Why Sports History is American History

Why Sports History Is American History

Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University


During a forty year career of teaching African-American and American History, I have often used examples from sports to explain key events in American history, or to explore how people in American society have grappled with and racial, ethnic and regional differences in our very diverse nation Whether it is assigning a book on Jack Johnson so explain the nationalization of white supremacy during the Jim Crow Era, to using the movie “Cinderella Man” ( on heavyweight champion James Braddock who was living on relief a year before he won the title) to show how much American families were under stress during the great Depression, to examining the experience of Muhammed Ali to show how American society was divided during the Vietnam War, I have found sports history to be a tremendously valuable tool to bring American history to life

This is not just because, like some of my students, I am a sports fan and (former) competitive athlete. It is because professional and college sports, from the late 19th Century to the present have served as one of the nation’s most powerful community building institutions, helping define American identity, on the grass roots, level as powerfully as our political system, our broadcast media, or Hollywood film. In huge and diverse nation experiencing waves of immigration, struggling with bitter racial divisions, and undergoing a pace of economic change unmatched by any society in the world, sports have provided many Americans with a visceral connection to America’s lived traditions and cultural values while providing them with a much needed escape from the hardships of their daily lives.

Take an event like the Super Bowl. If you had a friend visiting from another country, what better way to give a four hour primer on American culture than watching that game and the spectacle surrounding it. Here are classic themes in American civilization on display in dramatic form- the creative tension between individual striving and team destiny, the fascination with violence and courage in the face of adversity; the glorification of the citizen as consumer, the love of gimmicks and new technologies which highlight the nation’s wealth, and less felicitously, the use of scantily clad women ( in this case cheerleaders) to market products, and the racial divisions symbolized by the spectacle of an almost all white stadium audience watching almost black teams play a dangerous and violent game. This is American society on display, with all its grandeur, power and imperfections, broadcast in a way that commands the attention of almost every person in the nation. Is this any less worthy of historical investigation than Congressional debates over health care reform or of policies of Wall Street financial firms that helped destabilize the economy. The Super Bowl, like many sports events throughout our history, provides important insights into how we think and how we live, how we entertain ourselves, and how we gather together to celebrate and affirm who we are.

In the short essay that follows, I would like to offer some reflections on what I think are three key dimensions of sports in American history- its role in socializing and Americanizing immigrants and their children; its role in marginalizing African Americans in the Jim Crow Era, and then giving Blacks a platform from which to challenge their subordination, and its shattering of gender norms on the field without challenging the eroticization of women in the sports marketplace. To make the discussion more accessible, I will combining historical analysis with reflections on some of my own experiences as and athlete, coach, parent and sports fan

The role of sports in Americanizing immigrants has been written about extensively by historians and journalists. Professional boxing and baseball, both of which achieved heightened popularity at the dawn of the 20th Century, became important vehicles by which successful waves of immigrants marked their progress in American society. The hero making machinery of these two sports, enhanced first by mass circulating newspapers, then by radio, allowed for individuals from immigrant backgrounds to achieve the status of popular culture icons even while the majority of their ethnic cohorts struggled with poverty and marginality. For European immigrants, even those from Eastern and Southern Europe, sports, pervaded with an ethos of “fair play” and open competition, proved far more accessible to talented immigrant youth than the nation’s banks, corporations and universities where discrimination was often masked behind “gentleman’s agreements,” and where progress in breaking barriers was often painfully slow. Figures like boxers John O Sullivan, Jim Corbett, Benny Leonard and Rocky Marciano and baseball players like Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg became symbolic representatives of the potential of Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans to win success and acceptance in a nation that had often looked upon their presence with suspicion.. And this filtered down to the neighborhood level where the American born children of immigrants seized upon sports as a surefire way of affirming their American identities and opening up opportunities for economic and educational success

