Word: madison
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twenty years ago the students who attended James Madison, considered one of the finest high schools in Brooklyn up until a week ago last Monday, were the college-bound sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors and business executives. They were all white and mostly Jewish. They were the pride and joy of city school administrators. During the past ten years the student population has undergone a gradual transformation. Now the academic stars of the school are the children of hardware store owners, bookkeepers and salesmen. Their last names are DeMario, Poulanski and occasionally Goldberg. They are headed for the state...
...changes evolving in the neighborhoods surrounding Madison High School are similar to those that portended the rapid appearance of "For Rent" and "Sold" signs in cities across the nation during the last fifty years. They predict the beginning of a scenario familiar to urban sociologists; they hit the homes in Flatbush last week with a startling thud...
...participants in last week's riots all know how the story will end. They are tragic victims because they cannot possibly alter the inevitable course of events. For one reason or another, they are all stuck at Madison. No reformist program--the human relations office that will soon be set up in the cafeteria, the assembly programs on Martin Luther King that will be performed in the auditorium, and the parent-teacher meetings that will be conducted--can stop the emerging sequence of events. There is nothing mystifying about why this certain pattern must set in. It is a result...
...trains for three hours every day to attend a school with an all-white administration nestled in an all-white community, strike out at the whites. The black parents voluntarily commit their kids to this school transfer program because they believe their kids can get a better education at Madison than they can at the decaying neighborhood school. White parents fight tooth and nail the entrance of more black kids into the school because they fear the fall of property values and they can't afford to exit the scene. And teachers at Madison, who would prefer to have...
None of these responses are illogical when viewed as the responses by individuals to private troubles. All of them are irrational when viewed as responses by a social system to public issues. They are reactions that each member of Madison must take to save his neck, but combined, they are the reactions that will ultimately strangle all of them. Every time another black is knifed in a ghetto school, another black parent ships his child off to Madison. Every time a black freshman fights back in hatred of the alien atmosphere at Madison, a white student goes home wounded. Every...