War of Nerves: Racism in the 1950s

This barn roof was painted this way for nearly fifty years.

Equal Rights in America?

This story appeared in Time magazine, October 7, 1957. It was an era when African Americans were just beginning to demand equal rights. (During the same week President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers into action. Their job: protect nine black students who wished to attend the all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.) 

 Three concepts will be introduced below. The Confederacy was the nation formed by eleven states which broke away from the U.S. in 1861. They fought the Civil War to protect and keep slavery. The “stars and bars” was a flag they carried during the fight. The KKK is the Ku Klux Klan, whose basic beliefs hold that whites should rule America and the races should remain separated. 

 

War of Nerves 

In the ranch-house suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania (population 60,000), the empty house at 30 Darkleaf Lane came alive last week. From one roof peak flew an American flag, and from another—lighted by a spotlight at night—flew the stars and bars of the Confederacy. Each evening the house was now crowded with members of a new club, who worked hard at a strict bad-neighbor policy. With windows wide open they talked loudly over coffee, turned up their record players, sang songs, and directed all this racket at the house next door. The reason: William E. Myers, Jr. and his three small children had moved in. The Myerses are Negroes, the first to buy a home in the five- year-old Levittown community. 

Myers, a 34-year-old, $4800-a-year** refrigeration-equipment tester, moved into his pink, three-bedroom ranch house in August because his family had outgrown a two-bedroom cottage in a mostly-Negro area a mile away. But his coming to Levittown caused fears, anger, and rumors that he was the leader of a Negro invasion. For days ugly crowds grumbled outside his house, and finally threw stones through his picture window. Local police were reinforced by tough state troopers at the direction of Pennsylvania’s Governor George M. Leader. (“I am ashamed,” said Leader, “that this has happened in Pennsylvania.”)

After a cop was hit by a rock, state police drove off the crowd with swinging nightsticks. Further meetings by more than three people in the area around Myers’ house were banned. But since the crackdown, trouble-makers have come up with new methods of tormenting [harassing, bothering] Myers. They have taken turns each evening slamming a heavy mailbox door near his house, or stop their cars to yell and blow bugles. 

Not everyone in Levittown is against Myers. More than 1,000 people in the town signed a “Declaration of Conscience” to show how shocked they were by the violence and misbehavior of those who were trying to scare off Myers. Some people came by to mow Myers’ lawn, leave gifts or say hello. But even a few of these have paid the price for their friendliness. Next-door neighbor Lewis Wechsler has been openly friendly since Myers moved in; since then a cross has been burned during the night on Wechsler’s lawn and a painted “KKK” was splattered across one wall of his home. One woman who lives half a block away stopped one evening to chat with Myers. When she got home she found a sign on her lawn: NIGGER LOVER it said. 

Last week the police cracked down on the noisy neighbors. The owner of the home, William A. Hughes, who lives about 1 1/2 miles away, was taken to court. The judge ordered Hughes to bounce the loud “club” members from his house or face a fine. So Hughes agreed. The members finished their coffee, turned off the records and disappeared. At week’s end householder Myers waited nervously to see what would happen next. Said he: “I want to be the same as any other American; I want to be treated like anyone else. This is a war of nerves. But I’m not going to move.” 

**$4,800 per year in 1957, would have been considered very good pay.

 

Your work: 

(Answer on your own paper.  Write short paragraphs for #1 and #4.) 

1. Why do you think some of William Myers’ neighbors were so afraid of ONE black family living in Levittown? 

2. In what ways did people who hated Myers attempt to scare him? 

3. In what ways, if any, do you feel the following people showed courage? Answer for each of the choices below:  

    A) William Myers, Jr.  

    B) The white “club” members.

    C) Neighbors who showed friendship toward Myers.

 

4. What do you think would happen in your neighborhood if a person of a different race moved in? Would it make any difference?

Burned cross, farm field north of Cincinnati.
The author of this blog has NO idea
who would have stuck that campaign sign there.

Governor Kasich and the Business Model in Education Perfected

      
IF YOU LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS TALK (people who almost never actually teach) about how to “fix” America’s “failing” schools, you notice certain terms are accepted without question. Inner-city schools, where graduation rates are low, are “dropout factories.” 

CNN does a series on education and repeats the phrase “school crisis” so often you think the End Times are coming. 

And if you turn in to Fox News you hear Hannity and O’Reilly and Beck (when he’s not busy weeping) talking sagely about saving public education by following the “business model.”

If we’re going to go in this direction, as Governor Kasich here in Ohio and Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Chris Christie in New Jersey seem to want, it might be important to know what this means. Are we talking business-like efficiency? Or profit above all? Or do you mean that schools should copy business morality?  

Do we copy, for example, British Petroleum?  

True: it would take effort to blow up an entire school and sink it in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven teachers in the process, but cutting corners on safety and spreading toxic waste would be an interesting “business model” in education. 

The possibilities are endless. You might copy the tobacco companies, which insisted for decades that their products weren’t harming anyone. Teachers could pitch product like companies selling male-enhancement pills. School districts could start paying $473 million to lobbyists to get laws and breaks they want from the legislature, just like the finance, insurance and real estate industries did in 2010. 

Oh, wait:  White Hat Management, the largest for-profit charter school operator in Ohio has already been accused of bribing public officials and corrupt financial practices. Probably makes Governor Kasich, an old Lehman Brothers hand, get misty-eyed for the “good old days” when he and his friends were derailing the U. S. economy. 