The belief in sports as a true bastion of “democracy” was alive and well in the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in during the 1950’s- Crown Heights. In a community where 95% of the people were Jewish and Italian ( I didn’t meet a white Protestant until I was 8 years old!) and where the older generation spoke little or no English, sports assumed almost religious significance among English speaking boys and men. The men of my father’s generation not only discussed sports constantly, on street corners, in bars and at the dinner table, they bet on sports events, ranging from horse racing to boxing, to basketball, through the bookie who was a fixture outside the corner candy store. As for the boys I grew up, sports totally dominated our horizons.We fanatically followed the three New York baseball teams, the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants and tried to model ourselves on the three centerfielders on those teams, Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Mickey Mantle.When we reached our teens, we practiced basketball even more, aware that many older guys in our neighborhood were playing on high school teams and some had gotten scholarships to play in college. We watched Sunday pro football and the Friday night fights, practicing the moves we saw there in the sometimes brutal fights we had in alleys and occasionally in school, and in equally brutal sandlot football games. But the thing I most remember about all of the games watched and played was the sense that America was ours for the conquering; that if we got good enough at our sport, there was no height to which we couldn’t ascend because people named Gordon and Koufax and Furillo and Rizzuto and Berra were at the pinnacle of professional sports and people just like them were stars at every Brooklyn high school. Did we think this way about Presidents and Senators, Mayors and members of Congress? I doubt it. None of us knew anyone who had succeeded in politics or even had run for office. But if anyone has asked us did we believe in American Democracy, all of us would have said “yes” without the slightest hesitation and we would have pointed to sports as proof that America was the land of opportunity for people just like us.

If anyone had asked us, we would probably have said, looking at the teams and athletes we rooted for, that American Democracy applied to Blacks as much as it did to Jews and Italians. Living seven blocks from Ebbets Field, and coming of age a full ten years after the Dodgers broke major league baseball’s color line, we marveled at the exploits of Dodger stars Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and despite hating the Giants, all tried to make basket catches in the style of Willie Mays. Of equal significance to the basketball fanatics among us,, many of the great high school players in Brooklyn in that era were Black, as were some of the participants in our schoolyard games, and we looked on NBA players like Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell as models for our developing games, which we hoped would take us to college stardom.

But as I would learn much later,, meritocracy and fair play were concepts which were more exceptions than the rule for African Americans for most of American history. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, African Americans, no matter their talent level, were barred from participating in most professional sports leagues, and were unable to play on most college and recreational teams. Whereas children of European immigrants, when they Americanized, were welcomed in virtually all spheres of American sports, African Americans were viewed as a stigmatized lower caste whose very presence would lower the prestige of any team they were on.. Nowhere was this caste system more visible than in major league baseball, which drew the color line from the first “World Series” in 1903 till Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This was not because African Americans didn’t play baseball at the highest level, or because white players and coaches weren’t aware of their talent. At the turn of the century, baseball was the single most popular sport in Black communities throughout the nation, and the pool of Black talent was deep and strong. The best white major leaguers knew this because they competed against the best Black players in winter leagues in Cuba, where the Black players more than held their own, and in sandlot games against black teams played in the off season. You cannot find a clearer example than major baseball of how racial segregation violated every principle of equal opportunity and fair play which Americans claim to cherish. Unlike European immigrants who were encouraged to think that they could go as far in America as their talents and effort would take them, Blacks were told that their racial identity would always trump their talents, and that no matter how hard they worked they would always be treated as inferiors. To the shame of all who love the purity of athletic competition, Sports in America were used to convey that awful message.

Fortunately, tensions between idealistic visions of American Democracy and the ugly reality of Color Caste could not be contained forever and over time, sports would become an importan arena in which this caste segregation was subverted. In the 1930’s, boxing and track and field, two sports in which segregation was never as complete as it was in baseball, produced two Black athletes who became genuine American sports heroes, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. In each instance, the moment of their coronation was a competition in which they beat athletes from an ascendant Nazi Germany, whose racial theories marked stigmatized much of America’s immigrant population as racial inferiors. Because of this, Jesse Owens victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Joe Louis 1938 victory over Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium, marked the first time in American history that large numbers of white Americans perceived a Black athlete as fighting for them, and joyously celebrated their victory. And it was these moments which helped set the stage for the gradual steps taken by coaches at schools like NYU and UCLA and City College of New York to recruit black players for their football and basketball teams, and for the much bigger step taken by Branch Rickey to integrate major league baseball.

