Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Atlanta's progressive image was severely tested in the early '80s by the murder of dozens of black children. White police suspected parents; African Americans saw the hand of the Ku Klux Klan; others believed that a child pornography ring was responsible. The killings abated after the arrest and conviction of Wayne Williams, a black photojournalist. But suspicions and suppositions continued. Bambara's posthumous docu-novel conveys the period's fear and conflict with a powerful blend of fact, fiction and indignation...
...Black folks who know Jackie Goetter, president of the school board in Decatur, Ill., insist that she's no bigot. But when she lashed out at Jesse Jackson last week for inserting himself into a local tempest over the expulsion of seven high school students for fighting, she sounded a bit like one--the late Leander Perez. "I really resent outsiders coming in and telling us how to run our schools," Goetter whined, conjuring up memories of the legendary segregationist's threat to bury "outside agitators" in the bayous of Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish during the 1960s...
Then there's the mixed message that Jackson is sending. He contends that although the officials who kicked those black kids out of school are overwhelmingly white, the issue is "not race but fairness." In almost the very next breath, he likens Decatur to Selma, Ala. If race is not the issue in Decatur, why dredge up memories of a historic civil rights struggle where the only issue was race...
Those are just two examples of why it's so difficult for all of us, black and white, to discuss racial issues productively: our words keep throwing us back to the past. That's what's happening in Decatur, where school officials' stubbornness and loaded language from both sides have escalated a local dispute over school safety into a racial cause celebre...
...high school football game in September. None of the teenagers used a weapon. If the six who still live in Decatur (the seventh has left the area) don't get back into class fairly soon, they will in all likelihood become permanent dropouts--which, for young black men, often translates into a one-way ticket to jail. They obviously ought to be disciplined for taking part in the fight, but not more severely than the student who threatened to blow up a Decatur high school last summer and was expelled for only a year...