in a baseball cap driving a Peterbilt—or eagerly stopping for him when he’s the one with his thumb out. That gene became dormant in the late 1970s after a few well-publicized killings of and by hitchhikers. Young male and female hitchhikers finally bought cars, got married and began raising children for whom hitchhiking was absolutely verboten—even if it meant buying them their own cars. (Perhaps the invincibility delusion gene has reemerged in recent years with the explosion of extreme sports.)

According to British sociologists Graeme Chesters and David Smith in a 2001 paper, “The Neglected Art of Hitch-hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability,” (http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/chesters.html), hitchhiking isn’t likely to return on a widespread scale, despite nostalgia, charity, and young people’s passion for adventure and the environment. Most folks view the risk as too high, and they have a greater variety of transportation options anyway. Those occasional souls on the side of the road with a handmade sign reading “New Orleans” or “need food and a ride” aren’t your father’s hitchhikers. Give them a couple of dollars, but let them catch a lift with another Good Samaritan besides you. Nor would I advise hitchhiking as an efficient method of, say, getting to that important business meeting in Atlanta. Amtrak—or even a bicycle—might be faster.

By Jennifer Dome, AHF public relations and publications manager

One of my earliest memories is traveling in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon from North Carolina to South Dakota where we were going to live while my father attended Air Force Officer Training School in Illinois. I always seemed to be in the back seat of a station wagon, or mini van, or some vehicle while growing up. As the daughter of an Air Force captain, such was my lot in life from age 1 through 16 when we finally made our last trek, from California to New Jersey, where my father retired.

It was on those trips, though, that I got to see a vast majority of our amazing country. From the plains of Kansas, to the mountains of Grand Teton National Park, to the snowy peaks of the Rockies, there are very few states that I haven’t at least driven through. And along the way I’ve learned a lot about our country’s history.

I was born in New Hampshire and left New England before I could walk to live in North Carolina. I only attended school through first grade there, but it was time enough to pick up my teacher, Mrs. Best’s, southern drawl and learn to say “you make me ill” for just about any reason at all. What I remember most about North Carolina is the beautiful beach, and bouncing in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Next up was a short stint in South Dakota where we stayed with friends, the Mortons, and got a first-hand look at the Badlands, an amazing landscape east of Rapid City where prairie dogs seemed to be the only life that existed.

When my dad finished school, our next post was Minot, North Dakota, where the snows piled high and frost bite was a scary thought to this seven-year-old. Here I traveled to water parks near the Canadian border, and the International Peace Gardens across that border. What I remember most about those trips are the fields and fields of wheat, and the rows of sunflowers, blooming and stretching their yellow faces to the hot summer sun.

We moved back to South Dakota as a family and had our first taste of living off the Air Force base, in Rapid City itself. It was there that I got my largest taste of American history: Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, the plight of the Sioux. South Dakota is a rich state, with a deep history buried in the Black Hills. I’ll always remember the sunrise Easter church service we attended at Mount Rushmore, seeing the sun come up and shine like a spotlight on those four faces.

It was during this time that we traveled to Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park, two of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, besides Hawaii. Between Old Faithful and the mountains that rise out of Jenny Lake, I’d never seen a landscape so grand.

California was next on the map and traveling through Utah to get there was an interesting experience. I remember getting stuck in Utah for a few days because my mother was sick, and dad taking my sister and I to see “Aladdin” to pass the time. The landscape there seemed rugged, but the orange glow the sun produced as it set was stunning.

Then, California, with its wide beaches and traffic congestion and hazy, palm-tree-lined horizons, was unlike anywhere I’d ever seen. Especially because we lived far from the glitz and glamor of L.A. in the middle of the Mojave Dessert, at Edwards Air Force Base. As a middle school and high school student, it became common to be out on the base’s golf course late at night with friends, and have to stand still, in scared, hushed silence, as coyotes traipsed nearby. Witnessing shuttle landings, and hearing sonic booms, tied this place to history as the place where Chuck Yeager first broke the speed of sound.

It’s the move from California to New Jersey that I remember best, going through the Rockies and stopping in Breckenridge, Colorado, for a night. The mountains rise out of the ground and shoot straight for the sky, snow on the tops even in July. On to Texas we drove, getting my first look at the metropolis of Dallas, then on to the East Coast, where I finished high school and now call home, despite having lived in Pennsylvania, Chicago, London and now Birmingham, Alabama, since high school.