But the one thing to keep in mind, when charting the gradual integration of college and professional sports was that it was changes in the political climate in the nation and the world that cracked open segregated sports, not some miraculous growth in the talent level of black players. All throughout the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, before integration took place, the best white major league baseball players and the best white professional basketball players were competing against Black players, usually on all Black teams, and often losing! In the early 1930’s, the legendary New York Celtics basketball team, which was all white, played many games against the Harlem Renaissance Five, who were all black, and lost as many games as they won. Later in the decade, the Harlem Globetrotters, whose skill level was as impressive as their comedy, won the majority of their games against professional teams. The same thing was true in contests between barnstorming groups of major league players and Black teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. Satchel Paige was a legendary figure among white major leaguers well before he was signed to play for the Cleveland Indians in 1948 and there wasn’t a white player who competed against him who didn’t think that if the color line broke, he would be an instant star.

As historians, there is no better way to teach our students about the creation and destruction of the color line in 20th Century America than to draw examples from the history of race in sports, a history which is now richly documented in biographies, historical works, novels and documentary film,

The history of how gender barriers were broken in sports follows a somewhat different trajectory than the breaking of racial barriers. For women, the story is not about how female sports talent was kept out of competition, it is of a powerful, overarching gender system that kept female sports talent from developing on the grounds that such talent would masculinize women. For most of the twentieth century, women were socialized, in families, schools, and the media to think that competitive sports were a male domain, and were given few opportunities to develop athletic talent. It was not until the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and the passage of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that women as an organized political force, began to define sports participation as a women’s rights issue and insist that girls have the same opportunity to participate in sports as boys. And it is through protests, and legal challenges, and struggles fought by women and men in families and communities that girls and women’s sports have expanded to become an integral part of organized athletics from the school to the university level as well as in neighborhood and recreational leagues.

How dramatic, and how recent this change is can be demonstrated by what took place within my own family. All my life, I was a competitive athlete, and I ended up as captain of my high school and college tennis teams. By contrast, my wife Liz, who is every bit as good an athlete as I am, never had a chance to play organized sports in school. She became an expert skier and swimmer, but when it came to school, the only team available was field hockey, so she put her energies into cheerleading, where her cartwheels and spins got her made captain of the squad. When Liz and I got married, we both, as committed feminists, agreed that if we had a daughter, I should teach her everything I knew about sports, so when my daughter Sara was born in 1977, I did exactly that. I started teaching her to throw hit and catch from the time she was 2 years old and when she was five, I took her down to the church
across the street and signed her up for baseball. When it became clear to everyone who watched her, that she could throw hit and catch as well as any boy, a whole world opened up, not only for Sara, but for other girls in the neighborhood. Sara ended up playing baseball, basketball and soccer on mostly boys teams, first in our neighborhood, then on teams that travelled around Brooklyn, sometimes being cheered, sometimes provoking protests. When she was ten, the boys CYO team she played on won the Brooklyn CYO championship with her as the starting off guard, and the coaches secretly got together, the next season, to ban girls from boys basketball. By going to the papers, we overturned the ban. But irrespective of Sara’s situation, girls sports in Brooklyn was a juggernaut that couldn’t be stopped. By the time Sara was 14, girls softball, basketball and soccer leagues had sprung up all over Brooklyn, and girls now had the choice of either playing with boys, or playing on all girls team. And school and college sports kept pace. By the time
Sara was applying to college, most American colleges, thanks to Title IX challenges and lawsuits, had as many girls teams as boys teams and Sara had a choice of playing college basketball, softball or tennis. When she chose tennis and ended up, like her dad, as the captain of her college tennis team, I realized history had come full circle and something of a revolution had taken place in sports and gender. Now a young girl growing up has almost as many sports opportunities as a young boy, and sees models of women athletes all around her, in her school and her neighborhood and on television.