Cincinnati Bengals Business Model?

If nothing else, there’s always the National Football League, one of the most successful business models in America today. It might be wise to study their play book. Why not, for example, charge students “seat licenses” before they sit down in our classes? Is that what we mean? Why not stop students from bringing their own food into the cafeteria and sell hot dogs in the lunch-room for $4.50. Meanwhile, shut off the water fountains and charge kids for bottled water.

 

That way you can be like Mike Brown and the Cincinnati Bengals and put out a crappy product and still make a fortune.  

IF SCHOOLS ARE GOING TO FOLLOW THIS PATHWAY how will it work in the end? Schools don’t have a chance of making a profit on handicapped kids. So, do we deny entry based on pre-existing conditions, like health insurance giants? Do we follow the tactics of the banking industry? You issue students debit cards to buy paper, pens, and pencils. Say:  the child needs a mechanical pencil to complete a math exam. His account is short on funds. He uses his debit card, pays 49¢ for the pencil, and the school charges $38 for an overdraft fee.

The airlines are another source of inspiration. We tell kids:  “You want to bring that book bag on this bus? It’s going to cost you $25 extra.” And that’s only one way! Oh: and you want to change your class schedule? We’re going to have to charge a $150 booking fee. 

We want schools to cut administrative costs. Let’s use HMO’s as a guide. We start routing phone calls from parents through press 1, press 7, press 6, press 4, press 1, press 5, get put on hold, get disconnected, and start all over again. Finally, mom or dad reaches someone with a foreign accent. 

Consider the case of Pennsylvania Judge Mark A. Ciaverella, Jr., if you want to know what might go wrong as we privatize schools and run them for profit. Judge Ciavarella was found guilty in February, 2011, on a dozen charges, including money laundering and racketeering in a $2.8 million dollar scheme to funnel juveniles into two privately-owned prisons.  

In what prosecutors labeled a “cash for kids” scam, each young defendant was seen as a unit of profit and the more prisoners the judge “produced” the more prison owners profited.  

Ciavarella received $1 million in kickbacks, and sentenced thousands of youths to jail, including one high school girl who earned three months behind bars after creating a Web page spoofing an assistant principal. Another teen went to jail for stealing a jar of nutmeg. 

A second judge involved took a plea deal, as did the builder of one of the detention facilities, and 6,000 juvenile records had to be expunged. 

In the end, the best example might be for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix—where we can actually study how the business-as-education model works. These kinds of schools enroll 12% of higher education students in the United States. Those students receive nearly a quarter of all federal student aid, which accounts for more than 80% of revenue at for-profit colleges. Unfortunately, many students who attend for-profit colleges graduate with no marketable skills and make up nearly half of all federal student loan defaults.  

If Republicans law makers have their way, perhaps we can go back in time to the good old days. Let companies that run schools make teachers live in company-owned homes in company-run towns. (There won’t be any teachers unions to stand in the way.) When companies perfect the system they can pay teachers in scrip, like coal mining companies used to pay workers in the 20s, and that scrip would only be good at the company store.  

You total up the bill at the end of the month—groceries, rent, utilities—and what do you know? The teacher owes the company money or ends up with only a few pennies. 

IF YOU ASK GOVERNOR KASICH or the shills at Fox News the system at that point is perfected.

Sham Standards: Teaching to the Test

I JUST READ THIS MORNING in the New York Times that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending millions to push for “common core academic standards.” Education reformers like Chester E. Finn, Jr. praise the effort. At last count, forty-five states had adopted these new guidelines.

 The other five are probably run by incompetent governors. 

I, for one, have serious doubts about the efficacy of standards. I’ll keep my blog sweet and simple for today. “Standardized testing” means what you get in the end is “standardized teaching.” 

For many years, I was able to bring amazing speakers into school to talk to classes. We had a Holocaust survivor, a Quaker woman, a man who survived ten years in a Siberian prison camp and several Vietnam War veterans.  

Call me stupid, but bringing in speakers seemed to me to be a good but “non-standardized” method of teaching. 

In May, 2008, three weeks before I retired, I organized a program that brought fourteen veterans in to speak to 700 students at Loveland Middle School. We set up a schedule that allowed every student to hear three speakers or groups: and those speakers were tremendous. Joe Whitt survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ace Gilbert, a former Marine, saw heavy fighting in Vietnam. Mark Adams was an F-16 pilot who dodged missiles in the sky over Baghdad in 1991. Seth Judy had been badly wounded in Iraq in 2003 and Dave Volkman, a Loveland High School teacher, was just back from a tour in Afghanistan.

 THE QUESTION THAT BOTHERED ME at the time—and still scares me today—was this: “Was this really education?” 

Joe wasn't going to stick to a script nor would any of the other speakers. So, if we’re going to tie teacher pay to standardized test results, technically, this entire day was wasted. I hate to tell a billionaire like Bill Gates—or break the news to Finn, who never taught a day in his life—but this is nuts. 



Left to right: John Neal, Milt Rooms and Tom Thomas, all combat veterans in the Pacific Islands in 1944 and 1945. 

If Mr. Neal talks about dodging bullets and bombs on Iwo Jima, which he did, will students be “learning” if the standardized test doesn’t include a question about Iwo Jima? 

What if the standardized test focuses on Songhai trade instead? Don’t tell me you don’t know about Songhai trade! 

THE OHIO ACHIEVEMENT TEST included questions on Songhai two years in a row, in 2006 and 2007.