From D.C. up to my father’s hometown of Boston, the East Coast has always seemed so accessible and the opportunities to learn endless. From the Smithsonian museums to the Liberty Bell, to Wall Street and then Quincy Market, the East Coast is a fruitful trail that tells the story of our country’s birth.

I’ve been very lucky, to be raised this way and see the states I’ve seen. Sure, there were miles on the road when I propped up baby doll blankets to block out my sister and her peskiness, and no doubt we tested my parents’ patience numerous times. But now I look at the travels I took as a child and I’m thankful for the experience, thankful that I live in such a free and beautiful country where I can drive from state to state, taking in the bounty. Without the journeys I had as a child, I might not appreciate Alabama as much, with its wonderful landscapes, from the ocean in Mobile, to the mountains up north, and all the historical sites in between.

It is on a lengthy family trip to northern Minnesota in February 2010 that Daniel has the opportunity to exhibit the full extent of his prowess with geography, maps, navigation, and weather. Armed with his personal hand-held GPS, laptop computer and an array of road maps of a half-dozen states, Daniel plans and advises the two drivers every mile of the way from Birmingham to the Ontario border and back, including the weeklong stay in a remote cabin on a frozen lake. Returning home and back to his fifth-grade class, Daniel preps for the upcoming Geography Bee at his elementary school by poring over atlases after school. It is no surprise to his teachers when he wins first place for his school and subsequently represents the school system in the statewide Geography Bee, capturing third place.

Not satisfied with placing third, this budding meteorologist intensifies his study of geography over summer break, sandwiched between Boy Scouts, piano lessons, and church activities. By mid-winter of sixth grade, his email weather updates are launched with pinpointed detail, matching the accuracy of professional forecasters across Alabama. Now in his first year of middle school, he finds himself up against a more challenging field of competitors. Again, he wins first place for his school and school system. After a sudden-death shoot-out in the statewide Geography Bee at Samford University in April of this year, Daniel is now packing his bag and flexing his memory in preparation for the National Geography Bee in our nation’s capital as Alabama’s 2011 Champion. As soon as his plane touches down at Dulles Airport, we fully expect to receive an email forecasting the weather in Washington, D.C.

Glenn Dasher, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UA-Huntsville, asked me to write an essay for the civility forum in August 2010. I agreed, even though my only professional exposure to thinking about issues of politics and morality is an introduction to ethics course I teach every semester. The theme of that course is how to use ethical theories as guides for resolving conflicting (or potentially conflicting) desires. My essay is an attempt to develop this theme on a political level, where conflicts occur among people’s different values. The basic idea for the structure of the paper comes from Plato’s Republic, where an investigation of the nature of justice leads Socrates and his interlocutors to imagine different sociopolitical structures and, ultimately, to use their conclusions about the nature of justice in a city to draw conclusions about the nature of justice in the soul, a city in microcosm. Plato’s conclusion in the Republic is that a person is just when there is harmony among the three different parts of the soul—appetite, emotion, and reason. My analysis differs from Plato’s in three important ways: first, in focusing on the nature of civility rather than the nature of justice; second, in not following Plato’s rigid division of the soul into discrete parts, each with its own distinctive function; third, in striving to accommodate the democratic spirit of honoring even priorities that are, from certain evaluative perspectives, corrupt or misguided. But, despite these differences, I think the most interesting part of my essay leans heavily on Plato’s insight that political virtues, such as justice and civility, depend for their realization upon the existence of those virtues within individuals.

For the most part, the panelists for the civility forum focused their comments on the political themes of my essay rather than the psychological themes. This strikes me as a helpful and legitimate focus, since the point of the forum was to discuss civility in a political context and since people tend to think of civility as a political virtue rather than a personal one, as a way of treating others rather than a way of treating oneself. Each of the panelists, moreover, offered excellent food for thought about what civility means in a political context, and I’d like to use the rest of this post to offer some brief and friendly responses to their ideas.