But as with race and sports, it would be too soon to declare the revolution is over and we can declare victory. While sports and fitness have become women’s domains to a degree unimaginable to past generations, the most popular and highly publicized professional sports, football, baseball and basketball, remain overwhelmingly male domains where women are often presented as prizes of competition, the bare midriffs and cleavage of the cheerleaders reminders of the reward that awaits the male athlete when his athletic labors are over. Today, in American sports, the woman as eroticized object coexists with the image of woman as ferocious competitor, creating a tension which some might find exciting, but others confusing and demoralizing. Nowhere is this polarity dramatized more than in the “Swimsuit Issue” of Sports Illustrated, the single most popular issue of any magazine published in the United States, where women are marketed as sex objects for a predominantly male readership. That there is nothing comparable for women goes without saying. What is a young girl to think? For whom is she developing her physical talents? And to what end? That her athletic talents are now respected is gratifying, but when it comes to men and sports, is it still all about sex? Where is real equality? Or is that an illusion too?

These questions, as disturbing as they might be, remind us of the excitement that awaits us, as teachers, as we use sports to reveal important themes in American history and culture. There is no point of entry into American culture and civilization that will tell us more about how our fellow citizens think and live and imagine themselves than sports, and we now have great books and films as sources to reveal those mysteries. Hopefully, the articles to follow will serve as resources for you in your teaching, and incentives for future research. Let the games begin!

Mark Naison
February 16, 2010

Hiding Elite Athletes: How Academic Departments Can Be Complicit in Undermining Academic Integrity

Hiding Elite Athletes: How Academic Departments Can Be Complicit in Undermining Academic Integrity
Mark Naison, Chair, African and African American Studies

Whenever athletic scandals erupt at major universities, whether it be the University of Tennessee, Florida State University, or SUNY Binghampton, several conditions are usually present
First, the University administration makes a major financial commitment to achieve national success in sports and declares this to be an institutional priority
Second, the University agrees to admit students whose academic profile is far below the University norm if they will help teams in high profile sports win.
Third, the University puts pressure on its Academic Advising Staff to use any and all means to make sure that high profile athletes are eligible to compete, including having assignments written, or tests taken, by surrogates.
Fourth, the University identifies institutions which offer correspondence courses or on line courses which athletes may take to receive college credits, and approves those credits without investigating whether the courses are legitimate or the athletes are the ones actually doing the work
Fifth, the University identifies Departments and individual faculty members who support the University’s sports initiative and are willing to allow elite athletes to get course credits without meeting the normal attendance criteria or submitting the work normally required in the courses they offer.
As a faculty member and a Department chair, it is the fifth of these conditions that I find most disturbing. Wherever academically unprepared and, at times, functionally illiterate athletes, are admitted to Universities and receive high enough grades to maintain their eligibility, some members of the faculty are giving athletes grades they don’t earn, or offering them tutorials and independent studies which allow them to circumvent normal academic requirements.
At SUNY Binghampton, the Department that served that purpose was the Department of Human Development, chaired by a person who also was a faculty member in Africana Studies.
Which brings us to college athletics dirty little SECRET- that the vast majority of academically unprepared athletes being brought into elite programs are African Americans, and that the rationale for their admission is often phrased in terms of a mission of social uplift, namely, giving young people from underprivileged backgrounds a chance to get a college education
It is on such grounds that faculty members in African American Studies and Africana Studies are often approached by University administrators to help academically marginal athletes remain in school. And the appeal is often seductive, especially at schools where the number of African American male students who are not athletes are extremely small.
However, at Fordham, such an appeal will not work
The faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies is, to a person, opposed to admitting academically unprepared student athletes or for watering down our courses to allow them to remain eligible. All of our courses have heavily workloads which we categorically refuse to modify to accommodate elite athletes. If the Athletic Department or Athletic Advising Office wishes to find a place where basketball players can “catch a break,” African American Studies at Fordham is the last place they should look
It is possible that Fordham can arrive at the best of all possible outcomes- achieving respectability in Men’s Basketball without watering down our academic standards or sacrificing academic integrity.
But we as faculty cannot just stand by and allow the academic progress of athletes to be an issue determined by other parties.
It is the Faculty’s responsibility, both individually and collectively, to make sure that if we do achieve basketball success at Fordham, we do it the right way.
Our vigilance is Fordham’s best defense against the kind of scandal that befell one of the nation’s best public universities- SUNY Binghamton.
Mark Naison
March 1, 2010

