I Feel, In The End, As If

If You Grow Up In The South Bronx Today Or In South-central Los Angeles Or Pittsburgh Or Philadelphia, You Quickly Come To Understand That You Have Been Set Apart And That There's No Will In This Society To Bring You Back Into The Mainstream.

I Once Made A Check Of All Books In My Fourth-grade Classroom. Of The Slightly More Than Six Hundred Books, Almost One Quarter Had Been Published Prior To The Bombing Of Hiroshima; 60 Percent Were Either Ten Years Old Or Older.

Children Are Not Simply Commodities To Be Herded Into Line And Trained For The Jobs That White People Who Live In Segregated Neighborhoods Have Available.

We Continue, However, To Write About Important People, Prize-winning People, Blacks Of Grandeur, Women Of Great Fire, Fame Or Wit. We Do Not Write About Ordinary People.

Children, Of Course, Don't Understand At First That They Are Being Cheated. They Come To School With A Degree Of Faith And Optimism, And They Often Seem To Thrive During The First Few Years. It Is Sometimes Not Until The Third Grade That Their Teachers Start To See The Warning Signs Of Failure. By The Fourth Grade Many Children See It Too.