Mr. Lennox suggested that the source of incivility is a gap between how we know we should behave and how we actually behave, and he advocated, as a solution to this gap, a principle of non-interference according to which we ought not impose our values upon each other. I agree with Mr. Lennox that there often is a gap of the sort he mentioned. But I think the source of incivility runs deeper. We often do not know how we should behave; the pathways of right and wrong tend to be snarled and jumbled (to use a phrase from Zhuangzi), if only because our society is one in which there are many competing moral ideals and our lives are ones in which we lack any obvious way of discriminating between correct ideals and false ones. Since civility is precisely that virtue that allows us to engage with others in the presence of moral uncertainty, the source of incivility must involve, at least in part, how we react to that uncertainty. For similar reasons, although non-interference is a central value of liberal societies, it is not sufficient as a solution to incivility, since situations in which reacting to moral uncertainty is challenging tend to be ones in which non-interference is not an option. (Paradigm example of what I have in mind here are political policy and law making, which by nature interfere with our behaviors.)

Dr. Jackson suggested that courtesy is the key to promoting civility. I agree that courtesy is a key ingredient of civil behavior, and that lack of courtesy is one way in which incivility manifests itself. However, there are different codes of conduct regarding how to be courteous. Dr. Jackson touted the code of the southern gentleman. But even if this code were able to be developed in a way that does not promote or reinforce unjust or otherwise immoral political structures, there are other codes for how to be courteous, and this diversity among codes makes it likely that there will be some situations in which the codes offer conflicting guidance for how to be courteous. When these situations arise, being courteous is not enough for being civil, especially when behaviors that are courteous according to one code come off as discourteous, and even corrupt, according to another code.

Ms. Romey offered invaluable reports of her on-the-ground experiences with incivility among high school students. Like Mr. Lennox and Dr. Jackson, she raised the question about why our public discourse has become saturated with incivility. The answer I have to offer for her question about why, when compared to the 1960s, we tend to be more uncivil to each other now, is that there is less uniformity and more diversity in public life today than in the 1960s. When the level of consensus about fundamental values and priorities decreases, we should expect the level of incivility to decrease as well, because absence of consensus raises the frequency with which we must engage with those with whom we disagree and thereby raises the opportunities we have to polarize ourselves and attempt to silence or disenfranchise those who advocate competing ideals.

Mr. Stewart emphasized respect as a key ingredient of civility, and he made the excellent point that the basic message of the civil rights movement was not that we ought to be civil toward each other, but instead that we ought to respect each others’ humanity. I agree with all of his comments, and I want to add only that civility involves more than respect: it involves communicating that respect in a sincere way. This was one of the points I tried to make in discussing different ways in which societies might try to be civil societies.

Representing the college student perspective on civility, Ms. Smith offered some helpful insights about what it’s like to be a college student today and the ways in which incivility manifests itself in college classrooms. She also suggested that we should teach civility in all college-level courses, not just special courses devoted to the topic. This strikes me as an excellent idea, especially since civility, like other virtues, is best realized through repeated and habitual practice. But I think more is required. I tried to argue in my essay that if we want people to be civil toward each other, we need to do more than discuss ideas–we need people to be civil to themselves. The next question to ask, of course, is how we can do that. Here I think we need to focus on engaging people bodily rather than just intellectually; we need to create conditions that engage people’s outward performances in ways that prompt internal change, in much the same way that Christians pray or do Stations of the Cross, and Buddhists meditate, in order to alter internal attitudes. One of the audience members at the forum, Mr. Charles McGee, suggested bread and soup luncheons as a way of getting people to engage with those who have different moral perspectives; I encourage my ethics students to perform community service, as a way of gaining exposure to people with whom they would not normally interact. But more work needs to be done here, both in terms of discovering the kinds of practices that promote intrapersonal civility and in terms of getting people to engage in those practices.

*To read Nick Jones’ paper on civility, along with the runner-up and other finalists for the Whetstone-Seaman Faculty Development Award, please visit the Alabama Humanities Review.

By Billie Jean Young, AHF board member

A woman is like a field of wild flowers growing inside of barbed wire.
Gated and locked in, flowers run wild,
grow in stature and seem to thrive.
Let the gate remind you, however:
Gates have gate keepers, seen and unseen protectors
of the status quo
who always exact a price above and beyond
what is called for.