What I REALLY Want for Christmas

Friends

Christmas in my family is a great holiday, and people are really generous, but most of the things I want are things they can't give

Below is the list of things I REALLY want for Christmas. I am not sure I am going to get any of them, but if never hurts to ask

What I REALLY Want for Christmas


1. A New Body, With Joints that Don't Ache

2. Health Care Legislation that Has a Public Option, And Provides Real Competition to the Insurance Companies

3. An Educational Reform Movement That Is Led By Teachers, Not Bankers and Lawyers! What A Concept!

4. The Passage of Medical Marijuana Legislation in All 50 States of the Union, Especially New York!

5. The Immediate Reopening of the Night Centers, After School Centers and Music Programs in the New York Public Schools That Were Shut Down in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's

6. The Release of All Non-Violent Prisoners from the Nation's Jails and Prisons and Their Enrollment in Schools and Drug Treatment Programs

7. The Immediate Approval of Domestic Partner Benefits for Faculty and Staff at Fordham and All Other Jesuit Universities.

8. The Conversation of Abandoned and Partially Occupied Luxury Buildings in New York and Other Cities into Affordable Housing

9. The Rehiring of Park Recreation Supervisors at All NYC Vest Pocket Parks, Another Position Eliminated in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's

10. Hiring the Indigo Girls and Parliament Funkadelic to Perform at This Year's Spring Weekend at Fordham

11. An African Music Festival at Yankee Stadium That Brings Together the Best Afican Rappers and Musicians from Africa, Europe, the US and Candada

12. That There Be a DJ at Fordham Graduation and Students March To Their Seats to the Sounds of "Flashlight" and " Thank You Fa Letting Me Be Myself Again":

13. That Fordham Adopt Roosevelt High School Across the Street and Use All Of Its Resources to See That Students There Get a Great Education

14. That the Next Big White House Event Be Catered By Johnson's BBQ

15. That Oprah Do a Feature on PS 140 and "Books in the Hood," Two of the South Bronx' Greatest Institutions, That Are Doing Wonders for the People of That Community

16. That American Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan Be Brought Home Before the End of 1010, and that All My Brothers and Sisters in Uniform Be Out of Harms Way

17. That All My Wonderful Students, Past and Present, and the Equally Wonderful People I Have Met in My Bronx Research, Find Jobs In the Fields They Are Trained For

18. That Americans Realize They Are Part of the Global Community and Act Like They Are Its Members, Not Its Rulers

19. That All My Friends- And People Around the World- Know Love and Peace and Happiness in the Coming Year



.AOLWebSuite .AOLPicturesFullSizeLink { height: 1px; width: 1px; overflow: hidden; } .AOLWebSuite a {color:blue; text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer} .AOLWebSuite a.hsSig {cursor: default}

Hustling, Schools and the Education of Inner City Boys- Reflections on a Talk by Street Lit Authoer "Jihad"

