Poetic Tongues/Fabu
What shall we do for our children?
by Fabu

     What shall we do for our children?  This is the question that I asked myself after attending a “Success for All Children in Madison” forum at S.S. Morris A.
M.E. Church. The forum highlighted the African Centered Pedagogy Project (ACPP) program created by retired and still awesome teacher, Tenia Jenkins
and West High School principal Ed Holmes. Later, I asked myself the same question when the State of Black Madison 2008 report was announced.
I asked myself this question twice because both the forum and the report discuss the dire straits of African Americans in our city. Both also focus on the
fact that our children are poverty stricken and not doing well in the Madison Metropolitan School system. This means that not only is our present status
severely limited but because of our hurting children, our future is impaired as well. The State of Black Madison reports that if the income gap between
Whites and Blacks from 1990 to 2005 continues, it will take 265 years to close this economic gap in liberal Madison.  Liberal Madison, where the talk is
that there is equal opportunity and economic empowerment for all. The forum and report confirm a different reality.
    This is devastating news. We are eight years into the new millennium, having survived slavery, segregation, lynching and generational racism, yet in
2008, Wisconsin leads the nation in the incarceration of young African American men and in having the worst third grade reading scores for African
American children out of all 50 states. Where is the outcry? Where is the response to this horrible news that to be an average African American in
Madison, Wis. means that you will have less, do less and be less, based on the color of your skin? The searing question still remains, “What shall we do for
our children?”                        
    Macaja Revels was a Black man listed in a citation by the late Dr. Zachery Cooper in his book, Black Settlers in Rural Wisconsin. In 1800, Revels
camped by a stream of water outside the village of Madison. He was free, Black and became a landowner. He traveled to Madison for equal access to
schooling, cheap land and freedom from slavery. Macaja Revels had more opportunity in 1800 than a Black man coming to Madison 2008. If Macaja
Revels’ descendant came to live in Madison today, he would have a 37 per cent chance to live in poverty, a 40 per cent drop out rate from  high school,  
only a 1 percent chance of owning a business, and even less of a chance to own land.
    Each of us has got to do our part to directly address and reverse the decline of the African American population in Madison. We cannot let our young
fail academically in an increasingly highly technological society. We need innovative programs like the African Centered Pedagogy Project. We need to
complain because funding was ended at West High School. Soon to be retired School Superintendent Art Rainwater has left a legacy that includes
African American students being worse off than ever before.
    I am a recent homeowner, a part of the negligible 2 percent of African Americans who own homes. One day, I hope that a newspaper journalist
interviews me about just how difficult it was to purchase my home even with a hefty down payment, the process that my credit union took me thru and how
I had to hire an attorney to be at the closing because of their overt racism. According to the credit union, where I had been a member for over 10 years,
this wasn’t racism because their institution isn’t racist.  
    What shall we do for our children and for ourselves? We shall work even harder to ensure freedom and justice for all.  We shall do this by all of us in
Madison doing our individual and collective parts.