When I look at the present-day exploitation of women in the culture, it is with dismay that I have to acknowledge that even with a women’s movement and 40 odd years of women’s activism, women seem to be relapsing. One painfully obvious way this shows up is in popular dress.

• Where is the freedom in women thinking they have to don stiletto heels in order to be sexy? High school (and junior high) girls in 4-inch stiletto heels are ruining their feet before they have quit growing even.
• What happened to make young women think that wearing their underwear in public is acceptable?
• Why do our children—even young girls—insist on wearing clothes so tight and revealing in public that they might as well be naked?
• Why do we allow our girl children to watch the movies that make them think being reduced to body parts is acceptable?

In the late 60s and early 70s, we took off the pointed-toe shoes that ruined our feet. We donned sensible shoes that allowed us to walk with confidence—not teetering and tottering as if we were on tom walkers, bent over to keep from falling—into the varied professions and fields theretofore held by men. We knew that there was a place for sexy, revealing clothes, and that they were not everyday wear. We learned to be concerned with what was inside our head, whether or not we could compete in universities and the marketplace, and we spent little time worrying about beauty shop appointments and money for outrageous hairdos and to buy phony nails that would keep us preoccupied and afraid to use our hands. We insisted that media people portray women in a more positive, realistic, equal light, including their relationships within the culture, and we protested women being used/portrayed as sexual objects.

A lot of women suffered for standing up for us, were ridiculed and taunted for their activism. Do we not owe them more than this? Geraldine Ferraro died this weekend. When the news people glibly mention today that she was the first woman to run for vice president, our young women and the youth culture have no idea what she endured, what ground she broke, how she was accepted—and not accepted—as a result.

Perhaps we seem tired and staid, even outdated, to the young and inexperienced. We may have even gone overboard in our attempts to right the wrongs. But was it all for this? Even though Abercrombie & Fitch has its defenders for marketing push-up bikini bras to girls as young as seven, there was at least an outcry from the public this weekend that forced them to change their marketing strategy. That outcry, speaking up, is heartening. Can we not get our young women and their mothers to meet us halfway, to somehow acknowledge that women’s recent history was not all for naught? We are, after all, the women who helped to open the doors for them.

Written by Jennifer Dome, AHF’s public relations and publications manager

“I like to believe
that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past
will resolve into the positive and Utopian extreme of her future;
that the sins of a dark yesterday will
be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I moved to Birmingham four years ago not really knowing what to expect. I knew the Alabama from my history books—the Civil Rights Movement, the students blocked from enrolling at the University of Alabama, the four little girls killed at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

But those history books didn’t make me feel what really happened here during the years that African Americans, and some people of other races, fought for their freedom, their rights, what they as citizens of the United States deserved. What brought that to life for me was the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Each exhibit in this institute moved me. Starting with the quote copied above by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From the photographs, to the news articles, to the facts and figures, the true meaning and struggle of the Civil Rights Movement overwhelmed me.

My favorite part of the institute is the section on Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written on April 16, 1963. Every time I visit, I have to read this letter from top to bottom.

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

This is the passage that touches me deeply. Still, today, we witness injustice in our own communities. In our own country. And we hear stories of it all over the world. If Dr. King can teach us one thing, if there’s one thing I’ll always remember from my visit to the BCRI, it’s that passage: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

As we reflect on Black History this month, on the progress that has been made through the Civil Rights Movement and other struggles, to the steps that still need to be taken today, let’s remember these words and take them to heart.

Written by Bob Stewart, AHF’s executive director

I was fortunate to finish my k-12 education in Tuscaloosa as desegregation was well under way—and largely without any serious incidents—throughout the city school system. My classes had included black students since about my 8th-grade year in 1966-67.

Nevertheless, when I arrived at Amherst College in 1971, I encountered a far more open educational environment than even the most progressive ones in Alabama. The staunch abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher co-founded the college in 1821. Edward Jones, a free biracial man from Charleston, South Carolina, graduated from the college in 1826 and went on to serve as a missionary in the colony of Sierra Leone. All the campus fraternities had integrated in the 1960s, many of which lost their national affiliation in so doing. Racial integration was fundamentally established in policy and practice (if not in large numbers of African-American students).