Dr Mark Naison


Jihad’s talk in our Hip Hop Street Lit Narratives class last week helped me understand some very important issues- one of which is the failure of schools to engage working class students of color, particularly boys. Jihad , a very successful "street lit" author, was one of those boys who found nothing in school to connect with. Even though he had black teachers, even though black notables came to his school to talk about their successes and inspire students to emulate them, and even though he was clearly incredibly intelligent, Jihad was stubbornly resistant to reading and any form of academic engagement. It was only when he went to prison, in his late teens that he immersed himself in books. It was only then that he became immersed in reading and discovered that history and philosophy and political theory could help him make sense of the world and his own place in it

As Jihad described his experiences, it became clear to me that the environment he grew up in, during the late 70’s and early 80’s, was very different from the Black, inner city communities I had spent time in during the late 60’s. First of all, political revolutionaries were no longer a presence. They were not giving speeches on street corners, not selling their newspapers outside the convenience story, not talking about Black unity and revolution at the dinner table or in the barber shop. But something else, maybe something even more important, was also missing from Jihad’s life, and that is black men who went to work in the morning and came back at night after working a long hard day with money in their pocket and the satisfaction of a job well done. Those kind of black men were still highly visible in inner city neighborhoods in the late 60’s- they worked in steel mills and auto factories, drove trucks and buses, owned their own cabs and the like .But by the time Jihad was growing up, the black male working class was fast disappearing as a force in inner city neighborhods. The only Black people making good money, legally, were people working in white collar occupations, often with college degrees and they were moving out of inner city neighborhoods into the suburbs

Given this, what kind of Black men did Jihad see and interact with during his childhood and adolescence? To an extraordinary extent, the black men Jihad was meeting, interacting with and modeling himself on, including his own father, were getting most of their income in the underground economy and were living lives that occasionally offered great rewards, but also involved danger and instability. I think we need to probe implications of this economic transformation.

What does it meant to grow up in a neighborhood where the primary source of work and income, at least for men, is illegal activity? In the neighborhood Jihad grew up in, “hustling” was more than just a source of income, it was a whole way of life with its own language, forms of dress, gender roles and family dynamics. Men who made their money illegally, and were at constant risk of imprisonment and death, were unlikely to commit themselves to the kind of stable family relationships that someone who worked in a steel mill or an auto plant might do.. They moved in and out of relationships with women and had only a tangential relationship to the children they fathered.

In addition, their ways of earning income seemed to have little relationship to books or to the disciplined learning environments schools tried to provide. What made men successful in the underground economy was bravery, quick thinking, and capacity to persuade and inspire through ghetto centric language that barely bore little relationship to the vocabulary and sentence structure offered in third grade reading and social studies. Hustlers communicated through an insider’s language that was indecipherable to most middle class people, black as well as white. But it was that language that was the language of money, the language of success, and the language of power in the neighborhood Jihad grew up in!!!

As a bright male child growing up in an environment where most of the money came from illegal activities, and where the men involved in those activities dressed, spoke and carried themselves in a way that bore no resemblance to anything presented in school, Jihad naturally concluded that school had no relevance to someone like him. Money, power, respect, in his neighborhood, and in his family—at least for boys came through mastery of the hustlers code, the hustlers language, the hustlers lifestyle, and ultimately, through recruitment into the alternative economy that hustlers has created.

Once a young man has the realization that the street economy is going to be their only path to money and respect and the good things in life- and for some it can come as early as 8 years old--, teachers are facing an uphill battle to get them engaged in reading writing and math, especially since the language used in teaching those subjects, whether in readers, or on tests, is totally different from the language of the street economy

What you have then is a battle of language loyalties with the teacher on one side and the hustlers the young men aspire to be on the other, and that is a battle the teacher will usually lose –not because the hustler’s language is “blacker” or more ‘authentic” but because in the young person’s neighborhood, the hustler’s language is the language of
SUCCESS, or at least what little success there is

From the outside, we may think that turning off school, for a young person who grew up the way Jihad did, is short sighted and self-destructive, but given the limited opportunities for employment in the legal economy that he saw in his neighborhood and family, looking to the hustling culture rather than school as the place to invest his energies may be a rational decision

If this analysis is correct, we are going to face an uphill battle in trying to get inner city boys to become engaged in school unless we can rebuild and reconstruct legal economic opportunities for men of color that equal those offered by hustling and the underground economy

Children look at what they see around them and decide, fairly early what works, and what doesn’t. And in many neighborhoods around this country, there is no evidence, especially for boys that school leads to economic opportunities for people like them.

