Improving education is the challenge facing America in the 21st Century, James Meredith said Saturday, and it’s time for blacks to take the lead.
“We are now in a position to take the lead,” Meredith told Walker’s Chapel Free Will Baptist Church members Saturday night at the church’s scholarship fund banquet.
“We control the city house, the state house and the White House. It’s all there for us. Right now is our time and the world is waiting for direction.”
Meredith, the first black to attend the University of Mississippi, compared blacks’ situation in Mississippi and the United States to Moses and the Israelites.
He said blacks faced many challenges after their ancestors were freed from slavery at the close of the Civil War and beyond, adding that things are changing.
“We are exactly where Moses was when he started up the mountain,” he said. “But there’s one big difference between Moses leading the children out of Egypt and our situation: When the pharaoh let them go, they all left, so the pharaoh — the rulers — didn’t have to make no laws to control or keep them off the street.”
When the slaves were freed, Meredith said, they stayed, forcing governments to make laws that kept the former slaves oppressed.
The first challenge for blacks was segregation, which Meredith called “the new slavery — and that’s all segregation was — new slavery.”
“Most of the things we think happened in slavery happened after 1865,” he said, “all that brutality, all that killing. Slaves were too valuable to kill.”
And most of the things that have caused blacks problems since, he said, occurred after segregation — from 1970 until now.
When segregation was eliminated and leaders began planning the integration of schools, Meredith said, “black educators were kept out of the process.”
“They had good answers, but they were not listened to,” he said.
“All the decisions were made by bureaucrats and lawyers, and they cut all of the leaders out and put all the teachers under so much pressure.
“Teachers weren’t scared they would lose their jobs, but were scared they would be unable to feed their families.”
Meredith said blacks made a lot of mistakes during the changes in the 1970s, but added, “we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes.”
The two worst things that happened to education in Mississippi and almost devastated the black community, he said, were closing black schools and busing to achieve racial balance.
Closing the schools, he said, took away apart of the black community’s base.
“I know that we weren’t completely ignorant of that because I know what the black educators in the ’70s said, but they were pushed aside,” he said.
Meredith said proponents for closing the schools began a public relations campaign, and anybody who opposed the plan “was ostracized, criticized. In addition to the economic pressure, the social pressure, they were made to shut up. They couldn’t say nothing.
“I feel the most guilty,” Meredith said, “because I knew it and I didn’t say anything, because I wanted to be nice to my friends.”
In the 45 years since busing, Meredith said, no black child has learned anything sitting next to a white child on the bus.
“The only thing busing ever did was help the people who made buses and the people who sell gas and oil,” he said.
“Over the years, we bought it (busing),” he said. “And who’s the most obese state in the union? Mississippi. When I walked four miles to school every day, I didn’t have an ounce of fat on my body. I don’t have 10 ounces on me now.
“If more children had to walk to school, over 50 percent of our health problems would go away,” he said.
What busing has done, Meredith said, is prevent people in communities from knowing their neighbors.
“If children living within one mile of a school had to walk to school, every family in the neighborhood would know every other family,” he said.
Meredith said people have realized the problems that closing schools and busing have caused education, and are ready to make changes. Some white officials, he said, have said they support changes, but are reluctant because they now face the same threats to their careers that black educators faced in the 1970s.
Meredith said the election of blacks to local, state and federal positions gives blacks a good opportunity to effect changes in education. He said the black community as a whole needs to get involved in the local schools.
Meredith said he recently joined the PTA as a community elder, adding that older people need to get involved and provide their wisdom in changing education.