Yet I recall that the most prominent African Americans at that time in the surrounding Pioneer Valley were not at Amherst College, but instead a couple of miles up the road at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I just missed the chance to be in the same building with one of them; I was privileged to be in the same classroom with the other. Both were named Julius.

Julius Erving was born and raised in Roosevelt, New York, where he played basketball and reportedly received the nickname “Doctor” or “Dr. J” from a high school friend. Erving enrolled at UMass in 1968, though he didn’t finally earn his bachelor’s degree until 1986. In two varsity seasons at UMass, he averaged 32.5 points and 20.2 rebounds per game, becoming one of only five college players in history to average more than 20 points and 20 rebounds per game. His basketball feats were legendary. Too bad he left for the professional ranks the year before I arrived in Amherst.

But in 1974 I had the opportunity to attend a class at UMass on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, taught by the multi-talented black intellectual and cultural icon, Julius Lester. Lester had already achieved fame in New York as a teacher, folk singer and television host. As a member of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) he participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. In 1966 he traveled as a photographer to North Vietnam and as a companion of Stokely Carmichael and Fidel Castro in Cuba. But his interests lay more in art, music and writing than in politics. By the time I enrolled in his seminar, Lester had converted to Judaism and was a distinguished faculty member. He had also launched a prolific writing career. He eventually published dozens of books ranging from fiction to folk tales to children’s books.

Dr. J’s accomplishments on the basketball court are etched forever in the record books, the Basketball Hall of Fame and ESPN film archives. I really wish I had had the chance to see him play in college. But maybe one day someone will start handing out MVPs in the humanities. When that happens I will be proud to say that for one semester I indeed had the chance to share the “bench” with an all-star in his own right—the other African American in town named Julius.

Written by blogger Dominique Linchet, Ph.D., AHF’s grants director

As a long-time educator and as I reflect upon what it means to celebrate Black History Month here, in Birmingham, Alabama, I would like to share this (abbreviated) reading titled “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education,” published in 1998, with our AHF blog readers. For the full text, follow the link below.

“W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. Experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts, which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts, which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools. Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities? Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved. When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound.

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century’s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.”

Click here for the full article at the Brookings Institution.

As we celebrate Black History Month and as we approach an important Civil Rights anniversary, I suggest that we pause and contemplate the progress that we have made in the past 50 years, but that we also take the time to face the road ahead with honesty. As a first-generation college graduate, I am grateful for the opportunities my education has afforded me. I will continue to dream of a place and of a time where, like me, everyone has a fair shot at a quality education.

It was my good fortune that I was hearing the debut of “We’ve Added It Up,” an original song written and sung by Shara Worden, a new voice beyond the run-of-the-mill in the realm of pop music. Conservatory trained for grand opera, this soprano whose range is as wide as FM radio’s band, bridges the gap between pop and chamber music. Accompanied by a string quartet absent from popular music since the Beatles recorded “Yesterday,” her song makes the point that opposing forces are necessary to bind the world in love and understanding, to insure the survival of society, just as the polar extremes hold this planet together. She goes on to cite more illustrations of opposites that work together beginning with omnipresent atoms.

After arriving at home, I immediately went to the National Public Radio website and listened again and again to “We’ve Added It Up,” trying to fix in my mind the multitude of metaphors Ms. Worden uses to make her point. Just as composers, writers and artists struggle to balance the tension that creates enduring works of art, we as a society must overcome the challenge of achieving a balance of the opposing forces that can create solutions to social dilemmas.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation speaks to this challenge with the offer of a cash award. A select group of humanities scholars from Alabama universities and colleges have addressed the topic “What Does Civility Mean in 21st-Century Debate?” On March 25, the author of the winning essay will share a summary of his/her paper at the humanities forum co-sponsored by AHF and the David Mathews Center for Civic Life. The forum, entitled “Daring to Defend our Rights: A Discussion of Civility in Alabama Public Life,” will convene at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. See www.ahf.net/newsroom for further details.

Admittedly, a handful of essays may not totally eliminate the exercise of such uncivil “rights” by some members of American society, but perhaps the ideas generated therein can produce a ripple effect that will illustrate how the balance of opposites can have a positive effect for the common good.