Until that changes, don’t expect school reform to accomplish very much

Dr Mark Naison
December 4, 2009

A Proposal That Banks That Received Bailout Money Fund After School Centers in NY Schools

Friends

After reading a powerful commentary from a friend who heads one of the largest Community Organizations in the Bronx about the growing threat of juvenile diabetes, which is especially acute in the Bronx because our children don't get exercise inside or outside school, I have a proposal to make to every bank headquartered in New York City which received federal bailout funds, beginning with Goldman Sachs

Here's my proposal-

Why don't you take 200 million dollars from the billions of dollars you have assigned to your bonus pools and use it to pay the NYC Department of Education to open the after school and night centers in New York City public schools which were shut during the fiscal crisis of the 70's.

That's right, for less than $200 million dollars, you could open ever elementary school, middle school and high school in the city from 3-5 PM and 7-9 PM for sports, supervised play, dance and excercise classes and the arts. This is what many of had growing up in New York City in the 1950's and 1960's and this is what our children need now, for their physical health, and collective well being

And if any funds are left from that fund, give the money to the Parks Department to hire
Parks recreation supervisors like Hilton White to run outdoor sports and recreation programs in the City's Vest Pocket Parks!

If you think of this as an investment in the nation's future, it is a much wiser and more cost effective use of your profits than bonuses for your top exectives. Think of the
reduction in health care costs and law enforcement that might ensue.

If you believe that this is a worthy proposal, please pass it on far and wide to people in
education, politics and business.

Sincerely

Mark D Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University
Principal Investigator, Bronx African American History Project

Schools and the Business Model
A New Notorious Phd Jam

If we ran schools like businesses
Everything would be fine
We'd turn all our classrooms
Into little assembly lines

We'd test our students daily
On spelling history and math
And fire their teachers quickly
If by chance they do not pass

We'll grade our schools too
On an annual basis
And fire all those principals
Whose scores remain in stasis

Cause the American business model
Is the envy of the world
So let's retrench,downsize and outsource
All our failing boys and girls

Education is too important
To leave to those who teach
Let's rationalize and privatize
And assess all within reach

We did that in our businesses
And look at the results
We got AIG, GM,and Lehman Brothers
They all went boom and bust

A hundred twenty bank failures
A trillion in bailout funds
An economy left in shambles
Is this how we want schools to run?

Violence in a Familiar Place

Young People Left Behind in Morrisania’s Housing Renaissance

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University

When I picked up the paper two days ago and read about the shooting of Vada Vasquez on a Bronx street corner, I felt a chill go through me. Not only was it depressing to read about another young person hit by a stray bullet in an inner city neighborhood- there have been too many such stories in recent weeks- but the corner the shooting took place on, Home Street and Prospect Avenue, is one I have driven by hundreds of times, and walked through at least twenty times when leading tours of Historic Morrisania for teachers, student groups and visitors from abroad.

This particular shooting took place in the heart of what was once the Bronx’s largest and most dynamic Black community, a place which hummed with vitality in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s and produced an unmatched variety of poplar music ranging from jazz, to mambo, to doo wop, to salsa and funk. Even in the 70’s, when the neighborhood was devastated by fires, young people living in it helped create a new music form- hip hop- which eventually became the voice of disfranchised young people throughout the world. Today, Morissania is still a center of musical creativity, with new groups of immigrants form Africa, Mexico and the Dominican Republic fusing their musical cultures with hip hop and R & B. The very corner on which Vada Vasquez was shot, Home and Prospect, was the first place I saw young people in the Bronx performing a new kind of street dance that they had created called “Getting Lite.”

But all of this wonderful history meant little when I thought of Vada Vasquez, lying on life support in a local hospital, or the 16 year old who allegedly shot her,
Carvett Gentles, who may spend most of his life in jail. Why did this tragedy take place? And why was hardly anybody who lives in Morrisania surprised that someothing like this happened?

Some of the blame for this shooting has to be assigned to the easy availability of guns on the streets of New York,, many of them brought in from states like Virgninia which make it as easy to buy a gun as it is to buy a portable CD player

But much of it has to be attributed to the misguided priorities of those who have controlled community economic development in the City of New York.

From the outside, the neighborhood Vada Vasquez was shot in looks like a great New York City success story. If you walk ten blocks in any direction from the corner of Prospect and Home, you will see literally thousands of units of new residential housing placed on what were once vacant lots, some of them townhouses, some of them apartment buildings, most of them built in the last five years,

When I first encountered this wave of new construction several years ago, I was inclined to see it as a kind of Bronx Renaissance until Leroi Archibald, a long time Bronx activist and one of the wisest men I know said to me “Mark, what are they going to do with all the kids who are going to leave here? They haven’t built a single youth center or recreation facility along with all the housing. Those kids are all going to be out in the street and getting into trouble.”

More prophetic words have rarely been uttered. With thousands of units of new housing going up in Morrisania, virtually all of them being occupied by families with young children, why hasn’t someone in City Planning or HPD seen fit to make sure at least one new youth center, either operated by the City or a non profit organization, be built in the neighborhood.

Worse yet, why haven’t local elected officials pressed the Department of Education to keep every school in the neighborhood- and there are at least ten within walking distance of Home and Prospect- open from 3 PM to 10 PM with arts, sports and supervise recreation?

Morrisania is a neighborhood filled with teenagers who have nothing to do when they leave school- there are no jobs-- in part because there are almost no stores- no sports programs, no art programs, no places where they can congregate under adult supervision

Should anyone be surprised if they hang out on the streets, sell drugs, join gangs? What else do they have to do? Where else do they have to go?

It’s time that policy makers at all levels make youth issues a top priority when doing community economic development.

First of all, whenever large numbers of housing units are placed in particular neighborhood, youth centers should be built which offer free sports and arts programs to local children and adolescents. I am going to establish an arbitrary ratio- 5,000 units of new housing equals one youth center. Let’s make this official city policy.

Secondly, every school in New York City should be open from 3 PM to 9 PM for supervised recreation under the direction of licensed, public school teachers. This is what we had fifty years ago in New York, and we need to bring this program back. Our young people desperately need mentors like Vincent Tibbs, who ran the night center at PS 99, only two blocks from Prospect and Home, who influenced thousands of Morrisania young people to stay in school and keep out of trouble. As a model for the rest of the city, let’s open a Vincent Tibbs Center in PS 99 and invite all the young people in the neighborhood to use it on a regular basis. I’ll bet if we do that, there will be a lot less shootings

Finally, let’s put back the recreation supervisors in the City’s vest pocket parks, positions which were eliminated in the 70’s, and which we desperately need today. Fiftty years ago, just ten blocks from Prospect and Home, a “parkie” named Hilton White ran a community basketball program that served hundreds of youngsters and sent scores of its graduates to college, including 3 of the starters on the Texas Western team that won the NCAA Championship in 1966. Our young people need mentors like Hilton White even more now than they did then. Bring the Parkies back!

The policies I am suggesting all cost money. But no more than the money it takes to put and keep young people in prison.

It’s time we invest in young people before they turn to acts of violence

If we don’t, we are going to read more and more stories about broken dreams and wasted lives.


Mark Naison
November 20, 2009